The People's Laundry

The doc says you're in a good state, a Free State

2012-01-28T14:50:00.000-08:00

When I was 11, I moved from Johannesburg to a village with no name, located somewhere between Odendaalsrus and Welkom in the Orange Fee State. The village, 12 houses built for white staff who worked at a neighbouring brick factory, was owned by one Piet Bezuidenhoud. Piet was a man to be reckoned with: when black labourers could not pay their 40 Rand per month rent, they were whipped with a shambok. When he caught labourers stealing mealies from his farms, he would remove their teeth with a pair of pliers, give them a large bag of mealies, and send them on their way. Piet had a sense of humour, or at least a sense of irony.

The house across from us had a high turn-over of tenants. When we moved in, it was inhabited by a man named Vrik who lived with his wife, Vrede, and their three children, Anton, Alta and Annette. Everyday, after school, when all the children of the village were dropped off by the brick company’s mini-bus, Anton would approach my brother I and say: “maak julle spiel?” (do you want to play?) Every day my brother and I would reply “No”.

Anton’s dogged determination ran in the family. Vrik bought a BMX for his three children to ride. Their preferred route was to circle the path around our house. On Saturday mornings, we would sit on the porch and watch Anton circle the house from early morning until early afternoon . Then the coveted BMX was passed on to an eagerly awaiting Anette and Alta, who would circle our house until dusk.

One day Vrik brought home a sheet-plastic, low-cost swimming pool which was erected in the back yard. The BMX craze surrendered to lazy weekends sitting in and around the pool, cooking braaivleis and for Vrik, drinking copious amounts of Lion larger. Anton would liven things up by bringing out a small step ladder from the garage and pressing it into the service of a make-shift diving board. One afternoon, after many cans of Lion, the 130 plus kg Vrik dived head-first from the step ladder, his head colliding with the ground below the plastic membrane of the pool. Following weeks in hospital, where Vrik was in traction, he returned to the village with a neck brace which he wore for the next five months.

I am not sure why Vrik and his family moved out. They were replaced by another Afrikaaner family, a husband, wife, and two girls in their early teens who were maybe fourteen and fifteen. I cant remember any of their names. What I do remember, is that they were the pretties girls in the village(there were only two others). The prettier of the two had blonde hair, the other had brown hair and would use thick base to conceal her acne. In the mornings, when the company bus took us to school in Welkom, I would look at their stockinged legs, the view ending reasonably high up the thigh. I never spoke to them, I only looked at them. They were aware of their prettiness and talked mainly amongst themselves.

On weekends, but even on weekdays, a family uncle named Andre would visit. Andre could play the organ like nobody. The family would sit on the porch, drinking brandy and coke while Andre, between beverages, hammered out tunes late into the night. The girls and their parents would sing along. It brought my brother and I great joy to watch Uncle Andre waddle between the stoep and the house. He was the fattest man we had ever seen with a middle the size of a tractor tube. We wracked our brains as to where he bought clothes which would fit him (“Welkom Outsizers”, as it turned out).

One day the family suddenly moved out. A few weeks later my mother told me that uncle Andre had got the blonde daughter – the hotter one, in my opinion – pregnant. I imagined Andre engaging in acts of carnal knowldege with the young lass and thought to myself: “how come I feel embarrassed when I fantasize about fucking her when that big fat pig gets his way with her every other night?” I was young and he was old and overweight. Her conception gave me hope.

I don’t know what happened to that family next. But their tenancy was replaced by that of Clint Sherriff. Clint was friendly and invited my friend and I into his house on the first day he moved in. The house was completely empty. His sole possessions were a bag and and a picture of his ex-wife. Clint’s face was as red as a fire engine and his two front teeth were missing. He told my friend and I that we would remember his name if we thought of Clint Eastwood and the star of the sheriff’s badge. That night my mom told me that Clint was a “down and out” and that my father had hired him as a mechanic because he needed “a second chance in life”. For the first few days, all was well. Then the secretary at the factory found a five- litre Autumn Harvest papsak hidden in the office toilet’s cistern. Clint was confronted by management but he denied any knowledge of it. The following day, he didn’t show up for work. The next morning he did, albeit staggering drunk. Clint had been partying for the last two days in Odedaalsrus. That morning, only a week after hiring him, my father had to let Clint go. He dropped him off at the train station in Kroonstad and gave him some money for train.

In a house along the way, a family by the name of the Hendriks moved in. They had two sons and a daughter. I became friends with the second son, Jody. Although he was my age, he was two years below me in school. He had failed twice, and so had his older brother, Raymond. The bonus thing about the Hendriks was that their father, a mechanic at the factory, had a side-line business in pet industry. They had two pet shops, one in Doorn, Welkom, the other in Hennenman. At the time, I had an obsession with animals – particularly parrots. In the Hendriks household, there were green Amazon parrots, two sulphur-crested cockatoos and an African Grey named Penny. They also had peacocks, rabbits, snakes, chameleons and a horse. I liked visiting their house, even though it always stunk of animal shit and stale cigarettes. The parents would openly kiss with tongue; the father liked horror movies. I had the great pleasure of watching Friday the Thirteenth parts Three, Four and Five at the Hendriks house. The films were often interrupted by animal antics – dogs copulating, goats on the sofa eating the pot plant, and the African grey which would squawk “fuck you”

There was a time when I hung out less at Jodie’s house and he hung out more at mine. When he began hanging out at my house, he never wanted to go home. It would reach seven o'clock, we were about to eat dinner, had given all the subtle cues that he should leave, but he either ignored the signals or did not register them. My mother would say: “Jodie, don’t you think it’s time to go home?” to which he would reply: “No, its fine”.

The year after we left the Free State and returned to Johannesburg, a neighbour phoned my mother and told the following: while the Hendriks family were watching Grand Prix racing on television one Sunday afternoon, Jodie, then about fourteen, walked into the garage and assembled his father’s shot gun. He put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. After two months in hospital, he died.

A few years later, we bumped into the Hendriks family at the north pier beachfront area in Durban. Like us, they were on holdiay. The father had gotten work on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the family were now based in Maseru. Our family exchanged pleasantries with Mr and Mrs Heindrich, their son and daughter. We did not talk about Jody.

I didn't realize it at the time but my stay in the Free State, which lasted three years,was to have a profound impact on the way I viewed the world. I might just post some more anecdotes of this colurful period of my youth: you can look forward to tales of dagga,the A.W.B and Satan.

Psychopaths

2011-05-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

I am busy reading an interesting article on psychpaths, here. It even has a diagnostic, tick the box,criteria thingie so that you can see if you are one yourself. I have known a few in my time. They make good capitalists, I believe.

The article contains probably the best sentence I have read so far this year, :

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

Its a shame I missed that, along with Caligula's stag party.

Bin there, done that ...

2011-05-05T01:51:00.000-07:00

Contrary to popular belief, Bin Laden is not now playing poker in a titty bar in Tahiti with Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney. He really is dead.

Things are very lousy in the west at the moment. The economy is in tatters, capital is shifting east, there is a rise in xenophobia in the likes of the La Penn’s and the Tea Party. Two wars which turned out very wasteful and very pricey and bad for the Euro-American brand name. Bin Laden’s death has been a gift from god – for Obamas presidency and for America’s self-esteem. I imagine the stock market will go up a bit, and talk of pulling out of Afghanistan will increase. This is more important right now for the West than it is for the middle east, where they are focusing on something far more profound, in my opinion. Robert Fisk, a British journalist who has interviewed Bin Laden three times, said, the other day, something along the lines of: I am really indifferent to his death. He made his mark ten years ago and that’s that. Far more honourable people are dying every day in the Middle East right now and for much better causes.

I also realized, to my surprise, that I have actually travelled through Abbotabad, the place where they shot Bin Laden, in 2000. Its on the road from Islamabad into the mind-bending Karakoram mountains of northern Pakistan. I remember thinking as I drove through that area. “Wow, its quite pretty here, I bet hardly any Westerners will ever visit here" (Ok, besides the fact that its name, Abbotabad, comes from a British administrator working out here - but I did not know that at thee time!) .

Anyway, who would have thought?

I leave you with something completely different and much more interesting.

The Sun Rises in the East!

2011-03-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

I have now seen the most conclusive proof thus far regarding East Asia's future global dominance:

Yes, I know, child number 2 to the left’s smile lacks consistency and their tremolo picking is uneven, but through a rigorous genetic hygiene prgramme, soon they will all be like the lead girl in the middle. She is a most superior candidate for the coming harmonious society; and her ability at denouncing political opponents is as vigorous - if not surpassed by – her fretboard fingering.

Onwards and upwards!

Images BeforeTime

2011-03-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was lucky enough to watch a preview of Werner Herzog’s new film and to see him do a Q&A afterward (hat-tip to Emma for buying me a ticket!). The film is called Cave of Forgotten Dreams and it’s a documentary on Chauvet Cave in France. The cave was discovered only in 1994 and contains the oldest rock paintings in the world. Not only are they the oldest (30 000 years old) – they are also mind-blowingly brilliant drawings. No joke: they are up their with the drawings of the high Renaissance masters. As I leant in art history, “the quality of the line” is most superb. You really get a sense of the amount of time we are talking about here. Herzog says that one particular drawing was done 30 000 years ago, and another drawn on top of it (which looks more or less the same in size and quality) was produced 5000 years later. Thinking today of 5000 years ago is a mind-fuck: I’m thinking pyramids, I’m thinking 3000 years before Jesus. In this cave, and the world outside, what marks the space between 5000 years is pretty much nothing. It is for this reason that Herzog says that these people lived in an era before time existed.

Herzog was one of the few people allowed into the cave (it was closed after it was discovered). The film also involves interviewing some of the oddballs who study the cave, including a man who used to be a circus performer and a perfume expert who smells rock-faces in the hope of locating new caves.There is also a French man who wears a bear suit plays the Star Spangled Banner on a Stone Age flute made from the leg bone of a vulture. But the most Herzogian flourish is the ending, in which we move from the caves to a nearby nuclear power plant where crocodiles have been introduced; some have had mutated albino offspring. Herzog ends by asking if, one day, these albino crocodiles will manage to reach the caves and wonders what they might think of the cave paintings. This has got to be the best animal ending to a Herzog film (there are quite a few) since Echoes of a Sombre Empire, his documentary on the flesh eating dictator of the Central African Republic, Emperor Bokassa. (this film ends with one of Bokassa's victims visiting the demented dictator's decaying personal zoo – see the clip below)

Seeing Herzog speak was great, although he shared the platform with a predictable Cambridge academic who, for each second he rambled on, sucked away valuable seconds in which Herzog could have spoken. I made two brief recordings of Herzog speaking; I will post as soon as I can find my camera calbe and put them on youtube. Give this film a go: its not the best Herzog film I have seen but its really good - especially when you consider the fact that nearly half the film comprises of the camera running over cave walls and that this is pleasurable to watch (especially remarkable considering my short attention span). And Oh! Is in 3D and you have to wear those silly glasses.

Finally, a note of national pride. I feel I should point out that the while these are the oldest paintings by humans, it is not the oldest form of representation. That was discovered about 10 or so years ago in a cave in the Cape area of South Africa. It not nearly as dramatic – a shitty little piece of rock about the size of your hand with some patterns scratched on it. I actually saw it once in a museum in Cape Town and wouldn’t have looked at it twice had I not have known that it was 75 000 years old. But I guess these discoveries are like the title of “tallest building in the world”: every few years they go and build a taller one. My guess is in the next few years China will announce the discovery of a hyper-realist oil painting of a panda bear, 3 million years old. But that’s just an educated guess.

Watching the English

2011-03-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

This morning when I woke up, I walked out onto my balcony and overheard a wee bit of a conversation on the road below. It was an elderly lady, walking her dog, who had stopped to chat to a neighbour, another elderly lady, watering her plants. As I honed in. I heard the lady with the dog wrapping up the conversation. In her sweet little old lady voice, she exclaimed: “All those Japanese being killed now in that earthquake…they bloody well deserve it! after the war and all… kill the bastards, that’s what I say!”. They both laughed and the dog lady continued on her way.

The Politics of Piss

2011-02-25T07:41:00.000-08:00

This post is about pissing in public toilets and the politics and affect thereof. People of an anthropological bent might find this post of ethnographic interest. We may be able to even trade notes.

Firstly, you can tell when you walk toward a set of public urinals, which one is the most frequently used. It is the one with the darkest, yellowest stain on the floor below. The funny thing is that it is never the first urinal in the row. It is usually the second one. Men might know why: its because the second one (if there are partitions between urinals) offers more shelter from the elements – the passing traffic of other men entering and leaving. British toilets often don’t have partitions. One thing which several women have quizzed me about in the past is: where to look while you urinate. There are several strategies here: one is to go to the lonesome urinal at the end of the row where no one is; if you go there and another man follows you, then you might be heading for trouble. If there are people on either side of you, then its about where to look. I usually look directly in front of me, like a traumatized war veteran. Some people overdo the “this is just so very normal” and whistle (most probably don’t whistle in any other context).

There is just something slightly odd with how human beings treat their own waste amongst each other. I could go on about this for hours. But broaching the topic of human waste should be incremental. We need more books on the subject. We need more women to weigh in. Comments and experiences please!

Expect more on this very under studied but valuable topic in the near future.

Fianlly, I am aware that since I last wrote there have been several revolutions in the Arab World of which I have divulged absolutely zilch of my infinite wisdom. For those who know me, you will know I am in the last stage of finishing my PhD dissertation - a magnificant slab of excrement. Thus, I have neglected this blog. I will make up for it, I promise. Still, the issue of feculants was so pressing that I simply couldn’t hold it in.

Speaking of human waste, I trust you have all been wallowing in the exuberant puddles of Gadaffi’s wisdom...

Familiar Faces

2011-01-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went with some friends to a Xinjiang-style restaurant in South London. One of the waiters actually reminded me of someone I knew from the region. After the meal I went and asked him if he had relatives in Xinjiang as he reminded me of someone there I knew. Are you from Ili? I asked. Yes, he replied. I then told him that I once knew a guy who looked like him from Ili who used to work in a bar in Urumqi. He replied “I am he”. He recognized me and I recognized him. It was very odd. I met him by chance in Urumqi in 2004 and then again (at the bar) in 2007. And now in London in 2011.

These things do happen to people. I was once in the East coast town of Hualien in Eastern Taiwan; while walking down the main drag, when I bumped into my old school friend’s sister. I guess there are certain global networks which certain kinds of people travel (for instance, there are loads of south Africans in Taiwan teaching English/ there are loads of everybody in London – and I was, after all, at the only Xinjiang restaurant in town). Come to think of it, I have bumped into several people I know from school in London (although no surprises there)

On How to See the Forest in Spite of the Trees: or, How to Think Orientalism Out of Existence

2011-01-20T05:15:00.000-08:00

Last night, as a way of kicking back and relaxing a bit, I watched two documentaries on BBC – one on some adventurers/scientists exploring the wildlife within a forested crater in New Guinea (Inside the Volcano), the other on quantum mechanics and holographs (What is Reality?). Both were predictable in two ways. Firstly, appealing to my nerdy/druggy side, the subject matter of both of them was mind-blowing. Regarding the New Guinea one, I get a raging mental erection when I see vertical forests several kilometres high partitioned by waterfalls and filled with wired and wonderful animals. Regarding the quantum stuff, I feel more at ease with the world when I am told by men in white coats (and German at that!). that the building blocks of matter present us with a fundamentally contradictory understanding of reality (when I say “men in white coats”, I mean here scientists and not male nurses in a mental institution). So that’s the first thing I feel.

The second thing I feel is more sociological. Namely that the narration, imagery, editing and casting of these shows must be done by the same people who put together things like Idols, Big Brother and various other degree-zero schlock. To be fair, the quantum mechanics one was not that offensive in this regard (although my scientist friends may disagree); but the New Guinea one was like being force-fed broken glass. It was as if the director of the show was the product of a child begat by Simon Cowell and King Leopold the Second. I will focus here, on the New Guinea one.

Firstly, they make out like the place has not been touched by humans. Of course, when they land their helicopter, there are some locals, dressed in hand-me-down western clothing, looking vaguely bored. They are not given names (simply called “trackers”) and the only thing we see them do is a small ritual to bless the Great White Hopes.They do not speak. Now that we have the quaint, folk-loric wisdom of the Other out of the way, we move to the real business: penetrating fecund, virgin forests in search of species hitherto unclassified, undocumented, un-calibrated, un-systematized, un-schematized, taxonomically uncertain. But this urge to render visible to the instruments of science those diminishing enclaves of the earth’s natural difference are only secondary to the truly real business of the venture: to watch grown, white men enjoying themselves - and for you, the viewer, to identify with their enjoyment (despite, or rather because of, the primordial risks and dangers undertaken in such a venture). My favourite line is when the trackers (who are the only ones who seem to know what the fuck they are doing in this tropical hell hole) bring them a mammal (a rat, I think) they have trapped, to which one of them replies: “this is the first time that science has witnessed such a thing”.

Now, I could go on for hours about this nonsense: how the fact that “science” begins with human observation of the empirical world out there – in which case, the local trackers, who have observed such animals for millennia, are very firmly and, dare I say, scientifically, way more knowledgeable about such a thing. I could go on about how the only other thing we are told about the trackers is that not long ago they were cannibals (you get the feeling that the presenter is secretly thinking of the locals attitudes toward the animals: “if the they can’t eat it, or fuck it, it’s not worth a second glance”). I could also go on about how, at the start of the film, there is one sentence about “the immanent threat of logging to the region” accompanied by a shot of a timber mill, thus implying that these noble Americans and Brits are there to save the region from itself (at the end of the show, they say how their exposure of this region will help and save it).

No mention of how the logging industry is bound up with the local economy and driven by global consumption; that our presenter's nice wooden coffee table in his London apartment, while produced in China, actually comes from trees logged in places like Indonesia and New Guinea and is then, through a massive network of corruption, imported into China with forged legal permission. None of this. The only way that China comes into the occasion is the overtly simplistic Maoist narrative of very, very good guys (the presenters)and very, very bad guys (the loggers).

Anyway, these are the things I will not go into. What I really want to say is this: as someone who has been in university way to long, I have been taught, through the likes of post-colonial studies and anthropology, to be hyper-critical of the neo-colonial implications of how the west engages with and represents other parts of the world (usually, I might add, places which they have previously colonized, New Guinea included: it is not by coincidence that New Guinea has place-names like “New Ireland”). If this is the only way in which you can view the world, it actually shuts out all the other interesting stuff that is going on in this mind-blowing universe of which we are a part. I’ll give you an offensive example. I was once told by someone steeped in post-colonial theory that the reason I enjoy mountains so much is because I have been conditioned by British Imperialism to view mountains as a kind of sublime symbol of conquest and ownership of the planet by the western world (something along those lines).

Before you burst out laughing, there is a grain of truth in this: nature is co-opted for all sorts of vulgar ideological reasons: think of America’s bald eagle, or, more sinisterly, when Rwandan Hutus were instructed by their government to “cut down the tall weeds” (i.e. Tutsis). But - and I mean this in the most militant sense – it is an outright impoverishment of the imagination to believe that this is the only way in which you can, or should, view the great beyond. How fucking depressing to think that the only reason I like anything is due to political, ideological or linguistic reasons. To do that is to deny the great outdoors its own agency. The world has its own reality, its own autonomy, it does not exist for me and it does not give a flying fuck whether I impose political categories on it or not. However, this great outdoors is not idle: it bites back; snakes and spiders and germs can kill you; rocks and avalanches can come tumbling down upon your head. And as you lie there dying, the birds will continue to sing, indifferent to your suffering. The Empire Strikes Back.

Ok, as usual, this is getting dark, so let me make my final point: when I watch nature documentaries which have been packaged in the vein of an Indiana Jones film (the old style, paternalistic, Attenborough ones seem, sadly, on the wane), I believe my viewing strategy should be as follows: “I know that the makers of this programme are forced to pitch it to the television company as some kind of neo-colonial fantasy in which lost islands and tribes are discovered; in which personality-driven, young, hip presenters reveal a hidden world. I know they have to do this because these money-driven television programmers are primarily concerned about making the show appeal to the widest possible demographic so they can increase profits (with the help of advertising). BUT, at the same time, I am still seeing fucking cool stuff: tree kangaroos’, mental species of butterfly, lizards, snakes, gorges deeper than third-year fine art students; waterfalls higher than… . You get the picture. To be fair, some of nicer, more knowledgeable presenters (usually older) are, you can tell, really enthusiastic about this place in a non-nauseating way – and this can be a contagious. But regarding some of the younger presenters, I kept secretly wishing they would be eaten, either by the animals or by local former-cannibals who want to get "back to their roots".

So the reason I continued to watch this particular show, despite all the bullshit, is because the real of big outdoors continues to ooze through all the fluff; I still get a sense of awe and amazement, not because of, but despite of, the horrible production. TV is not going to change anytime soon; and I usually only have my own super-planetary adventures every few years (next stop, Siberia, I hope!). So for now, I will continue to watch stuff like this in the same way you might have sex with someone you are repulsed by (because you were that horney): dim the lights, squint a bit and touch the void.

Dark City, Dying Hero

2011-01-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

I have written quite a bit about how I have ditched pop and rock music and have buried myself in a host of obscure “music” which, at its most conservative end, is noise jazz. But I made a mistake about giving up on rock. There was one rock band which I have really liked for a while now, and that band is Interpol.

Rock is indulgence par excellence. But everyone deserves to have space for at least one rock band. Yes, there is all the repetition and predictability. But there is also the pleasure of listening to music played by people who, deep down, you really want to be. I know. Its revolting. But its true. This is as close to homosexuality as many straight men get. For me, these heroes –closet heroes – have included Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan and – during a now regrettable period - Tears for Fears (Roland Orzabal). Bono was even up there at one point (it was 1989, ok!) as were the Pixies Frank Black (who I now look frighteningly more similar today every day, including loss of hair and an extending belly). Deep down, all of them were linked by a similar yearning: They played the kind of stuff which you could use as set music for your most obscene fantasies, from staggering home drunk at sunrise in a state of (youthful) bliss to getting the girl who you, you know, digged.

Anyway, just when I thought I got too old (the key word here) to relate to this exuberant form of identification, along came Interpol. When I first heard them, they sounded like just another gay, crap Emo band (Emo is basically Goth with an injection of Capitalism). They even wore suits…like, all of them, at once. The lead singer, who looks a bit like a model, also dates models. This was not good. These were no longer the kinds of people I wanted to fashion my own ego ideal upon. But there was one riff on their first album, Turn off the Bright Lights (at the end of the song PDA) which, from the first listen, stuck in my head. From then on, I listened again and again, and liked the whole thing more and more.

As I was getting into Interpol, I was in the process of moving to Urumqi, in Western China. Interpol reminds me of Urumqi city. I would listen to Interpol in my apartment as I stared down onto a floating highway and a massive white skyscraper built by the richest businessman in the region. At night, the sky-scraper would glow orange from the highway lights a few floors below. Beneath that, under the bridge, all sorts of nonsense would go on. Drunkeness, lewdness, fights. If the air was free of pollution, you could see distant mountains coming out of the surrounding desert; up there were pine forests; fast-glowing rivers, lakes and glaciers. The sordid, beautiful city and, to quote Herzog, the dark glow of the mountains. All in one go. In the 1930’s two Missionaries, Mildred Cable and Fancesca French, described the Urumqi thus: “On the one hand the slopes of the Mount of God, a perfect paradise of purity and beauty, and on the other the man-made slough of iniquity and misery”. Urumqi was, and for me, still is, a beautiful, sublime failure of a place. Interpol is the theme tune for this city of sublime failure.

Interpol has also always reminded me of New York City (where they are based) and yet I have never been to New York. What’s even weirder is a friend of mine also told me they remind him of NYC. Perhaps Urumqi was my dirty substitute for NYC, or maybe even better than the real thing. Anyway, I find it really odd that music can make me feel as though I am in a city I have never been to.

Finally, about a month ago I saw Interpol live in London. I don't really do rock swhows anymore. I was sceptical. But I was relieved to see that a large portion of the audience had already passed puberty. The lead singer, Paul Banks, was as cool as fuck. He was so cool, in fact, he was the only one not wearing a suit. They seemed genuinely delighted at the audience response. And they played tons of old stuff and hardly nothing of their one shite album, Our Love to Admire. I haven’t seen a rock concert in ages and it felt good. I am starting to feel some of the benefits of looming middle-age. For one thing, I am now happy to be part of the audience, and no longer wish I was up there on stage playing heroic lead solos or whatever the case may be. My internal rock star is dying. A minor victory.

“

Fighting Fire with Tramadol

2011-01-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

I recently watched Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights – a six episode show which has stand up comedy and skits. It is on the British Channel Four and can be seen online (if you happen to live in Britain) here; if you dont live in Britain, you can see it here The reason I watched it was because I had read a few articles in the newspaper decrying its course, blunt tasteless humour. Immediately I was like: “where do I sign up?” Upon watching the first episode I felt a great sense of relief – there are other people out there in the world which think like me. Lots of paedophilia, drugs, murder, sadism and other crowd pleasers. But there is also a very important social function with this kind of humour – and I am not just saying this as a cover for my obscene enjoyment of the content – and that is this: it is an unabashedly knee-jerk response to how fucked up mainstream media and popular culture is. For instance, Mr. Boyle lays subtle lines like this: He claims Jade Goody, in her final weeks of dying of cervical cancer, must have been a good shag cause she lost a lot of weight and her pussy got a lot tighter (prior to the cancer, he notes, she would have had a “pussy like canoe”).

For those of you who don’t know, Jade Goody became famous in Big Brother – particularly for making racist comments to an Indian housemate. She then got cancer, got married a week or so before she died and sold the rights to the wedding to a British tabloid (The Sun, I think) for a wad of cash. Everyday, the Sun had Jade on the front cover of the newspaper (which would lie on the table at my place of work) announcing the next increment in the final countdown to her death. This is what I call affective hijacking –forcing you to feel pathos for someone you didn’t know about so as to sell newspapers. This is a new kind of marketing: necro-spectacle. Anyway, my point is that this is so obscene that I feel the kind of jokes Frankie Boyle makes about her (and countless other talentless, sawdust characters who have been jettisoned into the media stratosphere) are, in a very immediate sense, justified. To be manipulated into having to mourn a particular person’s death for profit and have it forced in your face warrants the kind of scatological reflex we see in Tramadol Nights. During this period, I probably made similar tasteless jokes – although I would never have the balls to say them like on TV. Anyway, the Jade jokes were not that funny – but I really liked the Victoria Beckham ones, such as: fucking her would be like trying to separate deck chairs with your dick. He says it a lot better than I ever could – so please, do watch!

Here's an example of earler work on "Mock of the Week", a family show which he eventually walked away from:

Suffer the Children

2010-12-16T17:55:00.000-08:00

Over the past few weeks in Britain there have been a number of student protests. They are demonstrating because the government has decided to raise annual tuition fees from 3000 or so pounds per annum to 9000 pounds per annum. I think two things about this – and they are not reconcilable.

On the one hand, as an international student who has to pay 10 000 plus a year for tuition, when it comes to feeling sympathy for them, I couldn’t care less. (let’s not mention that I have a scholarship and thus pay nothing). Less than 50 years ago, Britain still possessed half the world in the form of colonies; most people coming from one of these colonies to Britain today are immediately overwhelmed by just how god dammed expensive it is here. The first time I came to London, I saw my monthly budget back in South Africa disappear after buying a coffee and a (shit) sandwich. And I am, by South African standards, wealthy. So when these little toffs from Oxbridge and the like pretend to get all militant because the government dare charge them the same fees they would charge poor Thambo from Soweto Township for a year’s study here, I find it hard to sympathize. Well that’s on the one hand – the icy hand, the hand withdrawn, the hand which will not be stretched out to pull you out the raging river.

Then there is the other hand. And on this hand, I am really admirable of a social system in which everyone forks out a bit to educate the populace. As you all probably know, Britain is a horribly classist society (actually, I find the whole working class solidarity thing here as annoying as the painfully subtle rituals of avoidance practiced by the upper classes). Anyway, it is worth marvelling at the fact that in spite of this gulf, even the most hardened council trash have a chance of getting into a good university. I imagine this must piss rich people off as it demonstrates that wealth alone does not guarantee intelligence. I think this is part of the reason that Britain has loads of excellent academics despite the fact that, compared to America, its universities are broke. That will all end soon. As usual, the humanities and the social sciences will get the most severe bollocking in the from of mortal cuts (probably punishment for being the only faculties which launched sustained critiques against the excessive market speculation which got us in this mess in the first place). We can look forward to a new generation of market driven students: competitive, aggressive (in a good way), sharp, flexible, mobile, decisive, affirmative, smart, dynamic, creative, punctual, efficient, tech-savvy, hip, goal-oriented, leverage-friendly, facilitators, enablers, pursuers, dominators, tormentors, sadists, pederasts, murderers.

Amazon No More!

2010-12-03T04:48:00.000-08:00

I just read this in The Guardian:

Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called for a boycott of Amazon, over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks.

In an open letter to Amazon, he writes:

I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I've been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That's over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.

From now on, I will boycott Amazon (unless, of course, they have an item cheaper than any other website, then I will be prepared to bend the rules). My heart is in the right place!

Also, Assange is doing his first interview today at 1:00 PM with the Guardian. You can send him questions. I sent him this:

My question is:

I have seen you decry the media’s attention to yourself instead of the (far more important) documents you have released. While I whole-heartedly agree with you, it begs the question: why was it ever necessary for you to go public in the first place? Surely, knowing the media’s personality-driven obsession with celebrities and the like, you could predict that far too much news would focus on you, rather than the leaks themselves?

Couldn’t you have simply remained anonymous (and spared yourself all the trouble you are facing now)?

On the other hand, you could just say: "well, I will use this personality obsessed media to draw attention to myself, and thus promote Wikileaks at the same time." But why then get irate when the media focus on your personal life? Doesn't that come as part of the job?

Anyway, every now and then God grants you an excuse not to do any work. The good Lord must be looking down upon me favourably as of late.

Manhunt for a Spitting Object named Das Ding

2010-12-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie: I see that the hunt for Julian Assange is on. Sarah Palin has said that he should be "hunted down" in the vein of Bin Laden (which bascially means they will never catch him). Mick Huckabee, Republican presidential wannabe, says he (or was it the guy who leaked the documents?) should be excecuted. Anyway, lots of fun and games.

Of course catching Mr. Assange would is a bit like the faux triumph the authorities must have had when they shut down Napster, the file sharing pioneer. This short-lived glory dissipated when more (many more, and better) file-sharing sties simply sprung up in its place. Wikileaks is the same ... God, I'd set one up if I knew how (any takers?).

Anyway, if I were a Tea-Party nut-job who happened to also run the USA, I would simply ban the internet, or do what China tried (and failed) to do, introduce "Green Dam" software, where every computer bought would have to have mandatory government software installed which would - God Bless them - "protect" you, the consumer, from harm.

Anyway, on a lighter note, my friend Henrik has pointed me to this marvelous web site. It adds growing evidence to what I have long suspected: Kim Jong Il is deeply commited to an Object-Oreintatd Philosophy....

And finally, two nights ago I saw The Thing play at The Vortex. I had front row seats. It was as though they were playing only for me; the only downside was getting spit flying onto me from insane sax player Mats Gustafsson; however my partner, who has an open, unashamed crush on him, rather seemed to like it...

The Emperor's New Clothes

2010-11-29T02:40:00.000-08:00

God Bless Julian Assange. In fact, God increasingly resembles Julian Assange – for both God and he seem to know all the secrets this world has. I am talking, of course, about last night’s leak of diplomatic cables. In case you haven’t read them, these are some of the things which have come out:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urged the US to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

US officials are said to have described Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as feckless, vain and ineffective, sharing a close relationship with "alpha dog" Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is said to be thin-skinned and authoritarian, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is described as risk-averse.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is referred to as "extremely weak" and susceptible to conspiracy theories.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya always travels with a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse, according to one of the cables.

Iranian attempts to adapt North Korean rockets for use as long-range missiles
Corruption in Afghanistan with concerns heightened when a senior official was found to be carrying more than $52m (£33m) in cash on a foreign trip

Bargaining to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison camp - including Slovenian diplomats being told to take in a freed prisoner to secure a meeting with President Barack Obama

Germany being warned in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for CIA officers involved in an operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was abducted and held in Afghanistan

US officials being instructed to spy on the UN leadership by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime
Yemen's president talking to General David Petraeus (while he was responsible for US military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East as head of US Central Command) about attacks on Yemeni al-Qaeda bases and saying: "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours"

Faltering US attempts to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon

Each of these is a news scoop you could run for about a week in an average newspaper. I find it slightly disturbing that BBC’s headline is: US Condemns Wikileaks Diplomatic Cables Release”. Who gives a fuck if they condemn it? In fact, that is not news....Of course they will condemn it... even my stuffed toy pig (named Piggus) knows that. But on another level, BBC has, unwittingly touched on the heart of the matter. How so?

Derrida once claimed something to the effect that sovereignty is never fully sovereign. As soon as you declare yourself sovereign, as soon as you have to convince others you are a sovereign – to persuade and cajole, to engage in realpolitik, you are no longer sovereign in the true sense of the word. As you announce your sovereignty to others, your sovereignty is weakened. The true sovereign is someone like the psychopath in the film No Country for Old Men: he does not have to persuade and cajole and he is not persuaded or cajoled. As a true sovereign, he is not actually fully living, he is, as Tommy Lee Jones states, “a ghost”.

Anyway, to my point: Nation states are never fully sovereign because they have to lie all the fucking time to each other and to their citizenry. Take the War in Iraq. If Bush was a true sovereign, he would never have had to “make a case” for war. He would have just gone ahead, or said something more along the lines of: We need to secure oil reserves in the Middle East to maintain American dominance for the next 100 years. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, instead of saying it was merely responding to Georgian aggression, they should have said: “We need to show the world we are not a declining power; we need to whip up Russian Nationalism; We need to flex our muscles so that European powers don’t think we are a push-over.” Anyway, you get the picture. And we could all make our own very, very long lists of countries justifying their often violent or selfish actions under the guise of altruism, “freedom” or some other such nonsense (My personal favourite is when the Nazi’s burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on the Jews ... how un-sovereign is that?).

So what Assange has done is simply to reveal what everyone knows already: that behind all the bullshit ritual performance and stage management of International Relations lies calculated self interest, aggression and obscenity. Assange has publicly displayed that behind the White House, the Kremlin and so forth, lie little Stewie’s a la Family Guy: naked, jealous, tantrum throwing, weak. We all know this – just that we know that behind our clothes we are naked. And yet, if someone ripped your clothes off in public, everyone, including yourself, would gasp in horror. I have long wondered what the world would look like if nation states suddenly all told the truth to each other and publicly... it would be similar to if you made a global rule that all advertising would be banned... the world as we know it would collapse.

On a final note, when the sovereign is shamed, when they are shown to be cowering, snivelling, lying instead of the picture they usually portray – proud, noble, freedom loving – then they get angry ...real angry. I fear that Assange’s own, increasing sovereignty (which grows precisely by making the sovereignty of nation states less – he feeds off their sovereignty) is now reaching levels of – by at least the US’s standards – unacceptability. I fear, that they will now crush him; I fear it may now be the end for him. The reason I say this is embarrassing: When I read about the new series of leaks I instantly thought: “He has gone too far now, I feel a sense of shame and indignation, (like when my clothes are ripped off)”. The reason I felt that is, because , on a very deep and disturbing level, nation-state ideology works...even on the likes of me. Even though I know its crap, years of speaking it and enacting and being told it – I, like everyone else, have bought into it. And thus, I am feeling this shame on behalf of the leaders of the world. So imagine how shameful they must be feeling? He can release documents on killing innocents and the like...that is tolerable...but he daren’t release documents showing that I, in the White House, in the Kremlin, am snivelling little brat ... you have now awoken the snivelling little brat ... and he is in no mood for fun and games. Run Julian Run!

Sovereignty Unveiled

2010-11-20T08:28:00.001-08:00

I have singularly devoted the last few weeks to doing absolutely nothing. I've hardly read, hardly worked, hardly gone out. It has been nice. You will be amazed how interesting staring at your navel for hours on end while eating mayonnaise by the litre can be (my navel, by the way, is named Mike.)

Anyway, its time to re-engage with the world again. Hello world!

Since I wrote last, Interpol have put out an arrest warrant for Julian Assange; British students, protesting government cuts, kicked in a window of the Tories headquarters (and the press made out like it was May 68); Haiti is like something out of the Black Death of the Middle Ages; and that foppish son of Prince Charles’s is tying the knot (BBC headlines announced this first and the Haiti epidemic second on their news broadcast this week); Aung San Suu Kyi was released (again) by those Generals in Burma who like to wear turd-brown uniforms; Ireland is broke (again); New Zealand (after Chile) has boosted its popularity in a new form of nation branding where they deliberately trap miners underground, then put down cameras and then you can watch them (like in Big Brother) until they are dug out and we can applaud ourselves for our humanity.

Now, you may think: wow! There are so many things going on in today’s world ...so many instances of fear and despair – but also hope and optimism. But these things have always gone on. Its just that before newspapers, TV and all of that, you knew nothing about any of it. Today you know the world’s business – that people are starving here; that a civil war is about to break out there; that Moscow will have heavy snow this week. Now, say, 400 years ago, all these things were going on but you hadn’t the slightest clue about any of them. Less stuff to worry about; your thoughts may be more focused on how if you had enough grain to pay your local feudal lord; or if the next hunt would be successful, or some other (stereotyped) thing like that.

Global consciousness equals global anxiety. And if you don’t worry about the world at large today, then you are accused (or unconsciously accuse yourself) of being cold and indifferent.

In the words of Lenin, “What is to be done?” I am well nigh tempted to crawl back into bed for a few more intimate weeks with Mike and the mayonnaise. And then, after soem time, someone will have to unbury me, just like the ruthless provocateurs who unburied this little sovereign:

I’m back. Its good to be back.

Seeing Like a Neo-Liberal

2010-11-02T15:39:00.000-07:00

I have started looking to buy some property. I have never bought property before. Overnight I have turned from a lefty socialist into ravenous neo-con. You see, when you decide to buy a flat in London, poor people become the enemy. Witht he budget we have, most of the houses we look at are council flats. The first thing you need to know is how many people within the estate are owners and how many are council tenants. The less council tenants, the better the value of the flats.

Council tenants are perceived as less likely to contribute to the up-keep of the building. If you are lucky enough to live in a really rough estate, you will see tenants walking around at mid-day with their dogs carrying cans of strong ale; you will see lots of pink tracksuits and hoop earrings; you will see gangs of BMX riding youths who know where every surveillance camera is on the estate and pull their hoods up and down accordingly.

Young aspiring people don’t like living in neighbourhoods with these kinds of guys and gals. I used to love seeing the crazy street life on the estate where I live. But now that I want to buy a flat around here, suddenly these eccentric working class Brits seem to me like parasitic dole scum. If the Tories were to say something like “we’re forcing poor people out of their London homes” (actually, wait! They did say that!), then I would, I am afraid to say, believe that such a move would be in my economic interests. Just think, sipping claret from my balcony as I watch all the lay-abouts frog marched off beyond Zone 6 and abandoned to their fate.

But the funny thing is, that if, say, I buy my flat here and in ten years all the “right” people move into the neighbourhood, I would hate the fucking place. How terribly boring and predictable it would be. I would reminisce about when it used to be a real, authentic working class neighbourhood. Before all the hipsters moved in. (At this point we bring the poor people back! But we make them charming, make them folksy, make them consumable)

Anyway, all of this has given me an idea. London is full of Marxist and left-leaning academics and activists. Many of them own properties in London. I find it hard to believe that they would not have caught the contagious “neoliberal eye” as I have. I am trying to imagine the scenario: “I know I am a radical, left wing professor who has fought hard for working class rights for much of his life; the reason I am buying a property as far the fuck away as possible from the local housing estate is because it will make my investment grow. Gotta look after my family on my modest salary”.

Maybe academics should have to publish autobiographies of their lives so you can weight up the social theories they write about against the way they actually live their lives. Actually Mao made the whole of China do something like this – it was called “eating bitterness”, where you stood before your commune and confessed every sin (usually of an ideological nature) which you had committed since you were born.

Maybe I am eating bitterness ...but it tastes so sweet! Either way, the only way I am going back to working class solidarity is when I give up the mortgage and go back to renting.

We Believe in Merzbow

2010-10-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went to see the veteran pioneer of Japanese noise music, Merzbow. His instruments are an apple laptop and a weird, grey metal machine which he plays like a guitar. The mind bending noises he produces punch you straight in the face. But like the VHS man in the previous post, after this wears off you are faced with an abyss of repetition for over an hour. But this repetition - sublime in its own way, although it gets monotonous - is made far more interesting with the help of a drummer, Balasz Pandi. I think he is from Hungary and he plays incredibly precise death-metal blast-beats (Eastern Europe has a huge death, speed and black metal scene). Between them I happily endured it for the next hour; The sound was so intense it was almost like getting a full body massage. After the gig I bump into a acquaintance of mine who was also at the show. When I ask him how it was, he replied, “tepid”.

Merzbow is very Mr. Japanese nihilist. He does not look at the audience, does not say hello or goodbye. What really surprised me was the crowd. Not a small room filled with middle aged men; rather a sea of young hipsters in a very chic venue. Noise is now popular amongst the youth. I was told tonight that noise is...in!

This always means a success and a tragedy. The success is that this dude, who in the 80s in Tokyo must have seemed rather bonkers (even by Japanese standards) was now getting British middle class recognition. This is good in some ways. More people like the music, he gets paid more (probably a descent wage by now) and he is now taken seriously by an entire younger generation. More people start collecting his CDs (he has hundreds, many of them collector items); more people make more bands which pay credit to him stylistically; thus he becomes canonized (in a very modest way).

But it also produces a nostalgia for when Merzbow was small and “underground” as it were. His CDs and records become collectors items (lots of collectors of noise music are, funnily enough, into collecting tapes) and it becomes a scene in which Merzbow has crossed the line from the underground to middle-aged respectability ... making a living.

Fair enough.

The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living

2010-10-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

This youtube video reminds me a bit of reading the Marquis De Sade. It is at once fascinting but, after about the first minute, unwatchable. Its like entering the at once sublime but tedious mind of the psychotic. Let's all be thankful that his object of desire is VCRs and not human skin. Initially I thought this was a joke - but reality is frequently more terrifying than fiction. Of course, being the pervert I am, I have already imagined his lesser known rival...a club-footed dwarf from a satellite city in Armernia who exclusively collects Betamax.

Be afraid ... be very afraid....

Actually Existing Abstraction

2010-10-25T04:20:00.000-07:00

Within China there is an obsession with presenting bird’s eye views of things. Often when you enter a city, one of the first things you will see on the outskirts is a large propaganda poster telling you how civilised and harmonious the city is while in the back-ground is a low/high oblique view; or 90 degree view of the city you are about to enter. Private companies do this too. Long after a construction a project is built, large models of the projects, complete with little men walking on the streets and grass painted green, persist, even becoming part of the general decor of the premises itself.

Often when you walk into museums in China, the first thing you see is a massive three dimensional relief map of the province or region with mountains jutting out of them and all major roads lit up with red flashing lights. These are not just decorations for the foyer; these relief maps are often larger than my living room; guides with microphones and pointy sticks enlighten packs of tourists as to their geophysical position – and of course, enlighten them as to how the area is becoming more developed – with roads, and railways and cities (which have replaced the 60s model of modernity: factories and agriculture). Often in the middle of the city centre, you can find a special museum which houses – I love this – an exact replica of the city itself. Inhabitants can come and speculate where their houses or apartments are (before you laugh at this too much, recall the first time you were introduced to Google Earth back in 2005 - how the first thing you looked for was your own house....how solipsistic we are!).

The Chinese city which I am most familiar with, Urumqi, has its model city presented in the most suitable place: on top of a small red mountain which overlooks the city itself. People have for centuries come up this hill to get sweeping, bird’s-eye views of the city. Today, on top of the mountain, is a three story traditional (but newly built) Chinese Pagoda, which on the top floor houses one of these replicant, model cities. So instead of looking out from the balcony of the pagoda over the real city, you can stay inside the pagoda and see the model of the city, which is far superior to the real thing. The other thing is that with China’s economic boom, the city has grown so rapidly, that the skyscrapers now tower over the hill itself. When you look out from the terrace, instead of sweeping vistas, you are looking into the 24th floor of the Harmonious Shenzhen Construction Corporation.

The Chinese have a long history of presenting idealized models of space which are “even better than the real thing”. Perhaps they were the first post-modernists? Even a century after the Jesuits at the Qing court had introduced modern-day trigonometrical mapping methods, many Chinese still insisted on producing highly idealized maps – with the central city in the middle, with five towns radiating out from the centre, all equidistant, as if it were a Tibetan Mandala painting. During China’s last dynasty – the Qing – the dynasty in which the Chinese/Manchu Empire conquered Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Taiwan, the emperor had a summer palace built with replicas of the major landmarks in these conquered regions meticulously reconstructed in his garden. Thus, 200 kilometres north of Beijing, you now have a copy of Tibet’s Potala Palace and some pivotal Mongolian Stupas. Inside the palace were series of paintings of the various newly conquered territories so the emperor could walk though his summer pad as if he were striding across the empire itself (there are also some hilarious paintings of him dressed as various figures of the empire: a monk; a fisherman; an ethnic minority etc).

And today, you have the Qing summer palace for the masses: the Chinese theme park. There is a massive theme park in South China which has replicas of the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and the like. When my mother travelled there years ago, the guide told her that instead of Chinese going to visit the world, the world could be brought to them – a world, no less, devoid of pesky human rights protestors and non-Chinese food (I think here of Borges’s story of making a map of the world which is as large as the world itself – the Chinese vision of sheer perfection!). This is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of these theme parks....representation silently taking over reality....becoming reality.

Anyway, i think the point I am trying to get across is that the Chinese are into exemplary models of reality. I think this is why, even today, they are obsessed with political ritual, with stage managing, presenting the ideal. At the same time, they are not zombies to this representation. People in China – especially the poor – are very cynical and mock power; they are well aware of all the nonsense and pomp of such idealizations. And yet, the exemplary form is like a mode you can slip in and out of. Its a bit like going to a very formal dinner where you wear stupid clothes and make polite conversation and then get home and say “what a load of bullocks that was!” Here you have easily slipped between ritual mode and normal mode. You know it is bullshit and yet you are not really a hypocrite (or, maybe you are).

Well, I think the Communist Party’s ideal version of the ideal society is one big, continuous, formal dinner party where everyone obeys the invisible ritual rules of polite society. The more models, the less chance for entropy to invade the system, the better society is. And yet, at the same time, no matter how many paralyzing models, there is always room in Chinese society for excess, for manoeuvring, for one-upmanship, for screwing your neighbour – not necessarily only beneath the surface of the models – but within the construction of the models themselves. Ok. Once again, this post is flying off the handle. So I end with a quote by Susan Stewart on models:

In this productive mapping of sign upon sign, world upon world, reality upon reality, the criterion of exactness emerges as a value. And exactness, always a matter of a concealed slippage between media, is moved from the abstract, the true-for-all-times-and-places of allegory, to the material, the looking-just-like, the sleight of hand which is the basis of this new realism

Red Phones, Pink Presidents and World Domination

2010-10-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

I am busy reading The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor, a Financial Times correspondent. He talks about the Communist Party’s network of four-digit red phones which link all the head honchos in the Communist Party with all the pig-men in big businesses in China. These phones, throwbacks to the Leninist state, are so in demand that it has been known for juniors to sneak in and use the bosses red phone to foster business connections (i.e. impressing the other party by using the red phone). McGregor asks us to imagine if the Western media discovered that, say, Dick Cheney had a secret encoded four-digit phone network connected to all heads of industry in the United States. Ok, let’s forget the fact that he probably has this already; you can imagine the cries of “conflict of interest” as they bay for his blood.

The Chinese leadership need not worry about any of this. Firstly, conflicts of interest are not relevant in a one party state. Secondly, there are no pesky reporters (at least none which are not already picking salt in a Qinghai gulag). This intervention of the Communist Party in Big Business – and the fact that they run the banks - is partially what prevented China being sucked into the 2008 financial crisis. Actually, most party members are in a weird mutual relationship with business people anyway (see the excellent book Comodifying Communism writtne by the unfortunately named David Wank). In fact, it may come as no surprise that some of China’s highest level leaders' family members (including Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji) run China’s largest private equity firms. Oh. the other reason China didn’t undergo financial collapse is because the Chinese are really, really good at saving money – better, even, than the overweight underclass of Americans who, until recently , were fuelling their penchant for MacDonald’s on sub-prime mortgage loans.

Where am I going with all of this? I am going here: Authoritarian capitalism seems to be the way forward. If Obama or Cheney or Bush or whoever had a secret network of phone lines to all of big business (i.e. they were all the same entity), America could probably run a neo-liberal economy better than it is doing now (Actually, looking at the state of the American economic and political system, Somalia’s government in exile could run it better than America is doing now). This is depressing on so many levels. Not only does capitalism triumph, but the most menacing kind triumphs. The only consolation is that in my life time probably, we will see what the West always wanted: Communist countring embrace capitalism... and in doing so, bringing about what the west so fears: destroying its own hegemonic superpower status. Perhaps its true what the Marxists said about capitalism: it knows no boundaries, it’s a shape shifter, only juju magic can stop it....

And speaking of juju magic, China, and the like, last week I went to a very high profile, global geo-political strategizing seminar. It was filled with forked-tounged former ministers and bloated, neo-con toadies. Their speech was filled with prophecy and divination, all with the word “China” in it: the rise of China, its potential aggression, whether it was going to take over the world, or whether the US could maintain control. There were worrying forecasts about the spread of the Beijing Consensus and such. I was somewhat relieved to hear barely a word mentioned about the Middle East and Terrorism... that’s sooooooo 2001-2008 darling!

Go here for my favourite Slovenian philosopher's review of McGregor’s book.

And, for you information, I was told this weekend, in the strictest confidence, that China’s Paramount leader, Hu Jintao, is gay. Well, at least the Tibetans think so...and besides, the picture below offeres incontestable proof.

Fistfull of Silence and Noise

2010-10-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

You will all be delighted to know that this post is about my penchant for alienating noise music. My only consolation is that it will be short. I have recorded little clips from a few shows I have seen recently and thought I would put them up.

First up was Peter Brotzmann’s band Full Blast with guest Ken Vandermark. It must have been one of the best gigs I have ever seen. The bass and drums (Pliakis and Wertmueller) was so tight they might as well been playing for Cannibal Corpse or some such death metal band. Ken Vandrmark is a genius (literally: he won that MacArthur genius award a few years back which won him 200 000 plus dollars). Brotzmann - a living legend - has a place in my heart cause he’s the first noise-jazz musician I ever saw play live - and since that day, I have been hooked.

After the gig, but still at the venue, a mate of mine, Leo, calls. He used to run an underground music booking agency in Chicago in the 80s called Southend music. He booked all sorts of mental avant-garde artists while everyone else at that time wouldn't touch them with a barge pole (they are now considered quite sophisticated, quite high brow!). Anyway, he phones and tells me he’s old mates with Brotzmann (first person to bring him over to the US) and could he have a word with him. I walk up to Brotzmann with my phone, awkwardly interrupting him while he’s having a conversation with Ken Vandermark. I realize that I may be on the verge of making a spectacular dick of myself when I say “Excuse me Mr. Brotzmann, Leo X is on the phone and would like a word with you”. Mercifully, a big smile comes over his face and he takes the phone immediately and starts chatting with Leo in German. Anyway, it was a great night and my friends Henrik; Emma and Matthias and the great chairman Zo, all seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

The gig has been bootlegged with passable quality here.

The following night I saw the Ames Room – a trio which describes itself as Maximum Minimal Terror Jazz. It’s two Australians (Wil Guthrie, drums; Clayton Thomas; bass) and the Frenchman Jean-Luc Gionnet. They are all absolutely brilliant - especially considering the limited options of what you can do with a jazz trio playing idiomatic music these days. Its very stop-start stuff in staccatoed series. Gionnet repeats the same bar over and over again but each one is a slight variation on the one before (including the odd bar which just flies off key). One of his other bands includes as a member Ray Brassier, the nihilistic philosopher who I posted on a few weeks ago. They are involved in a project called noise and capitalism.

Lastly, was the Durrant/Toop/Butcher/Kolkowski gig at the Whitechapel Gallery. I really wanted to see Phil Durrant. He is a violinist who has turned to computer music. He makes very minimal bleeps, scratches and the like. One of my favourite albums at the moment is Dach, which is him, Thomas Lehn and Radu Malfatti. It has been described as “music on the edge of audibility” and indeed it is. The piece I went to watch (dragging along my poor mate Chris, who was in London for a few days) was so quiet that you could hear people shouting outside and a police car whizzing by. It kind of worked well with the music (or perhaps that’s a sign that its awful music and the noise outside offered light relief).

Thanks to Dr. Zo for pix and filming...

A Noble Nobel ... Finally!

2010-10-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

Liu Xiabao has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is such a good choice that it almost makes up for the idiotic choice of Barak Obama last year.

Liu is like Ghandi and Mandela insofar as he has an insane amount of guts in standing up against vile regimes. But unlike these two figures, he represents scores of similarly gutsy people who no one knows anything about (although that will now change for him). What better way to restore the Peace Prize than for it to be awarded to people who risk torture and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade (as opposed to being elected American president, which takes guts but requires no spine). We who live in relatively free societies (or should I say, we who live in relatively free societies and are not Muslims or blacks) don’t really know the daily terror you incur if you decide to openly criticize the state in places like China. Daily terror works. People keep their heads down and bracket out injustice. And so they should ... or, rather, so I would. That way, you can get on with it. And that way, the shitheads in power stay firmly in power. And nothing changes.

So to devote your life to sticking your neck out in a place like China, where the seething masses will not be joining you in your rallying cry anytime too soon, is as noble as the Nobel prize itself.

Now, if you want some entertainment which will even trump Idols, then I suggest you follow the Chinese State Media, Xinhua, here. Like all up and coming nation-states, they are very keen to present a proud and shiny image of China to themselves and the world at large. So naturally, whenever China wins a Nobel Prize (usually for science) they go on about it a lot (and, I think, rightly so). However, the most recent Noble Prize will not be doing that. If you thought like one of the chief grubs in the Chinese Politburo, your main worry would be “how does this jeopardize the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and what is our counter-strategy?” Chinese state media has two ways of dealing with its internal enemies. Either, it won’t mention them at all (as it tried to do with the rise of SARS and on the Tiananmen Square anniversaries); or – in the good old Maoist vein – it will devote half of the newspaper every day for several weeks to vilifying the person or parties as ridiculously stereotyped incarnation of evil. It will co-opt dodgy, second-rate western academics who will give their “foreign, expert” opinions on how he is evil (on that point, maybe I’ll have a job after I graduate!); They will deploy what in Chinese is called “the ten cent army” – student nationalists (paid peanuts) to flood every blog within and without China as to why the West is evil (for my favourite psycho nationalist blogger, see the guy on this post - second comment down - who calls himself "Modern Chinese", I read his posts as one reluctantly, but in amazement, stares at a car accident) ; they will also, probably, and hopefully, pull out their best phrase : That the decision has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. Also, this will not be a surprise for China. Their propaganda Ministry (recently and ominously re-named the Ministry of information) will have been planning the counter-strategy for months, if not years. So kick back and enjoy the show...

And if you are wondering why China adopts such retrograde, one-dimensionality, you must remember that the people in power belong the exact same tradition of party and government as the people who made this (see below) not too long ago...

Impoverished Little Britain

2010-10-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

Today I read this article in The Guradian in which the new education minister in the UK claims that they will abolish the "no touch" policy which teachers have to follow when teaching kids. Good.

For those of you who have not been to Britain, there has be a ten or more year paedo- hysteria here, where shit newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun lead populist witch-hunts against alleged kiddie-fiddlers in the same way that Senator Jo McCarthy led anti-Communist hunts in the States in the 1950s. The problem with these things is that politicians dont have the guts to say "this is getting out of hand" becasue it is a bit like committing political suicide. You can picture the headlines: “Minister sympathetic to paedos “ or some similar alarmist clap-trap.

Out of all the countries I have travelled in the world, the UK stands out starkly in this regard: it is the only place I have visited where, when you go near a child, a certain zone of self-imposed taboo paranoia comes over you. Also, the children “know their rights” and are often mistrustful of adults coming near them: I often feel as if I am Gary Glitter in a thinly veiled disguise. In contrast, in other countries – particularly the “Third World” - what I love is that you can have normal relations with kids. You can pick them up; you can tickle them; you can joke ... they mostly laugh back and if their parents are around, they laugh too. Britain is absolutely sick in this regard. I see it as part of this weird, New Labour, managerial utopia which is in the serious business of quantifying brownie points. This may be one good thing which comes out of the nauseating Lib-Con coalition.

A really good spin-off of the paedo-effect is a number of top-notch British satires which take the piss out of this idiocy. I recommend Brass Eye’s Paedogeddon (including the militant paedophile organization, Millipaede); and the Monkey Dust Cartoon on the Paedo-finder General (see above).

Photographing the Unknowable Now

2010-10-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I said my posts – due to work constraints - would be shorter from now on. Today is the first time I break this new rule. However, what I have posted below is stuff I am thinking about and writing about in my day job. Thus, touché Big Other!..round one to me!

I saw this advert today for a digital camera (see below) and it got me thinking about theories of time (yes, this its one of those posts). Apparently Marcel Duchamp was obsessed with how to represent four dimensional time-space...precisely because it cannot be adequately represented in 2-D formats such as painting and photography. In his paintings, such as Nude Descending the Stairs, we see a kind of trace of the woman as she comes down the stairs – alluding to what her body moving through time would look like if we could see objectively how objects exist in time (as opposed to just space). Perhaps a case of strong ale or high powered LSD may do the trick too.

There were others into this idea. For instance, the photography of Edward Muybridge and the paintings of Francis Bacon, where the body smears and shimmers on the canvas as if it were moving through time in the same way you, the viewer, were (except in some grizzly, fleshy parallel universe). Gerhard Richter’s blurry photo paintings touch on this theme too. To return to Duchamp, when he boldly gave up painting at the age of 25 – to play chess, apparently – he turned toward producing strange installations which have been the fodder bad installation art ever since. Anyway, in these installations, you see certain themes and figures repeating themselves – elements being echoed in a number of different installations and pictures (such as the chocolate grinder; shadows; wheels; naked women and other stuff). Anyway, Alfred Gell has argued that what Duchamp was ultimately attempting to do was to make his entire oeuvre a single art work which exists over various points in time and space. Thus, all of his art work is like a single series through time. He says:

The sum total of the infinitely transformable network of internal references ... uniting the oeuvre from all these temporal ‘perches’ – which we can only, in fact, adopt serially, is the unrepresentable but very conceptualizable and by no means ‘mystic’ fourth dimension. (1998: 250)

Anyway, this new advert seems to join this lofty quest for representing time-space in a two dimensional format (i.e the computer or T.V screen). There are two forms of “cut” time in the advert: one is the Billboard man as he jumps from one movement to the next through time-lapse photography; the other is the street-life beyond the billboard (its Budapest, by the way) which is filmed in another jumpy time-lapse sequence which is more “dense” or “speeded up” than our two-dimensional billboard man. The difference between the two is that our billboard man leaves a material trace of his movement whereas the surrounding environment does not. So here we have two different durations of time space. One slower and leaving a concrete trace, the other faster and leaving no trace ...just like in reality.

Philosopher Henri Bergson coined the word “duration” (duree) to articulate how we must not see things as discrete entities in time; rather, objects (and subjects) should be seen as akin to a cube of sugar dissolving in a glass of water. The cube is constantly changing its state from one moment to the next. Reality on the whole, functions in a similar way to the cube of sugar: namely enduring as a kind of flux through space-time. To understand myself as a discrete entity in the present is a mistake; rather I should understand myself as a passing through time: I am literally attached to my virtual past and perpetually becoming something slightly new. I am a four dimensional entity. I am the billboard man.

But of course the way you may see other objects and subjects moving through time and the way you experience the movement of time yourself are quite different things. In fact, we probably have a better ability to understand how we persist through time and space than we do other objects and things. I guess this understanding of moving through time-space as a discrete, conscious entity is what philosophers mean when they talk about “being”. This is something all of us (even stupid people) can’t help but experience on a daily basis. Thus, we need not represent this because we actually live it. And according to the philosopher Graham Harman, we will never really know how other things (i.e. the chair you are sitting on; the tree outside) experience their own movements through time. These things remain unknown to us.

But what no advert or artwork seems to be able to do is to represent how we experience consciousness as we move through time. It remains something which is unrepresentable ... and yet we are experiencing it at this very moment (and at every moment). This is of a different order to stitching photographs together to create the illusion of movement through time.

And yet, the stitching of photographs together does seem to touch on how memory (or at least a certain kind of memory) works. Do this little experiment: remember the last time you left the house and went somewhere (the shop or the office or whatever). I don’t know about you, but I can only recall the events in a more or less photo snap like way. I might have a snap of me walking down the street but there is no way I can actively recall myself flowing through time-space as I walk down the road to go an buy the milk. I have a flash of speaking to the guy at the counter – or perhaps a few flashes – but they just don’t flow through time like the river of consciousness does. The only way I can do that is in a day-dream or a proper dream, in which I can actually represent full-on phenomenological movement in time space. But the more clear that becomes, the more you tend toward sleeping, in which case you are not strictly remembering stuff – it becomes spliced with all sorts of unconscious desires. Thus, if tonight i dream of what I did today (i.e. I dream of walking down the road to go and buy milk), it will never be quite the same place, and weird shit will happen: arbitrary children from my maths class in 1997 will suddenly appear on the road; the milk is actually a dog I saw a few days ago, and so on (fill in your own demented content).

They say that photography has changed the way in which humans remember stuff. Photos are like indexes of reality. They are external, material forms of memory. Also, the more photos you have, the more it probably changes the way you remember stuff. My favourite example of this is from the Soviet Union, where photos of Stalin with Yezhov are re-issued as photos without Yezhov, once Stalin had him shot.

So this external archive of photos infects your internal archive of memory. Perhaps they are cousins belonging to the same species. Of course, the explosion of all sorts of memory capture (e-mail, internet, data records, filming on your camera; digital cameras and so on) are what Derrida has called the emergence of an “archive fever”.- an obsession of collecting every trace of the past. Also, now that such things can be stored in computer format, they no longer decay like photographs and (good old fashioned) memories decay. But we must be careful not to confuse this with our actual experience of the world which is a different kettle of fish. Actually existing through time is like being on the cusp of a perpetual event horizon. I am aware that this post is horribly pretentious but now that we are neck deep in it, lets go the whole way and end with a wonderful quote by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense. For him, time:

retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.

Anyway, not sure where this is going ... so lets just end with this: Capitalism is yet to fully colonize this “space in between”. But if and when it does, then we are truly fucked.

A J'Burg Koan

2010-09-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned somewhere at the beginning of this blog that I actually have something of a day job. My day job (which isn’t really a job at all) is beginning to breathe down my neck. In the next 6 months I am (outrageously) expected to produce a substantial slab of written work. This means less blog-time. However, fear not silent masses! Yea who eagerly await my every new post! My solution will be to just post shorter blogs during this period (or ever after, if is comfortable). In fact, that was my intention all along - but every time I start writing, I just can’t bloody-well stop. It’s like Pringles; like 24 ; like beating homeless people....

Anyway, here is today’s post:

About 10 years ago while in Taiwan I made the grave mistake of accepting a stranger’s invitation to go out to lunch. What basically happened is that he carted me and my friend around to various friends, family members and business contacts to “show us off” (the other foreigner with me was a blond haired, blue eyed gal which gets you lots of extra “face” brownie points in Taiwan). Anyway, there was one nugget of wisdom he disclosed to me which helped alleviate the grinding tedium of the day’s events. When I told him that Johannesburg (where I am from) was a very dangerous city, he responded with the following insightful, yet poetic, piece of analysis as to why Johannesburg is this way:

First, they take the drug,

Then, they feel the dizzy,

Then they shoot the people.

I like that. Ok, he will not be holding the Anthony Giddens Chair in Sociology at the London School of Economic anytime soon....but still.

On the Importance of Being Earnest

2010-09-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this yet, you ought to. Very surprisingly, he was not elected, however, I see a bright future for him in arbitrating current fragile Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, or possibly even teaching kindergarten in Asia (on the latter point, I am really qute serious).

We Believe in Nothing, Lebowski! (Vol.2)

2010-09-24T05:56:00.001-07:00

Last night I posted a piece on a conference on accelerationism I recently went to. I got side tracked by a rant about the end of the world (as we know it). Anyway, this is the remainder of what I wanted to say.

The idea of Accelerationsims was seriously forwarded in the 1990s by a guy called Nick Land, who was a lecturer at Warwick University. Nick Land was himself the embodiment of acceleration – one of those rare figures in academia who was prepared to “walk the walk” and swallow all that which goes along with it, not least of which was insanity. I first read Land’s work about ten years ago, when I took out his modestly titled “A Thirst for Annihilation” from the University of Cape Town library. The book is on George Bataille – a figure in French theoretical circles who enjoyed excess so much that he wrote a three volume tome on the subject. The collection, called The Accursed Share, argues that economics should be understood in terms of waste, excrement, sexual excess, human sacrifice and the like. Actually, I think the IMF and the World Bank should take a look at it.

Anyway, Bataille’s work, which embraces nihilism, entropy and the like, always seemed to me at odds with the conservative feathering of nests which goes on in university departments. Nick Land however, was another kettle of fish. I remember discussing his book with a mate of mine in South Africa : we both reckoned that the book was at once brilliant, cringe-worthy and insane ... but too insane. Almost like a warning of what would happen to you if you used Bataille’s writings as a guide for living. ~What would happen to you if you read too much; if you thought too much; if you took too many drugs...

Several years later I began to meet British colleagues who knew and worked with Land personally. I heard that he was an amphetamine junkie; that he at times heard voices in his head. I am not sure whether he was fired or quit his job but he disappeared off the face of the earth, didn’t publish any more academic stuff and was now living in Shanghai.

What was really interesting is the parallel between his thought and his life. His argument that we had to embrace the intensity and speed of technological advancement was taken up by him with great zeal. Nearing the end of his tenure at the university, he had embraced right wing politics, supported Bush’s War on Terror and so forth. In fact, moving to Shanghai, a new and growing centre of capital accumulation coupled with authoritarianism seemed like the perfect fit.

Anyway, like I said in my previous post, the conference – as many of the ultra-left conferences I have attended – are very big on theory and very slim on details grounded in real-life situations. Another problem is that, in the UK at least, there is somewhat of an obsession with all that is European, or at least western. I think this is a mistake. If you want to deal seriously with the “globalness” of global capitalism, then you best have some grasp of at least one other part of the world other than Old Blighty and Euro-American culture. Last year I went to a huge conference on Communism run by Zizek (which included all the superstars: Badiou; Ranciere; Hardt and Negri) and exactly the same criticism applied there too. Europe; Europe and more Europe.

Anyway, to return to the accelarationism conference, on purely theoretical grounds, there was one gem of a speaker: Ray Brassier. He is one of four philosophers who have - in part willingly, in part unwillingly – been lumped together in a group known as the “Speculative Realists”; or “speculative materialists” – the other three being Graham Harman; Ian Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. The basic thing that they have in common is that they believe that there is a big wide world out there which exists independently of whether we experience it or not. It is largely indifferent to us. For the guy on the street, this probably sounds like common sense.

But in philosophy, since Kant, there has been this idea that we cannot really prove that the world exists outside of what we perceive it. But simply, how do I know what (or if any) reality exists outside of what I taste, feel smell, think and so forth. We all kind of know that there is a big wide world out there but (so far) it has not been philosophically proven. I think this is a crap idea – but it has dogged philosophy for ages and reached one of its apexes with postmodern relativism – where each culture or individual, etc. is so singularly other that it is fundamentally unknowable in essence. Now me and my dog and my mother all know this is bollocks. But how do you prove it philosophically? Well, in Meillassoux’s book After Finitude he uses the fossil record to get out of this conundrum. Basically, the fact that we can study fossils from 600 million years ago (or something like that) means we have access to reality before humans existed - or mammals in general or birds or what have you. Thus we are conscious of things which existed before consciousness. His argument is a lot more nuanced and complex than this, but you get the general drift. What is really funny is that you have to prove this kind of thing at all... but that’s philosophy for you! It reminds me of that George Orwell Quote: “ Some ideas are stupid that only an intellectual could believe them”.

Anyway, so Brassier is one of this cohort. I read a few chapters of his book, Nihil Unbound. It is insanely dry and, as a friend of mine put it, “torturous”. Reading it is like watching one of those Shia Muslims whipping themselves on a religious holiday. But dry and torturous works well when the content of a book is profound...and profound it is! The following excerpt from the preface of the book clearly demonstrates that this man truly believes in nothing:

"Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity."

Anyway, it was great to hear him speak, he is very rigorous. When he talks, - like all noble autistics - he only stares at the ground and not at the audience. You have to know quite a lot of philosophy to understand what he is saying. But what stood out for me was his discussion of a “transcendental speed limit”. I really can’t be arsed to go into it here (this is a good defence for not having to acknowledge that it was way over my head) but you can access his talk, along with the others, here. Another interesting talk on the website is the one by Benjamin Noys, who runs the wonderfully titled blog: No Useless Leniency. He is very much against the idea of accelerationsim. He also has very cool new book which has just come out (see below. Above is a short clip I took of Brassier’s introductory remarks.

We Believe in Nothing Lebowski! (Vol. 1)

2010-09-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

The other day I attended a conference on Accelerationism at Goldsmiths University. The idea of accelerationsim is basically that instead of trying to resist global capitalism – a dead-end cause - we should throw ourselves into it wholesale. I am not sure exactly what this would entail. I have images of Patrick Bateman and his off-white, tastefully thick business cards written in “silian rail” font. I am not sure that the people at the conference seemed to know either. This was Goldsmiths – a hot bed of radical lefties. There was lots and lots and lots of theory and not much in the way of ... well ... examples of how to go about such accelerationism. As usual, I had my own secret fantasy of what accelerationsims means: a kind of autophagy in which the economy lands up eating itself - just like that fox in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist...Chaos Reigns!

Neo-Marxists argue that Capitalism is axiomatic. Basically, in the old days, you had some symbolic force which held your world together: god, the king, the pope or what have you. Capitalism doesn’t need any symbols to hold anything together – it basically liquidates all these things. Its not that these symbols disappear (we still have god, the king, the pope), its just that they become replicants or simulations like those robots in Bladerunner. Lets take Green Day as an example. In the 1970’s you had old school symbolism in its final death throws: the punk movement; nihilism; Sid Vicious and the like. Then in the 1990s you get Green Day (and the replicants of these replicants: Blink 666 or whatever they are called; The Offspring; Linkin Park) – rebellion which is packaged to sell en masse. In fact, by this time, the Sex Pistols themselves had become clones. This is a very dumb example of how Capitalism descacrilizes and produces simulations which drive massive profit making. Baudrillard once famously said something like: Capitalism doesn’t destroy the other (like in the good old days); rather, it just meticulously reproduces it, in what he dubbed “the surgical removal of otherness”

Now, I don’t personally fully subscribe to this theory but there is a lot to be said for it. The easiest example is global tourism and the hunt for the next Shangri-La. Witness how travel companies are always trying to market some unique, unspoilt place in the world where you – Lord Stanley – can be the first to encounter its fragile otherness (in, of course an ethically and environmentally responsible way). In my early twenties, I sought out these places. In Nepal I went on a hike what the locals dub “The Coca-Cola Trail” due to the glut of tourism; in Tibet, I marvelled at the Neon-lighted karaoke bars and whore-houses beneath the Potala Palace (the Dali Lama’s former pad). I could go on, but I am sure the reader can come up with some of their own examples. The problem is that any new, uncharted place, elicits the desire to enter it, to consume it, to annihilate its otherness: to disneyfy it. If you are a fan of travel and a fan of fascist photography, you will know how difficult it is to cut out all signs of modernity the next time you take a photo of the quaint natives. In fact, capitalism deals with this by taking you to an authentic Zulu theme park where you can see authentic Zulus doing authentic Zulu-like things. It is for these reasons that I have found solace in the mountains in some of the world’s most dire shit-holes – places where even the most ideologically hardened venture-capitalists would fear to tread (Mogadishu in the spring is simply wonderful darling!). It is for similar reasons that I listen to the most obscure, atonal music that money can buy.

Anyway, my point is that there is no way to beat this – and the main reason is that most locals in other countries enthusiastically want modernity, TVs, cash, cars...you know ...the stuff we have! So for me, this is why I think the acceleration of capitalism is inevitable. But why will capitalism eat itself? My answer is very unoriginal but at least it is apocalyptic: basically, China and India and other places in the next 50 years will demand all the kinds of energy-burning luxuries which we in the West have (the same luxuries that we promised the spread of market capitalism would bring them if they embraced it). What this is doing is putting an incredible strain on the world’s resources and ecology. Take China at the Copenhagen climate summit: they put hardly anything on the table – and with good reason: how are they to catch up with the West when the West spent the last few hundred years colonizing and industrializing so as to get where they are today?

In Jarrod Diamond’s Collapse, his main argument is that most major catastrophes in world history happen due to a lack of resources (even, interestingly, Easter Island). All of his examples seem tragic precisely because they could have been stopped. If only those Easter Islanders had stopped cutting down all their trees to build stupid statues, they wouldn’t have annihilated themselves. I think the same is true today: We know we could stop a certain degree of environmental decline; stop relying on oil; get states to force people to consume less and so forth, but let’s face it: we can’t help ourselves ... it aint gonna happen. One of the reasons we can’t help ourselves is because we live within an ideological world in which it is our god given right to accumulate as much as we possibly can. Its like when Europe colonized Africa: ”Shit!” says France, “If we don’t colonize Algeria, the Brits will ... better take it now while it’s still going!” Infinite accumulation on a finite surface (i.e. the earth) has to reach breaking point sometime. This is when capital will begin, not to eat itself, but rather to eat its substrate, the earth itself. In this sense, it is like the Ebola virus: it can’t live for long periods of time because it kills everyone so quickly that it lands up destroying its own habitat. We had a hunter gatherer economy for 200 000 years; Capitalism now for about two or three hundred years ... any bets on when the beginning of the end will be? Unless, of course, Capital’s ultimate aim is to leave the planet!

Ok, this post has got way out of hand... I wanted to talk more about the conference but have been side-tracked with my damn Biblical visions again....please see "We beleive in Nothing Lebowski, Vol 2", which I will write up between in-depth readings of Ezekiel and Leviticus.

On How to Gape at (non) Celebrities

2010-09-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a gig at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, to see Unicazürn, featuring Stephen Thrower (formerly from Coil;) and David Knight (from the Lydia Lunch Band). The music was ok – nothing too amazing. But the audience was definitely worth the night out. If you have ever wondered what the fringe avant-garde No Wave types of the late seventies and early eighties look like now, you would have found out at this gig. It’s weird being in a room of about 30 people, where everyone is in (at least) their mid-40s but dresses way more avant garde than you ever would (the only other place I have seen this was at an Einsturzende Neubauten gig a few years back). Standing right next to me was none other than nudist, Dada performance-artist and Throbbing Gristle pioneer, Cosey Fanni Tutti (who looks remarkable considering she is nearly 60). And standing right next to her was Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and more recently, the amazing Thailand-based SoiSong).

In Britain, it is very un-cool to even acknowledge that someone “famous” is in the room (although these people are hardly at the Elton John level of fame; in fact, they are not even at the David Hasselhoff level of fame). It is for this reason, I have been told, that lots of American celebrities like to live in London. Anyway, I am from the colonies, and do not abide by such social conduct. I like to stare. In fact, I have a theory about famous people: they are one of the last remnants of the sacred in the modern world. If, say, you were walking down the road and suddenly saw, I don’t know, Lady Gaga, walk past, that experience is somewhat analogous to owning a Van Gogh painting as opposed to owning a copy of a Van Gogh. In our contemporary world, it is the circulation of images of these people which bombard us (TV, film, internet, print media). One image of Lady Gaga can be present in several thousand places at the same time. But Lady Gaga herself can only be in one place at one time. Its a bit like seeing the king instead of a symbol of the king (or an emissary of the king). And when you see them, they are affectively different from their image (shorter, taller, uglier – unless they are a replicant like Victoria Beckham who is so modified that she looks exactly like her image). Anyway, I end with a wonderful instance of this by a way of a description by some young chap in China in 1966 who managed to get a glimpse of Mao Zedong at a rally at Tiananmen Square:

[Mao] looked older than I had imagined and more than half his hair was white. His face showed marks of old age and did not glow either, as it was supposed to. His movements were sluggish. He was a senile old man...Lin Biao...was a small, thin, weak man, his face as white as paper. Lin Biao signalled....to energetically destroy all the “old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of exploiting classes (Macfarquhar and Schoenhals 2006: 108)

And if you liked that, then surely you will like this too.

Painting Myself Out of a Corner

2010-09-08T14:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend I decided to start painting again. I have not painted a single thing for about 15 years. I was never really good at painting. It requires two things which don’t come very naturally to me: time and patience. Mixing different shades of colour on a palate and keeping them separate from each other seemed way to anal for me; Also, after a few hours of painting, you don’t have a finished product, as you might with a pencil or charcoal drawing. No, after a few hours, you might have just begun to deal with a small corner of the canvas, a basic under-wash or what have you. I must have forgotten all of this over the weekend, when I decided to rush off to my local art store and buy a bunch of paints, paper and brushes and expect my first masterpiece done by evening. No such thing happened.

I had this idea of painting a photograph I had taken during a storm in Cape Town (a shot I took from the window of the car). I imagined a sublime painted version of it, with a bulging purple blue sky and glowing car lights shimmering on the road. When I started to paint the clouds I suddenly remembered how ridiculously difficult painting is. I also remembered that in choosing clouds for my debut painting in session, I had picked one of the hardest things you could possibly paint. Masters like Turner and Richter took years to work out how to paint clouds (along with water and mist and the like). By three in the morning I had created a half-finished abomination. The next day I fixed it up a bit and it looked slightly better. But I had been severely humbled.

After my first failure at painting, I was reading an interview with the guitarist and painter Keith Rowe. He said he tried to paint pictures like Caravaggio and failed. One day his painting teacher said to him: “Only Caravaggio can paint like Caravaggio”. Thus, he gave up and tried to find his own style, or “trick” as he called it. I like his (Keith Rowe’s) paintings. They are in absolutely startling contrast to the severe dronescapes and radio waves which constitute his music. Anyway, it got me thinking: I need to find my “trick”. Then I realized I already have a trick: my telephone book doodlings: Those little pictures you draw when you are speaking to someone on the phone, or are in a boring meeting or lecture – those things. They are possibly the most unpretentious and unintimidating things you can draw – usually because you draw them in the margins of books and on note-pads – not on clean white canvases bought from an art shop.

It turns out that my doodlings are always boxes or squares replicating each other and mutating. By mutating, I mean I make many mistakes. I cant seem to draw what i imagine in my mind. I have shaky hands; everything gets painted all crooked. Anyway, thats my wounded trick, and thats what I will continue to do for now.

The Descent of Richard Dawkins

2010-09-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

I used to love Richard Dawkins. When I read The Selfish Gene, I felt a kind of excitement which only a few books in my life have been able to generate. I liked the pantheon of fauna, all disinterestedly screwing each other over: baby cubs shoving each other out the way to get more of mummies teat; penguins on the edge of the ice-shelf all shuffling about so as not to be the first one in the water (sea lions! sharks!); monkeys lying to each other to get more food – all these species slave-like to chains of DNA driving the hapless phenotypes forward. Of course, it is no surprise that neo-liberal economists and Dawkin’s evolution were two peas in a pod: rational actors making (genetically motivated) rational decisions in order to benefit themselves; reciprocal altruism (I scratch your back, you scratch mine) evolving as a consequence (But always remember: selfishness first; altruism second). I also liked Dawkin’s cheeky swipes at the Christian community. But most of all, I liked the last chapter in the book – his theory of memes – the notion that ideas are like DNA: they replicate and mutate; they leap from one body to another. Thus, the invention of the wheel wheel, Marxism, Lady Gaga, iPods and many other things, were ideas which have high replicating fedelity.

Today, in The Guardian, I read an article called “Richard Dawkins: The Dick Delusion”. I read the headlines nodding in complete agreement with the author. What precisely, went wrong with the man?

The most obvious thing is that Dawkin’s occasional forays into God bashing became a full-time job. Whereas he might be a brilliant evolutionary biologist (and I’m not even sure about that: as my mate pointed out the other day, he hasn’t exactly published widely in academic journals), he is a shit social scientist. Terry Eagleton pointed out in his review of The God Delusion that Dawkin’s writing a book on theological debates is a bit like Eagleton writing a book on ornithology after reading The British Guide to Birds. I watched a documentary by Dawkins which came out around the time of the book called something like The Root of All Evil? (i.e. religion) He wants to see if religion is really a force for good in the world. At the end he goes to Israel and we see interviews with people from “both sides”. On the Islamic side, he finds an aggressive, belligerent New York Jew who has moved to Palestine and converted to Islam; he tells Dawkins that women in the West are “whores” and says all sorts of other things which make nice, scary sound-bites. Then he goes to the Israeli side and interviews an unflinching hard-line Zionist who also says very strong worded things about Arabs. Conclusion: religion is the root of all evil.

While this is a documentary (and not a scientific journal), you might still expect a slightly wider sample of positions on the topic; you might have expected a brief discussion on how religion, as one of many group identity markers (others being nationalism, ethnicity, gender, political organization and so on), mobilizes people along certain lines. In fact, in hindsight, the film’s title is a bit like a porno film called something like: “Will Busty get it on tonight?” Busty, naked on the front cover of the DVD, with two guys, suggests that she will, indeed, get it on tonight. Dawkin’s question about the root of all evil is like Busty’s quest for sex. A foregone conclusion.

Stalinism aside, what irritates me the most about him and his ilk (like Bill Maher) is that they don’t see religion as set of practices and discourses which can be mobilized in the interests of all sorts of causes both good and bad. Now, the sceptic would say yes, but most other large scale forms of community organization aren’t based on the irrational. Well, some perhaps more than others. Take nationalism for instance. What the hell is a nation anyway? Symbols such as flags and coins glue the whole thing together. We treat things like “Nigeria” and “Britain” as if they were pre-given places and not a bunch of repetitive practices which keep these imaginary geographies afloat. Many people die for their nations, even when these nations are very new. Now, even though I know all of this, I still act and behave as if nations exist. When I am feeling particularly stupid, I even think nation states have always existed in the form they are in now. So in this sense, I act “as if” they existed and in doing so, I, along with everyone else (including Dawkins), breathe life into them and keep them afloat. Consumerism is exactly the same. Whenever I don’t watch television for long periods of time, when I do eventually watch it again, I am always amazed at how odd advertisements seem. I can’t believe how stupidly superficial the narrative devices are. And yet, companies spend big bucks on ads because apparently they work. Even if I know its all bullshit, I still buy items (like clothes) according in part to the image attached to the item. And more worryingly, after a few days of watching TV again, the ads just seem normal again. How does this switch happen? To draw on Nike, I “Just do it!”

What I am saying here is that Dawkins is blind to the almost universal human capacity for belief in the irrational. This manifests itself in religion (and in many ways within religion) but equally so in the development of things like the Marxist Leninist Socialist Utopia; the purely “free” market; the Nazi preoccupation with racial hygiene and my purchasing of Nike shoes. To single out religion is just lazy, lazy, social science. Not extending your scope is a dangerous thing indeed. Remember before 2008 when quants told us they had figured out the science of neutralizing risk in markets. Or when colonial science, through the study of phrenology, measured skulls and rated intelligence accordingly. Perversions of rigorous inquiry? Absolutely. But my point is that economics and biology, just like science in general, are susceptible to all kinds of aggressive bullshit. Dawkin's shoddy investigations into human culture points toward someone who has decided the outcome of the investigation by choosing facts selectively. Much rotten science is done in this way.

Finally, a note on memes. Like many others, I am no longer fully convinced by the theory of memes. Culture does not mechanically replicate itself. It repeats itself but it has very low fi-copying fidelity. Thus, a recipe handed down over one hundred years is not simply a repeat of the recipe – each person that makes the food makes it is a different way. Each person has to process the recipe information and translate it into the practice of baking the cake. Some are more skilled, some are less. (actually, Tim Ingold, not myself, used this example first). This is precisely what the theory of memes overlooks – the idea of skill, mastery, lived experience – i.e. the way that people actually do things and get better at them. This knowledge, accrued by the practitioner is, in large part, transferrable, but it will have to contend with all sorts of other things: like the person you teach it to, their capacities, their translation skills and so on. If genes replicated with the same amount of low fidelity, we would not be mammals – we would be weird, dysfunctional grey goo. Anyway, I guess Dawkins was still on the right track when it came to memes – he just seemed to take humans as the kinds of automatons we see in that film, The Stepford Children. I think the only hope for the man is to quit his day job, go and do a course on methodologies of the study of social institutions and return to his theory of memes. Except this time, he should study them with all the rigour and respect with which he studies other animals.

Thanks to Helen and Andrew for encouraging me to rant about this!

Ozymandias on Speed or: The Second Death of Turkmenbashi

2010-08-26T05:36:00.001-07:00

Today I heard some devastating news: the gold statue of Turkmenistan’s first President, Saparmurat Niyazov (also fondly known as Turkmenbashi – “father of all Turkmen"), has been torn down by his revisionist successor Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (the names just role off the tongue). Turkmenbashi, who named a month of the year after his mother and another after himself, devoted much time and energy to good old fashioned American-style self-promotion. He wrote a book called the Ruhnama, made compulsory reading for the nation and treated as if some kind of divine scripture (readers of this blog will be delighted to know that English translations of this 400-page tome are available on the internet for a modest 40 dollars a piece). The statue will be sorely missed by the people – particularly its most wondrous feature: it slowly rotates on its base so as to always be facing the sun.

Following Turkmenbashi’s death from heart-failure a few years ago, thus tragically terminating his “President for Life” status, his corrupt successor began downgrading Turkmenbashi’s hallowed name. The latter repealed many hard-fought laws which Turkmenbashi had instated (the banning of ballet; the banning the use of lip-synching at public concerts; the banning of gold teeth; the closing of hospitals outside of the capital city).

Nevertheless, some of his great achievements persist, not least the building which houses the tightly controlled State Media - dubbed “The House of Free Creativity”, which is built in the shape of an open book (and cost a modest 17 million dollars to build). Just prior to his death, the dear leader had begun plans to build a palace built entirely out of ice in the centre of the Karakum Desert – an expanse of sand so foreboding that it only rains on average once in ten years. The man, and his representations, will be sorely missed.

O'Malley and Noble: A Groovy Kind of Gloom

2010-08-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

I recently went to an interesting gig – a duo comprising of Stephen O’ Malley and Steve Noble. O’Malley is the brainchild behind (amongst other projects) the insanely heavy Sunn O))) – a band which has really re-ignited my faith in the future of heavy metal. It’s diabolically evil and dark and it almost spills into free-form improv music. Steve Noble, who I have written on before on theis blog, is a jazz drummer who plays with such speed, intensity and accuracy that one might be forgiven for believing he had a bad case of Tourette syndrome coupled with an addiction to crack. But he looks so Germanically sober and poker-faced when he plays that clearly has neither of these afflictions.

The gig was absolutely packed and we were lucky enough to be sitting right at the front. To be honest, the music was so abstract and sparse that I was not entirely convinced that it worked. At times, it seemed like two different monologues going on although both artists are brilliant at what they do. Both of them play together in the band Aethenor, a project which I think works much better. The newest album, Faking Gold and Murder, has David Tibet on vocals (of Current 93 fame) and is really, really good.

The opener for the night was John Butcher. I have said this already but the man is a genius and will surely go down in musical history as one of the true innovators of his instrument.

Here is a clip which the diabolical Chairman Zo took of the O’Malley and Noble gig,
And here and here are clips of Butcher’s set. She also took the pics on this page ... and it shows!

Pappa In Afrika

2010-08-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

I just read a review of the new Bitterkomix release: Pappa in Afrika. It looks absolutely brilliant and I think I will be ordering it. The article about it is absolute crap. I have been trying to post a rebuttal but I always have trouble posting on the Mail and Guardian website. So I will take the liberty of posting my thoughts below in the meantime. My mate over at Metabunker, who is a Bitterkomix aficionado and all round comic whiz kid, might have something to say about it in the near future.... (no pressure)

I really love this part of the article:

“African-American feminist bell hooks is also useful here for having coined the term white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, which is even more instructive than simply to label someone as racist.”

Imagine dropping that in at your next dinner party with a straight face.

I find it interesting that this author tries to name drop as many academic names as possible but leaves out the most useful: The WITS based Cameroonian Achille Mbembe who has written extensively on the bafoonery of the African dictator, their excess and their obscenity. The reason the author probably leaves him out (he must know of him) is because it would make his argument look bad: if he agreed with Mbembe, it would mean that only black people have the right to criticize African excess; if he disagreed with him, it would entail that no such excess exists and we should not criticize African elite excess at all.

The other thing is that he accuses the authors of celebrating “the cynicism of arrogant and intransigent products of racial privilege” This sounds as if it was coming straight from the mouth of Mbeki in the depths of his paranoid rulership. If you were gay and white during apartheid and into black men (or straight and into black women), you might find that your mental life would be a bit turbulent. This art seems to convey that. Perhaps these comics are catering predominantly to a particular kind of white audience. Perhaps that’s why you don’t get it?

I have always thought that authentic encounters with people other than yourself are often violent, scary, erotic and the like. Many people intuitively understand this: that is why we all laugh at the naiveté of the “Rainbow Nation”. Perhaps your article should have finished with how, precisely, one ought to convey the trauma of the white South African male (yes, they had their traumas too, especially the moffies)?

I hate to gloat, but...

2010-08-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

a while back i wrote the following about Julian Assange of Wikileaks:

We can be sure, that in the months to come, the spin doctors of the Western world will try and dig up dirt on him in a cowardly and cruel manner so as to make him look cowardly and cruel

Alas! In this morning's news, imagine my astonishment when I read: Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Accused of Rape

Ok, ok, anyone with half a brain could have foresaw this - but these days my pleasures are meagre and petty.

One final thing on this rape issue: don't they know that Assange is as asexual as a Ken Doll? Well, at least, he looks it.

Verwoed's Children: South Africa's New Media Bill

2010-08-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

The South African government, led by the ANC, is in the process of trying to do two very dubious things: set up a media tribunal and pass a new information bill. The media tribunal will be set up because the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and other concerned entities believe that the current form of press accountability, an Ombudsman, is biased and ineffective. The Ombudsman will be replaced with an independent tribunal which will be accountable to parliment. The Information Bill will allow the government to easily make any documentation of its choosing classified. Anyone in possession of such documentation (say, if those who exposed the dodgy Arms Deal in the 1990s had done so following the passing of the bill) will face up to 25 years in prison. The ANC spin doctors are arguing that these bills will, bizarrely, strengthen access to information and create greater diversity and broad-based empowerment amongst the media.

This is what such measures will do, I think, in reality. Firstly, the bill and tribunal will allow a small handful of elites – politicians, businessmen allied with the Party (with dubious names such as the Black Management Forum) and a massive retinue of sycophants, toadies and lackeys – to continue looting the state coffers with far less hindrance. Such milking is done primarily through the rigging of tenders, nepotism, overzealous use of expense accounts and all other conceivable methods of self-enrichment which the media is constantly exposing. This is inextricably bound to a second purpose: it is embarrassing that the ruling party is constantly under the media spotlight for corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and all the other things which seem to come with prolonged one-party rule. The new bill and tribunal should go a long way to slowing down the daily litany of criticism which the media pours upon the ANC-led alliance (with the SACP and COSATU – the federation of Unions) although to be fair, COSATU’s leader is at least encouraging serious debate on the passing of the Bill (unlike the SACP head, Blade Nzimande, who recently argued that South Africa’s media is “a threat to democracy”)

It is painfully obvious that the Bill and the tribunal will be in the interests of a minute fraction of the country’s population. Thus it is almost amusing to watch the ANC try and argue that such ordinances are in the interests of “the masses”. A few things are brought to mind: firstly, when the Chinese government tried to pass similar laws in notoriously apolitical Hong Kong in 2003, Beijing had the shit scared out of them when 500 000 Hong Kongers took to the streets in protest.Beijing quickly retracted the Bill. While there is a lot of (even international) media coverage on the South African Bill, it would help if locals (not just the media) voiced their opposition to the bill. God knows South Africans love demonstrating. But then again, worrying about media freedom is itself the preserve of a minority wealthy enough to care about such things (as opposed to, say, eating your next meal).

Secondly, the ANC is always banging on about how the media is in “white hands” and that they have a political axe to grind with the ANC. This is, in part, true. Just witness the anti-Zuma campaign led by the media prior to his election (although that was in part propagated by the pro-Mbeki camp). I say “in part” because news outlets – from Fox News to Democracy Now in the US; from the Daily Mail to The Guardian in the UK, all have political axes to grind. It seems to be an inescapable evil of the media on a global scale. Thus the ANC, with their 60 percent of electorate and massive influence should be able to set up some competing newspapers with competing perspectives. They have tried, and thus far failed. Most of the media which the ANC bitches about is read, if not exclusively by whites, at least by fewer than 10 percent (I'm guessing) of the country’s elites. There is a massive underclass which could be exploited by a pro-government media. And yet, I find it frightening that they would rather resort to heavy-handed coercion (and the risk to international reputation which it brings), rather than persist in cultivating a literary culture within the ANC.

All of this further convinces me that the ANC, like so many other sub-Saharan African post-liberation states, is spilling over into a class, rather than a race-based, division. If, as I believe, these media bills are being brought in primarily to further enrich elites, then the core of the ANC is essentially abandoning its (mostly poor) electorate which so faithfully vote for them every five years. The whole point of the ANC's existence was to lift the masses our of racially based enslavement and poverty. Part of the reason they cannot do this is because of looting of the state coffers (particularly at provincial and municipal level) by officials. This leads to protests, cynicism and sometimes violence. If the media cannot expose such corruption – even if it be a “white” media – then the disadvantaged will only become more disadvantaged. Just like local elites in places such as Angola and China, the “liberators” of the South African poor land up fucking the poor in the ass.

I end with a return to the beloved Blade Nzimande who beleives that the media is a threat to democracy. The arch-communist, who last year urged government to "roll back the greed, corruption and selfishness of capitalism" was recently found staying, at tax payers expense, at one of South Africa’s most expensive five star hotels during parliamentary sessions in Cape Town. He also recently purchased, at tax-payers expense, a luxury, top of the range BMW costing over 1 million Rands. Mr. Nzimande points to the fact that all of this is above board. Indeed, above board it is. But as the head of an organization agitating for a Marxist-Leninist state, this is, morally and ethically, not above board.

However, not long from now, Dr. Nzimande might look forward to a South Africa in which journalists reporting on his lavish life-style will face a forced confession followed by 20 years hard labour in the Karoo....perhpas that is the brand of Marxist Leninism he is referring to...

Lisbon

2010-08-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

A staple of the European tourist industry is the image of the quaint neighbourhood where you can watch locals go about their daily business. Such an image of urban daily life is prolific in tourist brochures, romantic films, TV travel shows and the like. This is why places which actually have such quarters (narrow alleyways made of stone; washing hanging across the street; unique little cafes where locals hang out and do local things; city walls) are precisely where this global tourist trade head when they come to Europe. And in the act of doing so, something really diabolical happens to these environments. Property prices increase; multinationals open up premises; owners of shops start flogging touristy things like postcards, teaspoons, and stuffed animals with coats of arms embossed upon them. Reconstruction and renovation entails increasing numbers of buildings which look like squeaky clean versions of the originals. The streets swell with the last thing you want to see: lots of other tourists just like you in search of the idyllic, quiet European neighbourhood.

I have seen this in Paris, Barcelona, Rome and in Dubrovnik. This last city is absolutely stunning but so popular in the summer months that people have to queue at the edge of the city walls just to have a peek inside. In a sense, this is a good thing for a certain strata of the city's population: an opportunity to make lots of cash. But with it comes all the other baggage: a massive imbalance between the amount of money people make here and the rest of the population. More locals enter the city to get work. This is the new underclass which such places produce: the illegal trader on the side of the road pedalling some tourist trinket, a fake rolex, cheap sunglasses, binoculars (why always binoculars?) are some examples. But also hustlers, scammers and pick-pockets too. Interestingly, this class is increasingly made up of Africans; Romas; Arabs and other such folk who come from places which have yet to benefit from the rewards of global capitalism. And yet they head to these European cities like moths to a flame, often, I think, hoping things had worked out a bit better.

It came as a great surprise then, when I recently discovered that the city of Lisbon is nothing like this. It has an edge. Its a bit rough. Its narrow alleyways which climb up the hills are full of graffiti. Wonderful graffiti: political slogans advocating the killing of the pope, resisting capitalism, bashing gays, bashing fascism and so on; Fake wall tiles spray-painted alongside real wall tiles; Odd little creatures, utopian landscapes ... You are forced to be a voyeur as everywhere you look are open doors and windows filled with people going about their daily business.

We went into one neighbourhood to watch Fado – a kind of mournful singing which is listened to over dinner. Before going to the Fado hood, I anticipated entrance fees, queuing, aggressive marketing, lots of different places trying to get you into their shop, being anxious at trying to find an “authentic” one, as opposed to a “touristy” one, and so on...But it was nothing like this. As you walk through the alley ways, you can simply peer through doors and see them sing. At one place, we sat down in the alleyway opposite the door of a venue and listened to the singing. The owners seemed indifferent to our presence and there was absolutely no obligation to go in. Lots of locals sat around in the streets, listening to the music, or just hanging out.

This authenticity (I can’t believe I am using that word) of course, has lots to do with the fact that Portugal is the poorest country in the EU. And here is the moral problem: as a tourist, the best way to see authenticity is go to places increasingly outside the circuits of global capitalism. As capitalism penetrates these enclaves, we decry the lack of authenticity which we ourselves are helping to produce. How dare these people demolish their nice old homes and replace them with garish villas and rent out their first floor to the United Colors of Benetton? And as we decry it, we become increasingly reliant on the nice, smooth, luxuriant spaces which produce, or replicate the older ones. As we get older, we increasingly enjoy the luxury and convenience which the former provides. It makes your trip all the more pleasant and you can use your credit card wherever you like. Perhaps at this point, you really don’t want authenticity at all: it becomes dirty, inefficient, slow, disordered and even violent. You want luxury, you want a hassle-free experience, you want the other made consumable for you. This is the double-bind of the tourist.

But back to the graffiti: In order to reduce levels of graffiti, you need some or other kind of coercion: video cameras, private security guards, ambitious municipalities who will promote arrests of offenders. These measures help make the city appear cleaner, safer, more authentic for the potential cash-cow which is the tourist. The technologies which keep the graffiti to the periphery are the same technologies which keep the Africans, the Roma and the Arabs at the periphery.

Lisbon has lots of both graffiti and immigrants. For me, this means that the coercion of the video camera and the security guard are less at work here. It means you are in a place where your interaction with others entails slightly more risk but also potentially more reward. It is a place where you have to take a little bit more personal responsibility. The potential for interaction outside of market exchange increases, or at least does not necessarily dominate interaction (like, say, Leicester Square in London). This kind of travel attracts young, back-packers who will go on to grow up as the next generation of moneyed tourists. Perhaps by that time, they will reminisce about how cool Lisbon “used to be” in the way that former hippies today wax lyrical about Kabul or Bangkok.

Above photograph courtesy of the fantastic Mr. Chris Beckman

Tits and Context

2010-08-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

The other night I watched the film Kick Ass. Near the beginning of the film, you see the protagonist, a teenage boy, explaining to the viewer how he is so horny that he jerks off several times a day and will find almost anything a turn on. When he says “almost anything is a turn on”, we see a shot of an internet page on his computer depicting two young, topless African women decked out in their traditional tribal garb. He then - the film implies - knocks another one out. This got me thinking about why he would say “even this turns me on” when in fact they are woman in their twenties with their tits hanging out. But what disturbed me more was that what he said made sense to me. “Of course”, I thought, “it is absolutely scandalous to have a wank to these ethnographic photos of Sub-Saharan tribeswomen”. Now why would I think that? And why did the scriptwriters of the film assume that the audience at large would think this too?

Let's try a thought experiment: Let’s say we take off the beads and the neck bracelets and the cows in the back ground and we put these two girls on a plush bed with deep red pillows ... voila! you have perfectly acceptable batting material again. So what’s interesting about this, is the context in which you see the breasts. With the right props, the right artefacts, the right material supplements, you can somehow de-eroticize the pinnacle of bog-standard heterosexual desire: the firm breasts of late teenage girls. This seems absolutely miraculous to me. That you can actually achieve this. If anything, it shows that culture is indeed an incredibly powerful force. It betrays everything I learnt from socio-biology which tells me I must immediately drop whatever I am doing and dry-hump the material at hand. I think this is one of the reasons why someone like photographer Robert Mapplethorpe produced such interesting images: he was able to take at once the erotic (i.e. a cock) and the non-erotic (i.e. a suit) and put them together in a way where they are both achieving their opposite effects simultaneously: You are not quite sure whether feel at ease or turn away with Victorian horror.

Anyway, this scene from Kick Ass helped me understand something about race and desire in the colonies. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an incredibly protestant affair. There was only one “naughty” magazine permitted – the dreadful Scope magazine which showed topless white girls with stars over their nipples. On the other hand, in many of the local black African ethnic groups, women who were not married (i.e. woman in the prime of youthful appearance) would go about their daily business topless. What was really interesting was the fact that, for your average white South African, there was nothing really erotic about this (well, at least not for me). At airport curio-shops, you would see post-card racks with lions, elephants, and young topless teenage girls - in a country with virtually no pornography! My mother once told me that German men tourists loved coming to South Africa and going on tours of Zululand were they could hang out with hordes of topless, unmarried women. I thought that this was very funny but also somewhat immoral – not because they were young topless girls (I was at the age when I had become a discerning reader of Scope magazine) but because they were young topless Zulu girls, in Zululand, with their beads and cows and their calabashes. It was also, I am afraid to admit, because they were black. But I like to blame this on ideology: I was living in a country where it was a criminal offence for people of different races to have sexual relations, let alone marry each other. I was a racist, and I had, in part, been made thus. One often reads in post-colonial theory about how colonists exoticize, eroticize and sexualize “the other” which they are colonizing. This is indeed true: I knew absolute Nazi-style bigots who would fuck their maids for pocket change on the sly. And then there is the coloured community of the Western Cape: an absolute, indisputable product of inter-racial desire. But what post-colonial types don’t seem to focus on was the opposite: namely how colonialism was able to de-activate desire; to produce frameworks in which nipples became affectless objects of racial categorization rather than sublime objects of desire.

And then apartheid fell, and stuff changed. I remember in the mid 1990s, in my late teens, driving through Zululand and seeing a girl of roughly the same age on the side of the road, topless, going about her business. She was not decked out in traditional garb – just wearing a skirt and some flip-flops. And then I felt it... a wave of scandalous excitement that I was lucky enough to be catching a glimpse of tits in the great outdoors. The old apartheid style thinking of “this is not a person, it’s a racial artefact” was still there but weaker, broken. If you were a Focuauldian, you would say that new discourses (the Rainbow fucking Nation) was producing new desires in the subject (the subject being me). If you were a Freudian, you would say that this repressed natural desire was finally allowed to spill out from the unconscious and into broad, naked daylight. From a traditional feminist perspective (the most depressing of the three), I had simply shifted from one way of objectifying women, to another way of objectifying a women.

On this last point, I concede: but rather the latter objectification with its potential for intimacy than the former, which was as barren and sterile as apartheid itself.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Impoverished Humans

2010-08-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched the film The Fantastic Mr. Fox in which a family of foxes and their friends battle three farmer’s hell bent on annihilating them. The movie is directed by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums; Rushmore; Darjeeling Limited) and has voice-overs by a bunch of A-grade celebrities including George Clooney and Meryl Streep. Within the first few seconds of watching the film, I had an immediate feeling that I would not enjoy it. The reason was simple: I generally hate films in which animals become substitutes for humans – which is precisely what this film is about. Ok, sure, the foxes dig lots of holes and the eat in an uncouth fashion. But that’s where the animal analogy ends. Besides this, they are just a bunch of stupid humans and war with a bunch of other stupid humans. And because Wes Anderson always loves these slightly odd-ball, dead pan, American characters, so too are the foxes, the badgers and the opossums slightly odd-ball, dead pan, American characters. They speak English, they write in English, they play sport, they have accountants and real estate agents and are embroiled in human dramas. Come to think of it, I can’t for the life of me think why he even bothered using animals – he should have just used real people. Of the animal kingdom, we learn sweet fuck all. The best you can get from films like this is that by seeing animals doing human things, a certain aura of cutesiness and sentimentality is achieved – like that awful painting of dogs playing cards at a table. But beyond this, you learn nothing.

Perhaps there is a time and a place for making animal allegories of human situations (I am thinking of stories written in repressive regimes, where the author is slightly less likely to be killed if the hero, rather than an Hispanic revolutionary is, say, a frog). But making films about animals who are actually humans smacks of a poverty of the imagination. Stephan Fry recently made some programme about animals; in an interview about his experiences he said something to the effect of: “what amazes me the most is that animals don’t think about stuff like humans do; they are not curious; they are focused on eating, survival and so forth...that is all”. I think this is a more honest start. Problematic but honest. I say honest because, yes, animals generally don’t seem to care about my taste in music and literature ; I say problematic because making the distinction between animals and humans is like making the distinction between whites and non-whites (the same racism inspired in the term “world music”). But it’s much worse than that: There are 1,9 million known species on earth; when it comes to insects and algae, scientists reckon they only are aware of a small fraction of the total number. Broadly speaking, each of those species is as different as humans to any other given species. This "us and them" logic is a very poor state of affairs (and one which I will probably replicate in this blog post).

A simple, brutal example will suffice. When I was a kid, I had a friend who’s family owned a pet store. One day we caught a wild mouse which was living in the store. Young, and naive, we thought if we put it with some of the other, domestic mice in a cage, they could all be friends (sort of like how the rabbits and the foxes hang out in Fantastic Mr. Fox). To our horror, we watched the domestic mice quickly rip the wild mouse apart and then continue to go about their business, using its corpse as a kind of insulation. Anyway, my point is that that is the difference between two different species of mouse which, to my untrained eye, looked roughly the same. At that age, I probably thought they even spoke the same kind of language, danced the same kinds of dances. Each species is a universe a way from each other species. Different languages, different dancing styles; different philosophies; different desires. This is way too complex for most humans to even think of; it’s much better if we just have men and beasts.

Daniel Dennet has pointed out a very basic reason why we don’t know how animals think and feel: Quite simply, they don’t seem to speak a language like we do, and hence cannot communicate. Now I know all you tree-huggers out there will be saying “but dolphins speak and Blue Whales chatter....” Well, that depends what you mean by speak. As far as we know, some species have indexical communication. This means that one symbol means one thing. So they can get a chimpanzee to say stuff like “me want carrots” by using symbols taught to it which mean “me” want” and “carrots”. But they cannot (at least none of which we know) do is re-organize these symbols in a different ways to create different meanings. This is what human language does: a finite amount of symbols which you can re-organize in an infinite amount of ways to create new meanings. The fascist side of me likes to believe that this is why humans, in a very vulgar sense, rule the world at present (well, until some bacteria, who use our body as a landscape, wipe us all out, like we are presently doing to the surface of the earth). Its language in the above sense of the word (what they call in the literature a “combinatorial system of differences”) which is an absolutely necessary condition for the construction of sky-scrapers, the development of writing and the BP oil Spill.

And, god willing, it is the very usefulness of this language ability, which will outlive its usefulness and destroy us all (global warming and nuclear war are also dependant on this very language). I say “god willing” because on a strictly utilitarian basis – i.e. for the greater good of all species on earth – it is best if humans are wiped off the face of the earth. It is, ironically, our only hope.

What pisses me off about neuroscientists and the like is their un-ashamed reification of the human brain. “look how marvellous the human brain is!” they say.... “It is the most complex organism on earth!”. This is disgusting. Repeat the above quotes but substitute the word “brain” with the word “dick” or something... this is actually how vain the statement is. Scientists think their worship of the human brain is due to an abundance of knowledge – but actually, they say it from lack of knowledge. It is simply that we don’t know how other species think; what they think; how they experience reality, that we have such a space to shamelessly gratify ourselves in this way. Just because animals don’t use combinatorial systems of difference and, in mammals, our brain-body indexes are larger (excluding, hippies will be delighted to know, dolphins), we think we are the most amazing thing since sliced bread. Yes, the human brain is amazing; but it is only one sliver of a much vaster network of intelligence, of being. The absolute fore-front of philosophy, of forwarding humanity, is to look outside of humanity (Just as I learnt more about South Africa once I left it): how does a pine tree experience reality, for example? Just because it doesn’t have a brain, doesn’t mean it does not have expression: I use this in the sense that Spinoza does: The pine tree calibrates reality just as a human calibrates reality, but in a wholly different manner. Ok, this is beginning to sound like 4 AM at a trance party. Time to stop.

So lets finish where we began: With Mr. Fox. Near the end of the film, the animals are riding a motorbike on a country road. They see a wolf in the distance. They stop the bike and marvel at the wolf, at its wildness, as a symbol of the other (they after all, are humans, thinly disguised as foxes and badgers, and thus are like any other humans marvelling at a wolf). They try and speak to the wolf; they ask it questions. But the wolf just stares at them like a wolf might do in real life. For a second, I thought the film would redeem itself here – that it would allow a space for the non-human to emerge in all its fullness: namely that which is wholly other to us, unknowable, seemingly indifferent, but who knows? And then, Wes Anderson fucks it up. In response to the wolf’s failure to communicate, Mr. Fox raises his fist in solidarity with the wolf. A good director would have seen to it that the wolf would simply continue to stare at them, or run away, or run toward them or what have you. But no. The wolf returns the raised fist in solidarity. Thus the only window in the film which opens up into the unassailable abyss of the other is slammed firmly shut. All we see is ourselves reflected in the closed windowpane: the narcissistic, vain, self-referential idiots that we usually choose to be.

In one Ali G clip, our man visits a petting zoo. He is standing in front of a donkey and says something like: “a few lucky donkeys get to escape this terrible place and join the porno industry; but for the rest, they are locked up inside here, pissing and shitting in front of each other”. This follows the same logic as Fantastic Mr. Fox: the absolute naive stupidity of being unable to imagine animals as other. And yet, it is far more honest than Wes Anderson’s film precisely because of its transparent stupidity. It short circuits all the manipulative human sentiment embodied in a long tradition of narrative, from Toad Hall to The Lion King, in which we reify the very things we are rapidly destroying. Anyone familiar with critiques of colonial literature will hear alarm bells ringing: popular tales of the noble savage (King Solomon’s and Mines; Shaka Zulu are the ones I’m familiar with) ferociously consumed by the very apparatus annihilating them. That, I think, is a uniquely human trait, but one we dont bang on about in glowing terms.

The next time that Robert Mugabe or some other homophobe says that homosexuals are like animals, the Internatinal Lesbian and Gay Association ought to thank them for the compliment.

Beauty is the Beast: A Vile Network

2010-08-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

There was a film I watched in the 80s – I can’t for the life of me remember what the name was – which has a teenager in it who makes artsy films and shows them to his family. In one of them, the family watches video clips of themselves eating at a large family reunion but the footage is interspersed with clips of starving people in Africa and other disturbing images. The family are shocked. This contrast works on a purely formal level: excess and gluttony juxtaposed with utter deprivation. But it is also suggestive of the fact that this excess here at home is in some way linked to famine on the other side of the world (at least I thought that, anyway). Slavoj Zizek’s book On Violence has this as its central thesis: namely that not only western excess but also western charity constitutes a kind of violence upon the third world.

I was actually trying to think of a better example than this stupid film from the 80’s - I had in mind something along the lines of fashion models walking down the cat walk and then cutting to the snot-crusted, swollen bellied African children with a swarm of flies around their face. I am actually surprised I can’t think of a film or album cover with some such motif (let me know if you know of one).

I say “surprised” because in today’s world, with the obscene difference in wealth between rich and poor nations (and the fact that the former have played a very large role in the latter’s deprivation), this kind of contrast almost functions like some sort of guilty Jungian archetype of the Western unconscious. I think the glamorous model, her excess revealed in part by how thin she is, how little she eats, coupled with fancy jewellery and clothing (the prices of each item probably able to feed one of those skinny little critters for several years) is the symbolic epitome of this accumulation. And funnily enough, it is often these very figures who are engaged in high profile trips to Africa doing photo-ops with Angolan landmine victims and the like. Most of us intuitively feel like there is something diabolically wrong about this, no matter how well meaning these people are. It is for similar reasons that the likes of Bono, Bob Geldoff, and Madonna are found to be nauseating by so many people – even though they try to do good (the South Park episode where you find out that Bono is actually a piece of human shit is the best instance of this: “Now it all makes sense...how he can do so much good in the world and still be a piece of shit!”).

Anyway, what I am trying to say here is that the relationship between the vulgar excesses of celebrities (who we all, in our own guilty way, worship in some form or another) and the dire poverty in the world is always only a suggestive link. When we see a former Spice Girl kissing little Bonganithe AIDS orphan or what have you, we (or at least I) recoil in horror at the vanity, the hypocrisy, the nausea of it all. But it only remains an intuitive feeling of disgust. No matter how strongly we feel it, we cannot really say that Ms. Spice Girl is directly responsible for the emaciated child which she is reifying before the gaze of a tabloid photographer. There must be links between her excess and his poverty but they are merely suggestive. Thus, we can only imagine some vast structural inequality but cannot make any forensic links between one and the other.

In fact, this is the problem with much structuralist analysis (such as Marxism) where one abstracts actually existing inequalities existing before one’s eyes into a global problem whose totality can only be imagined through the supplements of GDP discrepancies between countries, pie charts, economic analysis or what have you. The Spice Girl kissing the baby thus functions like art: it is an aesthetic metonym for a massive problem whose complexity (not to mention our own complicity) is too vast to be fully knowable.

Science, on the other hand, is not about metonyms and imaginaries of unknowable wholes, but rather the causal linking of one event to another. This analysis of small level details, connections and relations between one thing and another is precisely what philosophers such as Bruno Latour have tried to re-introduce into the social sciences – what he calls Actor Network Theory. In ANT, you don’t imagine vast unknowable structural wholes as if you were god looking down upon the earth. Rather, you examine social life as a succession of practices between different actors (both objects and subjects). Structures don’t exist; they are only imagined. Only relations between things exist. Right, so you are probably thinking, what does this have to do with Emma Bunton and the skinny sub-Saharan Africans? Well, it has nothing to do with Emma Bunton, but everything to do with Naomi Campbell.

Yesterday, it was announced that supermodel Naomi Campbell has the green light to appear in the Hague’s International Criminal Court to testify in the ongoing case against former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. For those who don’t know, Mr. Taylor secretly funded the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighbouring Sierra Leone to wage war against that country’s government and citizenry. Here’s why: Liberia has bugger all diamonds but Sierra Leone has heaps: The RUF secured mining areas in the country through a reign of terror which, even by African standards, was off the radar. The RUF was headed by a most charming gentleman by the name of Foday Sankoh. He orchestrated mass rape, amputation, slaughter and cannibalism of the population in campaigns with titles such as “Operation Pay Yourselves”. Many of the perpetrators were pre-pubescent kids, high on amphetamines, wearing pink wigs and brandishing DIY tools such as electric drills (chords dangling behind them). It reminds of me of some African hybrid of Dante’s seventh level of hell and Caligula’s stag party fuelled by strong, bad acid.

Sankoh was funded by Taylor who received lots and lots of nice shiny diamonds in return. Sankoh was eventually captured and died in captivity, a dreadlocked, salivating mad-man; Taylor, after beginning a comfortable exile in Nigeria, was nabbed at the border while trying to flee from an arrest warrant issued by the Hague. Some stories do have a happy ending.

Now back to Ms Campbell. In 1997, during a dinner party in South Africa hosted by Nelson Mandela, Taylor gave her one of these nice big juicy diamonds as a gift. The prosecutors at the Hague are trying to prove that Taylor was involved in the processing of blood diamonds – and their evidence lies deep in the cleavage of none other than Ms. Campbell (actually, I don’t know if the diamond was used in a necklace,. I just made that up).

Now back to Latour. The reason this case is so mind-blowingly sublime is that for the first time (if you are not counting Grace Mugabe, Imalda Marcus and the like), we have an empirical connection between an anorexic glamour queen and the ass-raping of Africa. At least in this instance, we don’t have to intuitively imagine massive structural violence obliquely embodied in the figure of the beauty queen coddling a kid with polio. Just this once, we have a network, between the Ms Campbell’s rock (note: not her crack pipe, her diamond); how that rock was given to her by Mr. Taylor; how the rock came to Mr. Taylor via Mr. Sankoh; how he tyrannized a population to get that rock and so on. It is very rare indeed that such a network is ever made so explicit but that by no means implies that such networks themselves are rare; rather, it is only the ability to trace them which is rare. These things, by definition, remain in the shadows.

The Mother of All Indifference

2010-08-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

I once sat next to a guy at a wedding dinner who told me that all he wanted to do was to go and live in some secluded wilderness area by himself. He had in mind the modest proposal of Antarctica. I asked if he had ever lived in a remote area by himself. He replied no, he hadn’t.

I have met quite a few people who have similar sentiments: a strong urge to escape from the stifling confines of whatever social context they exist; to lose themselves in a vast expanse of nature - fecund, barren or otherwise. There exists a long heritage of this: the Beat poets (I think of Jack Kerouac living in a forest fire look-out tower; Burroughs in the Amazon); a whole litany of colonial explorers from Burton to Hedin; an East Asian tradition of the hermit monk and the almost universal phenomenon of the shaman. All of these (and many more) influences have helped structure the yearnings of my own generation of festival revellers, Lonely Planet back packers, New Age obscuritanists and the like. The underlying assumption here is that the solitary quest into the great beyond equates with some kind of Buddhist-like enlightenment – a voyage which will hasten a kind of transcendental knowledge which is always of the benign variety: inner peace; bravery; awareness...

When I decided, about eight or so years ago to do such a thing, I thought I knew perfectly well that nature would not offer me such clap trap. I had already spent lots of time in wilderness areas (well, at least relative to the Trance Party types); I was in the know. But here’s the thing: visiting a wilderness area and living in a wilderness area is a bit like the difference between enjoying a couple of drinks with friends and drinking a bottles of vodka alone every day.

When I first found my fecund nature retreat, it seemed perfect: a small cottage along-side a turquoise torrent of a river at the foot of a rain-forest-clad 3000 meter mountain. And as if god himself were involved in the finishing touches of this obscene fantasy, the cottage was rented from the chief of a tribe of formerly head-hunting Austronesian aboriginals. I am reluctant to say that this location was on the island of Taiwan; I imagine the reader will have in mind images of factories, pollution and cramped living. All of which is true. But for anyone who has travelled to the East coast of Taiwan, where mountains nearly the size of the Alps crash into the Pacific Ocean, they will know the urban sprawl of the West Coast is a universe away. It is still my contention that this 300 mile stretch of coastline is one of those golden nuggets which the western world has yet to “discover” as such.

Anyway, I recall my fist night in the cottage, moving my stuff in. While cleaning up the bathroom, I was somewhat shocked at encountering a large spider scampering out from under the basin as the bathroom was being cleaned. “Jesus!” I thought. “That's a big spider. I hope there aren’t any more of those!” About an hour later, while walking out the kitchen door, a large black splotch on the corrugated iron wall caught my eye. “I wonder what could have marked the wall like that?” I mused as I walked past. Turning back again, I realized that this large black splotch was actually another spider, which made the previous one seem like a pinhead. It was nearly the size of a dinner plate and covered in a thick set of fur. My immediate affective response was somewhat akin to when I watched that Japanese horror film The Ring, when that ghoulish girl climbs out the TV set. I usually don’t kill insects but I immediately reached for the broom (although killing this was more akin to killing a small mammal). As I swung for it with the broom at full speed, it shot away at the speed of light behind the kitchen cupboard. He (or she) was the first of many such brethren which found comfort in my kitchen, many which rivalled it in size. Because the kitchen was made of warped corrugated iron with vines growing through from the outside in, it was a hopeless task to shut these demons out. From that point on, the kitchen became a site of danger, always kept sealed from the rest of the cottage and entered and exited with great haste. This, however, did not fully prevent the spiders from entering my bedroom, bathroom and other spaces in the house.

The evening after the first spider event, while riding my bike out of the driveway, I had to immediately slam on breaks as a banded Krait – one of the world’s most poisonous snakes - made its leisurely way across the road about 20 cm from my bike. Another Japanese horror film moment. The snake did for the area surrounding my cottage what the spiders did for the cottage itself. Namely, the 90 percent of the time when I did not see snakes or spiders, they were still potentially there, in my mind, projected onto the surrounds. Every night, I anticipated them revealing themselves as I opened a door, as I drove up the driveway. Sometimes they were there but most times they were not. With no neighbours of which to speak, these creatures became my nightly companions, at times in the flesh but mostly in spirit.

Once I began my job down on the coastal plain, I would find infinite reasons to delay my nightly motorbike ride home back to my mountain lair. The hills had become a place of fear. This situation reminded me of a freind I once had who dated a pretty girl. As the relationship deteriorated, he commented to me that her prettiness had become something bad, something disturbing, something ugly. In a similar way, my pristine mountain cottage quickly became a place of darkness, of indifference and possibly even of evil. And yet, it became all of these things while still remaining breathtakingly beautiful. Perhaps this is a good example of what we humans call the sublime. Over the eight months I lived in the cottage, I naively kept believing that I would overcome these fears, or rather, that my purpose, my destiny here, was to overcome these fears –a bit like Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when he (or the character) ventures down from his mountain dwelling and strokes the most dangerous of beasts upon its head. But there was no such overcoming and my fear was as intense on the day I arrived as the day I left. Additionally, it was terribly lonely in the mountains. My only freinds up there - the animals - I wanted nothing to do with.

Finally, culture, in its most base form, came to my rescue. In the spring, a local company began mining the marble cliffs above the cottage. Every morning at about 5 AM, my cottage would shake as an army of large trucks made their way up the mountain road past my house to dig away the stone. The trucks would continue incessantly until sunset and sometimes beyond. After a while, from the coastal plain below, you could see a growing scar in the jungled mountain cliffs above as the labourers stripped away ever more soil and vegetation. The wonderfully blue-green river turned chalky white from the crushed marble; the monkeys and the flying foxes retreated (but the spiders stayed); my cottage became perpetually covered in a thin white film of dust. I asked the aboriginal labourers, who drove the trucks for the Chinese company, to just drive a little slower when they passed my house; they shrugged their shoulders and the noise remained the same. Eventually, defeated and broken, I left the mountains for the plain below and my life became increasingly pleasant.

So now when people tell me they want to go and live in the sticks, this experience of mine always comes to mind. This is not to say that it will be the lot of everyone else who wants to dwell in the wild. In fact, I had an American friend who lived about 200 miles south from me in the mountains of Taiwan in an even more remote place with even more creepy crawlies. He was not fazed by them at all. His parents had been biologists and as a kid he had been surrounded by insects. His indifference was somewhat infectious: when I crashed at his house, the spiders crawling on the walls and floors of his house somehow did not bother me like the ones which would crawl on my own walls and floors. Perhpas it was because I was not alone; perhaps I am a wimp, I don’t know.

If there is a lesson I learnt it was probably this: living in the wilderness brought me enlightenment and peace insofar as it brought me neither. When I eventually came down from the mountains and back into civilization as such, I had learnt that there was simply no lesson to learn. The sheer harshness and isolation of the experience made me like humans all the more. Whereas before I probably fashioned myself as some sort of lonesome nature warrior, I now shamelessly revelled in my annoying dependence on others.

I think it was Sartre who said “hell is other people” but after my stint in the Central Mountain Range of Taiwan, I came to believe that that is only the first or second level of hell: As you go deeper into the inferno - this green inferno - people become fewer and fewer....and at the 7th level of hell, there is no one at all...

No one, except, perhpas, Klaus Kinski. For the best description of nature I have ever heard, see this clip by Werner Herzog explaining his thoughts on the Amazon Jungle, where he spent a comfy four years with none other than Kinsky himslef. This is like two forms of the severest hell squeezed onto a single plain. Germans. They make the rest of us look poitively tame...

Julian Assange and the Question of Sovereignty

2010-07-28T04:36:00.000-07:00

Today I watched an interview with Julian Assange, head of Wikileaks. He has all the heterogeneous hallmarks of a bond villain: a shock bob of white hair (which, incidentally, is now very much in style); an accent which slides between continents and an insane translocality (each interview I see with him is in a different country).There was actually a Bond film in the 1990s, Golden Eye I think, in which the villain is a media mogul who wants to destabilize global financial markets. But Assange is far more creative (and I would like to think, ethical) than that. But besides his Dr. Evil appearance, the other thing which unites him with the Bond villain, is his sense of sovereignty.

What is most fascinating about Bond villains (and we might add to the list a number of real, high level players in the global criminal underworld) is that they seem to exist above and beyond the confines of the nation state. Sovereignty, in the true sense of the word, relates to absolute authority over a territory. The most objectionable thing a state can have is for part of it to break away and form its own sovereignty. Mr Assange has the aura of the sovereign about him. In the Economist interview I refer to, Mr Assange makes an interesting statement: He says that when they release leaked documents, they first “strip the harm” of them and only release “the good” - what will be in the public interest. I think it is precisely this decision – and perhaps an unavoidable one – which in part confers upon Mr. Assange his awesome power. If Wikileaks merely facilitated the posting of documents, that would be one thing; but making decisions as to what can and cannot be shown is, I am afraid, not that dissimilar in principle to the censor who decides what we can and cannot watch on television. In both instances, we say it is to prevent harm to individuals. And in both cases, it is an instance of a massive imbalance of power. Why is the censor fit to see what I cannot? Why should Mr. Assange decide which information gets into whose hands?

The bottom line is that there is no clear-cut answer to this question – and this is really why Mr. Assange functions as an important symbol in today’s world. What he does is in many senses exactly what the nation-state does: it decides who gets to see what; it (I am thinking of Alistair Campbell here) strategically releases news so as to coincide with whatever agendas it may have. It is not accountable to anyone other than itself. It is precisely because Wikileaks possesses this power (with hardly any money, it should be noted) that it acts as a wonderful mirror upon the coercion which is at the founding origin of all nation states. What Assange does is similar to when two different factions in a country are fighting for power. Once one gets in, it will naturalize its power, twist history, and make as though it was always destined for power. But prior to seizing power, when all is up for grabs, we witness the absolute fragility and contingency of power. I like to think of Assange as someone who destabilizes the rock-solid power of places like the UK, the US and a few massive multi-nationals. He shows how their right to disseminate the truth is but one narrative; he also demonstrates that their actions are often cowardly, cruel and deceptive.

And with all seizures of power, we have to also ask, to what degree is Mr. Assange cowardly, cruel and deceptive. We can be sure, that in the months to come, the spin doctors of the Western world will try and dig up dirt on him in a cowardly and cruel manner so as to make him look cowardly and cruel. When I watch him speak, he has the aura of someone very, very focused on what they are doing. His attention to detail is very impressive and most of his arguments are crystal clear. There is, indeed, a whiff of self-righteousness about him; but I think if you were in his position, following an ideological horizon might not be such a bad thing.

By remaining faithful to the idea of free dissemination of information (something the newspapers gave up on many years ago), he is incorruptible. Well, perhaps. One truth of the world today is that large-scale criminal underworlds never actually operate outside of the state: rather, they are usually in cahoots with the state. This does not only happen in Third World countries like North Korea, where the government allegedly exports en masse meth amphetamine to help keep the state afloat. It also happens in Britain, where a few years ago Tony Blair suspended an investigation of arms deal corruption between BAE and the Saudi government. At any rate, my point is, with all these powerful players out there, will Mr. Assange remain incorruptible?

Could, say, countries disseminate information to destabilize each other? Could you pay Mr Assange two Billion dollars to put up some fake reports damning your competitor (be you a country or a corporation). He is always banging on about how little money Wikileaks have? Just one little fix up like that and he need never ask for money again.

So yes, in this sense, we have to have faith that he stays true to his vision. I say this because how many freedom fighters, once they get power, turn into the vilest, most arrogant, bloated scum on earth? Mr Asssange has a somewhat psychotic air about him. I think this is a good sign. Psychotics are good at pursuing the object of their desire ... at all costs.

Books in the Future

2010-07-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

The last post on collecting books has got me thinking about something that was brought up in discussion with a friend of mine. He was explaining to me how books will be on their way out soon (or existing in a similar way to how vinyl functions today) once the right technology emerges. Imagine a little electric thing which stores 10 000 books which you can read where you like. I reckoned that the reason this doesn’t exist successfully yet is because books require lots of handling – more than any other thing they have transposed onto the internet. For instance, you don’t physically handle your music that much. You Mp3 player sits put as it works. But a book only works when you are holding it close to your face. It is this constant, clumsy, rough action of holding which technology has to get around. And get around it, I am sure it eventually will.

This got me thinking about a future scenario: it is 2017 and now everyone has their book collections downloaded onto some kind of electronic device. These devices are cheap to buy and are replaced like cell phones are replaced. Obviously, many people who couldn’t give a rats ass for reading, won’t have these things – or maybe they’lll just read the daily papers on them. Anyway, what will happen is that you will get a certain form of social networking site in which people (probably like myself) will make their entire book collections available on the internet. Anyone can download my books from my collection. By now, publishers have agreed that for every copy of a book you buy, you get a downloadable version too. These were then spread around the internet freely – no charge (perhpas legally, perhpas not). It is only if you want the actual book itself, you fork out.

In fact, this is exactly what happens when you download music off the internet – particularly blogs. I was wondering why people post their entire record collections online. Why bother? It takes so much effort. Well, I think one of the reasons is that it allows people to show off their collections of what they have. As in my previous posting, most collectors crave an audience of some sort. The internet is a great way to offer your records for other people to consume; They can then thank you and comment on your tasteful collection (as they often do). When I go to blogs which offer the promise of a free collection, I am always disappointed when they merely offer a critique of this or that album. I want their opinion, but more importantly I want free access to their record collections too!

Anyway, I think that once books are traded like this, a similar thing will happen. You can have a network site like “Bookworm” or some dumb name like that where everyone plunders everyone else’s book collections. Also, people will digitize books existing before this revolution which will also enter cybersapce (this has already been happening for some time). Of course, people will also offer copies to their mates and so forth via e-mail attachments – just like in the old days when one Harry Potter novel changed hands between 5 readers - now it won’t pass your hands, it will simply remain in your hands and be copied on to someone else.

I am very ignorant of technological advances, and for all I know, this trend (or some similar one) is already happening. But what I do know is accessing free books is far harder than accessing free music on the internet. Google Books has eased this somewhat but the chapters always are suddenly cut off as the read gets interesting. Bit Torrent isn’t exactly the Library of Congress either. Then there is the problem mentioned above: how to you carry these things comfortably around with you?

Anyway, the other big obstacle to this scenario is the power of publishing companies and the authors they represent. We have seen how nasty and coercive the music industry has got with its inability to adapt to this new form of exchange. There is no reason to suggest that big publishers (and authors) won’t get equally nasty.
But let them ...for without their violence, they are a dying breed.

Internet downloading has provided many artists with an exposure they would never have had without the internet. Most of these artists would probably not make a living out of the music they produce anyway. If I really like them, and see them live, I buy an album as a token of respect and as a nice fetish object. I think the promotion of artists like this by the internet far outweighs the losses of comparatively fewer (but infinitely wealthier) artists represented by the industrial-military complexes which are Sony, Virgin and the like. Art was produced for millennia without profit as a goal. Musicians in many societies have long had the reputation of being dodgy and outcasts. So let’s restore them this dignity!
Sure, there will always be spectacle - the Bonos and Madonnas of the world - but spectacle is not all we want.....

So yes, perhaps a book revolution could work in a similar way. Interesting new authors who may never be published (I am thinking of all the other Thomas Ligotti’s of the world) will now have fairer exposure. Interest in them would take hold like a seed and they would become popular – perhaps to the point where they might make a living out of it. Or, perhaps not, and like so many other people, continue to write without the faintest hope of economic reward.

Necrotext: My Bookshelf and its Discontents

2010-07-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

"More claret with your Proust?"

When people come to my house, I want them to look at my books, to witness my most tasteful, sophisticated (and sizeable) collection. When the landlord recently came into our apartment after we had moved in, he commented: “Wow! You have so many books!”. That made me feel good inside. But it also made me feel bad. Whenever someone comments on how large my book collection is, I feel embarrassed by the pleasure my guest has just given me. I feel embarrassed and guilty and shameful because one of the reasons I have so many books, is so people will say precisely that. When I say “thank you!”, what I am really saying is “Thank God! I succeeded in impressing you! I have succeeded in eliciting the desired response”. In a sense, thanking myself for the magnificent production I have put on. (This also happens to be, it should be pointed out, the foundation upon which Ricky Gervais’s character in The Office, David Brent, is based)

My bookshelves tower over me like those in the life of the characters in Michael Heneke’s Hidden (Cachet in French). In this film, a very sophisticated husband and wife (he presents a successful French literary programme on TV; she is a book publisher) are psychologically tormented by someone who anonymously sends videotapes to them of their house being filmed. These videotapes are, you eventually discover, tied up with dreadful events from his past which have come back to haunt him. The books function like this aesthetically dense and beautiful prison which protects but also prevents him from dealing with how fucked up he is (In a similar way, Heneke’s earlier film, The Piano Teacher had a similar vibe, insofar as she was a big-wig professor at a big wig conservatory in Vienna.) On a broader level, you could say Heneke is interested in how fragile civilization is – all this bad shit is oozing through its brittle crust. I sometimes think that my bookshelf is that crust.

As a kid, from about the age of 8 or 9, I began covering the walls of my bedroom with posters – just stuff out of the weekly magazines – and covered my walls with them. Negative space was the enemy: all unfilled bits of wall without poster covering it were gradually pasted up (Reality had been successfully sealed off...the image prevails!). I am not quite sure what drove me to seal off the great outdoors (or reproduce it in my bedroom)? Perhaps, at that age, if you are not interested in sport, this is one of the things which might happen to you.

Anyway, today, I see my bookshelves in a very similar way. Negative space on the bookshelf is the enemy. It must be filled up with more volumes. And not just any volumes. No, they must be weighty, dense texts: difficult...but very important.(I sometimes secretly believe if I buy the book I will naturally understand the contents therein: I am often almost offended when, after trying to read, say, Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, I don’t know what the hell is going on and I forked out ten quid for it!). I also probably secretly believe that if other people see that I own such a thing – that I then have full knowledge of “the thing in itself” Its totality; its full meaning. This is probably the contemporary equivalent of what they used to call “magic” in the old days.

As part of my slow rehabilitation from my book vice, I often today explicitly tell people that there are lots of books on my bookshelves I have not read.In the past two years, I have laid off buying books. Just a few a year. It’s just less stuff I have to worry about.

I remember once a friend of mine commenting in a slightly disappointed tone when looking at my books: “you’ve got no fluff here! Its all heavy going stuff”. But thats the stuff which fills the negative spaces with such wonderful opacity.

But of course, I do actually like my books for other reasons too. Each one has a history. Some have interesting haggling stories attached to them - especially second hand books I got in back alleys in China. I have an old copy of Marquis de Sade’s Justine which I picked up in Bangkok; I have copy of Mao’s little red book from the 1960’s with the owners comments written in the margins thoughts; I have a book by George Bataille which was intercepted at the China-Pakistan boarder by 10 stern looking Chinese officials at this god forsaken outpost some 3000 metres above sea-level. I wish I could have taken a photo of the scene: All these People’s Liberation Army types huddled around a book with Andre Mason’s Acephale (see picture below) on the cover trying to figure out if I was part of some lunatic fringe religious cult. So yes, there is that pleasure which all collectors have. Its called provenance. And I am telling you about it because it brings me pleasure.

And then there is the enjoyment of reading books (note: only third on list). I get a great thrill from reading. I like it when I need a reference and I try and see if I can locate it from within my book collection (a sad pleasure, I agree). I alienate people in bookstores by staying for hours and not wanting to budge. If I am travelling about for the day and I dont have something to read, I feel as though I have forgotten my clothes at home (my headphones are increasingly serving a similar purpose).

All of this raises the following question about collections: can they function completely independently of a certain audience, a certain gaze for which they are (partially) intended. Other collectors perhaps, the public at large? I am not sure. Its an open question.

One example of this might be the case of Ed Gein. Gein was a serial killer in the 1930s in Hickville Wisconsin. He would dig up the graves of dead woman and make domestic objects from their body parts (a waste paper basket; a hide over the couch and so on). But he also collected bits of skin to make a full woman-suit which he could wear when the mood was right. He was a collector. He ran out of collectables when the graveyard ran out of bodies and he had to turn to living specimens.

Anyway, I think Mr. Gein was the most solitary of collectors. He did have a local simpleton who he paid to help remove the bodies from the graves but that was merely instrumental. The very nature of his collection prevented anyone’s gaze but his own. But perhaps then Gein is the exemplary collector: a black hole collapsing in upon itself. What is crucial to collecting is repetition and excess. At one level it is investing in stuff you don’t really need and getting a rush out of acquisition. The display of this excessive enjoyment for others is only a secondary enjoyment; what is primary is accumulation of a series of objects. Accumulation has always struck me as the result of a terror of death. It keeps death and everything which pertains to it at bay. I think this anxiety always haunts the collector. In this sense then, perhaps Mr. Gein’s actions appear more rational: to collect death itself.

If this is the alternative, I think I'll just keep reading.

The Best Pop Singer You've Never Heard Of

2010-07-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

Earlier I mentioned that I had stopped listening to pop and rock music because there was not much new or interesting. But I wasn’t telling the whole truth. For I have found Jesca Hoop and she hits the spot. I have always been a push-over for female vocalist of a certain bent. As a kid I liked Cyndi Lauper and later Suzanne Vega. I also liked Liz Frasier from the Cocteau Twins and Kim Deal. By the time Alanis Morrisette came along, in the mid-1990’s it was that point where alternative rock was suddenly no longer alternative (although it has retained that moniker even up till today). For this reason, I hated Alanis (along with many other popular bands at the time .... didn’t anyone realize, I was into these bands before anyone else! How dare they!).

But secretly I admired Alanis. She wrote good, strong songs and even her ridiculously personal lyrics worked kind of well. I remember being at night clubs in South Africa during this period and, when Alanis’s music came on, teams of woman in their late teens and early twenties would get on the dance floor, cigarettes and Breezers in hands, clutching each other, singing along to “Its not fair!...to deny me!...” . Alanis was pissed off because an affair she had with an older man had turned sour. I think some of these girls might have had similar experiences; some were probably filled with the general rage of being women in a very man-friendly South Africa; and some were just drunk and having a party. Anyway, that was the blossoming of a feminine angst. In time, Alanis’s albums got crapper and crapper (except for her very surreal cover version of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps”); and those girls on the dance floor had children and are now in their thirties.

For all those woman out there who were on the dance floor back then, I suggest you temporarily shelve your aged copy of Jagged Little Pill, and listen to some Jesca Hoop. She’s the Alanis of our age. Why? Well, her music is “alternative” (Yuk!) – but alternative in a different sense: her odd time signature changes and heavy palm muting is basically 2010’s version of alternative (alternative in the mid 1990’s was four bar/ four chord time signature changes...and still passes for “alternative” today....disgraceful!). Her lyrics are deeply personal. But while I was about to say that they are not nearly as cringe-worthy as Alanis’s, a thought springs to mind: in the mid 1990’s Alanis’s lyrics weren’t cringe-worthy; they oozed painful meaning as we swayed on the dancefloor. So yes, what I am saying is that when I am in my mid 40’s I might find Jesca Hoop’s lyrics painful: but for now, in my early thirties, they seem deep and beautiful. You get the sense there has been much trauma in her past but in her lyrics this content is somewhat cryptic and subdued (but also sometimes bursting into the explicit). Oh, she was also Tom Waits’s baby-sitter. He loves her music and has described it as “a swim in a lake at midnight” or something like that. She also comes from a Mormon background. Ok, maybe she’s not that similar to Ms. Morrisette....

Anyway, the best thing about her is she is, relatively speaking, unknown. I saw her play in a pub in Cambridge. It was (half) full of people who had no idea, I think, of who she was; they seemed to be there more for lager. But when she played everyone shut up and watched because she is just so damn good. She plays difficult muted guitar arpeggios and is an awesome live singer. Best of all was when she lifted her arms, she had a massive torn hole in one of the underarms of her shirt. For some reason, that really impressed me.

Someone asked to dedicate a song of hers to one of their friends whose birthday it was. She said: “I dedicate this song to (whoever the guys name was)” and then continued, “it’s about the death of my mother”

What’s not to love?

Here is her myspace page. Her album Hunting My Dress is really good.

Rebiya Kadeer or: How to Make a Martyr

2010-07-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

On the south side of the city Urumqi, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, there used to be a white tiled building, 6 stories or so, with something resembling a mosque dome or a UFO sitting on top. This building was referred to as the “Rebiya” building, named after none other than the infamous Rebiya Kadeer, the ethno-separatist granny of Xinjiang. Rebiya Kadeer got enormously wealthy over the 80s and 90s when China liberalized its economy. Through trading textiles and all sorts of other stuff, she became the richest Uyghur (and woman at that) in Xinjiang. The party, of course, seized on her as a promotional tool – to show how a liberalizing economy fostered by the state, could benefit China’s minorities too. Rebiya was all over the TV and newspapers as the exemplary modern Uyghur woman: prosperous; enterprising; not too religious and obedient to the state.

But that, alas, was not to last. By the 1990’s she had begun to make noise about the inequalities between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. To keep her quiet, the Chinese kicked her upstairs, so to speak – that is to say that made her a member of a highly ritualized, formalized branch of government known as the National People’s Congress. Just like under the Qing emperor, all the minorities come from all over China to Beijing for this, dressed in ridiculously stereotyped minority dresses (the Han are all in suits) and doing synchronized dances. The representatives then go up on stage and are meant to inform all the bureaucrats in Beijing of how life is in the colonies. They are meant to be critical of state policies if need be; but everyone knows you would be daft to do something like that. In fact, all speeches which the ethnic representatives deliver are vetted first by a state censor, thus preventing any embarrassment but also, unfortunately, preventing any decent Party Members from hearing how shit life is in the Great West.

Anyway, Rebiya, god bless, her, broke the mould on this one. She got up one year and gave the leaders hell. In true Chinese fashion, Li Peng (a rotten politician – even the Chinese don’t like him – who is largely believed to have organized the repression during the Tiananmen Square Massacre) gently took her aside after her talk and said something to the effect of: “oh very good Rebiya! Thank you for making us aware of these injustices ... just speak to us in private about it first, next time, ok?”). What that really meant is something along the lines of: “Lady, you have fucked us over and now we are going to screw you into the ground”).

And that’s precisely what happened. On her way one day in a taxi in Urumqi to meet up with some NGO person, her car was intercepted (in the form of a car crash) by the state. She was accused of the time-honoured “stealing state secrets” charge. Thinking she would be executed, it was a relief when she found out she was only sentenced to merciful seven of so years. In this time, naturally, she became somewhat of a martyr and international campaigns took on her cause. Then, after a few years in the nick, she was suddenly released following a visit by Condi Rice on “medical grounds”. She now lives in Washington D. C where she champions her cause.

Following massive riots in Urumqi in July 2009, in which Uyghurs killed nearly 200 Han and, in the days that followed, Han killed many Uyghurs (it was recently discovered that his latter series of killings was hushed up by the state media). The government immediately pinned the blame on Kadeer with virtually no evidence (I mean, what the hell else were they going to say: “we accept that our policies in the region have alienated the local minorities thus forcing them to use violence as a legitimate means of protest; we understand fully”). While before was she public enemy no 1, she is now public enemy number one squared.

Anyway, this all brings me back to the building. When she was loaded and legal, she managed to build this large trading store which also functioned like the monument to her own achievements (anyone familiar with Kadeer will also be acquainted with her astonishing lack of modesty). After she was imprisoned, the government was put in the unusual predicament of what to do with the building with her name printed in big letters at the top. (It would be a bit like the equivalent of the Bin Laden Emporium in down town New York). The risk of tearing it down, of course, entailed the further wrath of the Uyghur people. So the building stayed.

By 2008, the structure had been jettisoned from the realm of Uyghur modernity and into the realm of the semi-sacred. Several times when passing the building with Uyghurs, they would utter in hushed tones that this was the Rebiya Kadir building. For while the majority of Han Chinese and the state despised her, many Uyghurs saw her as a beacon of hope. They had heard stories of her meeting the President of the US; of being short listed for a Nobel Prize. And the bigger she became in their minds, the more forbidden it was to talk about her; the more sublime she became.

This created a weird vibe: there was this woman who no one could talk about openly (unless you were talking about her in a very negative fashion) and yet her building stood tall announcing the very name which could not be uttered. Although the building had not been washed in several years and looked like it was falling apart (possibly a state ploy) it became a shining beacon of hope to some.

And then, in 2009, just after the Urumqi riots, the state tore it down. They claimed that the building (along with another two which Kadeer owned) had cracks and bad foundations and had to go...only two months after the riots. This was in conjunction with other things: the state had been getting back at her for a number of years, by imprisoning two of her sons for tax evasion and then, after the riots, by getting her family members still in Xinjiang to publicly denounce her on TV (nice!). When she was blamed for the riots, the building simply had to go.

Michael Tausig has written that desecration “is the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world”. Thus the Chinese state, by demolishing this building, has unleashed a sacred force which, like a demon, is something you don’t really want to be around. The destruction of this building has thus become a public secret: it openly and publicly tells you things you know that you shouldn’t know. In a recent National Geographic article, the author, Matthew Teauge, writes that one of his informants

spoke freely of rebellion against China’s government, but when I mentioned Rebiya Kadeer, he froze: ‘If China finds this;, he said, pointing to my voice recorder and then reaching for my throat in mock vengeance, ‘on Judgement Day I will catch your neck

This is coupled with a major propaganda initiative in which Rebiya is slandered incessantly in newspapers, on the TV, on billboards, and even by those little trucks driving around with loud speakers which pronounce things. No wonder the building had to go ... it would simply be like the political equivalent of pornography to let it stand.

I think this has taught me a lesson in the arts of contradiction favoured by every great Chinese literary figures from Lao Tze to Mao Zedong, namely that contradictions are fine up to a point, but when they become too violent, you have to swing back into the Yang side of things (state control, patriarchal rule, etc). Something like that!

Anyway, if you have the stomach for it, read Rebiya Kadeer’s book “Dragon Fighter”. I say “have the stomach” not because it lists a long litany of abuses bestowed upon her and her people by the Chinese state (which indeed, it does), but because the writing style is, at times, nauseating. While it is a great story to read, every now and then you are reminded of the author’s mind-blowing vanity. I have the suspicion that in Uyghur, some of these phrases come off as far less cringe-worthy; what you get in the English translations are lines like this:

I want to be the mother of all Uyghurs, the medicine for their ills, the cloth with which to dry their tears, and the cloak to protect them from the rain. My name is Rebiya Kadeer.

After reading this book, I am convinced that she is a naturally gifted businessperson, incredibly savvy and with gall to boot. But as a political figure, I am far less certain. At best she is a place-holder for a more savvy political type to come along and replace her. I saw her on telly once after the riots, showing pictures of Chinese police killing Uyghurs during the riot. It turns out these were pictures of Chinese peasants protesting against the government in another province, taken at another time. She of course looked like a complete idiot after that...and rightly so. The Uyghur associations in the West have a habit of falsifying facts to make things look worse than they are. Its a bad idea because things are thoroughly bad enough as it is . The state just does a half decent job at presenting the region as a tolerant, multi-ethnic region where all, Uyghurs included, are simply thrilled to be part of the motherland.

Steve Noble

2010-07-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight I saw a brilliant drummer and reeds player jam. The drummer, Steve Noble, is an amazing artist: he has been described as having the musical equivalent of attention deficit disorder. His drumming is constantly changing pace and style: He brings all sorts of odd things on to the kit: Chinese gongs, shakers, tuning keys, pot lids...you name it. He studied under a Nigerian drum master called Elkan Ogunde. The first time I saw him play, I thought “wow...this guy should play in a metal band”. Turns out he also plays in a metal band – a project called Athenor, with the guy from Sun O))) which is really dark and abstract. Tonight I picked up a CD of him and guitarist Derek Bailey (a guitarist who also has ADD). Its all over the place but really good.

Here is a homemade clip I took of Noble drumming last night (with Alex Ward). The man is a machine.

Infant Terror

2010-07-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

I really like Stewie from the show Family Guy. He is a misogynistic, imperious infant fashioned upon a Sadean aristocrat. I really like the combination of infancy and cruelty. Here is one of my favourite clips of Stewie’s sadism. and here is another.

Freud alludes to the fact that children are like rotten aristocrats. Both of them live off the labour of others and thus do not have to deal with “the reality principle” too much (which includes work and other terrible obstacles to immediate satisfaction). These types quickly get bored with their wonderful lot and delve into darker realms through which to get their pleasures. (well, some kids and some aristocrats, at least). One of the best descriptions of this descent can be found in the Houellebecq's novel Atomized, in which the son of a famous, wealthy new age spiritual guru, moves from the airy-fairy theology of free love and crystals into the pagan carnivalesque of debauchery and violence. After failing in a career as a rock musician in LA he moves into snuff videos in which he kills people on film.

Stewie embodies these perverse, bottomless drives of sovereignty – where the greatest of pleasures is in the humiliation and cruelty of others. This, according to Bataille, is why the sovereign is never sovereign: they always rely on others (even if it is killing them) in order to sustain their pleasure. At any rate, there is a certain pleasure the viewer (well, at least this viewer) gets in watching Stewie’s cruelty. We become Sadists by proxy.

The main object of Stewie's rage is his mother. He fantasizes about and occasionally tries, to murder her. What is interesting is that the mother, Louis, is herself somewhat twisted; this is not least evident her masochistic drives: she wants her Husband, Peter, to perform bondage on her; She compulsively gambles the family’s property away, she engages in addictive shoplifting and burns herself with cigarettes . It is almost as if Stewie's abuse and hatred toward her is him performing for his mother, her deepest, darkest desires. A re-appraisal of masochism argues that masochists are far more disturbing to the social order than sadists. When you physically punish a masochist, instead of cowering from their tormentor, they get an erection.

In fact, what is most amusing about Stewie is that his designs of domination and terror are betrayed by the fact that he is an infant in nappies who no one except the dog, Brian, listens to. Stewie is funny largely because his rage is impotent. He is like a dictator in a baby-cot; He is the 2000s equivalent of “the Brain” in Pinky and the Brain – a cartoon about a laboratory mouse obsessed with world domination. Both The Brain and Stewie are deliberately cute. It is the rift between such cuteness of the characters and their megalomaniacal drives which make them so funny to watch.

It has been noted, interestingly enough, that Idi Amin had a character which embodied both light-hearted bafoonerry and sadism: One minute he would be laughing, joking and playing the fool and the next he would fly into a murderous rage.

So, anyway, yes, lets enjoy watching Stewie fly into an flaccid rage in his crib, knowing with certainty that he will never occupy the halls of government. But also spare a thought for those who live in North Korea; Zimbabwe or Uzbekistan where the likes of Stewie have assumed the full mantle of sovereignty.

China Experts: The Road of Excess Leads to the Path of Wisdom

2010-07-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

The “rise” of China has produced a very telling body of literature in the West. Researchers who were former “Sovietologists” and the like, have now jumped ship onto the China bandwagon; Journalists have rapidly also become China specialists, often publishing “first-hand journalistic accounts” of the region; and then there is the business crowd, who churn out gazillions of books on how to do business in China – how to “tap into” this vast resource of 1.3 billion (and counting) consumers.

The problem is, quite a lot of these writers don’t really know what they are talking about. And before you think that I am playing that cunty game in which I am the academic-type scorning all these “vulgar” interpretations of China which don’t understand its “true” dimensions, let me tell you the following story: I once knew a Professor in Asian Sociology from a top school in the states; he had recently shifted into the rapturous realm of China Studies. He once told an audience how he visited some schools in rural China in the official capacity of representing his fancy university in the states. He remarked to the audeince how “open” the classes were and how the students spontaneously asked questions.

Now, see, for anyone who has spent a bit of time in China, you might smell a rat when hearing something like this: First thing which jumps to my mind (as it would, I think, any self-respecting Chinese) is that these schools probably were long time rehearsing the presentation of a model, exemplary school to the foreign expert (before we denounce this kind of Stalinist practice, just remember the nonsense western universities have to get up to so as to present model departments to the Research Excellence Assessment bureaucrats during their inspections). The production of "effortlessness" and its meticulous staging is something which goes a long way back in Chinese ritual. Of course, its logic also fits rather nicely with a Socialist paradigms of utopia. I have seen this thing too many times before: you meet with people affiliated in some or other way with the Chinese state who tell you in an offical capacity to "ask anything you like". But you both know that it means anything but... The presentation of an exemplary in Chinese culture is something which makes perfect sense when looking at it from the bottom up. The pupils get into shit if they embarrass themselves while presenting the perfect school: they must say the right things, they must make it be seen that the classroom is a space of exempalry intereaction; the teachers get in trouble by their superiors if they slip up; the superiors get into shit by their superiors if they slip up and so on. This is not to say that its all just a lie – people all have a stake in this and there are some who believe fully in it. Others believe in it sometimes and not at others.

At any rate, my point is that this guy speaks on authority in China from his position as an “expert”, which is not the same as someone who has spent a significant amount of time in the region. The latter, who unlike the bandwagon prof, have not popped into the country for a week (like the British tabloid journalists reporting on the South Africa during the World Cup!), would understand the obsession which China has with a politics of presentation (although they might not put it quite like that). They have a better knack of how Chinese culture works. These people include all sorts of fringe characters who are like a dark western underclass of neo-colonials: missionaries, long-term travellers, sex addicts, drug users at one end of the spectrum – English teachers, language students, business operatives, CEO-types at the other (although you can certainly be both at once). In large cities such as Shanghai, these people, if they so wish, can contain themselves in a little cultural bubble of working in their western institution; drinking only at expat bars; eating mainly at western restaurants and live in those ridiculous new condos which fashion themselves on Mediterranean Villas. They need not engage with Chinese people outside of institutional and business frameworks. But many others – particularly the druggy types and the missionaries – mingle with the masses.

One instance of this is the archetypal western guy with “Yellow Fever”. Now, before you denounce these agents as exploitative monsters (which some of them undoubtedly are), remember this: the guys who get to sleep with the most girls in China are often the ones most fluent in Mandarin. They spend much of their available energy chatting with woman and writing to them by means of text-message. As they plunder their way through this infinite resource of women, they learn things about the regions of China, what people think, how the behave; where they eat; what stuff they want in life. So in this weird co-exploitation (yes, its true, many Chinese woman are equally preying on western men but for very different reasons) knowledge of the singularly cross-cultural kind emerges. It might not be morally ethical, but these sorts know way more than the visiting professor who speaks from a place of authority but who can only see what his visitors want him to see.

Then there are missionaries: an entire subterranean evangelical network ranging from mainstream to the lunatic fringe. As much as I hate to say it, missionaries have played quite a productive role in China (medicines, education etc). Today, like the Yellow Fever types, they embed themselves in a community and get to know the locals; they are all really good at Chinese (and increasingly, Minority languages) and they are primarily interested in one thing...and it ain’t sex. Well, perhaps I am a little naive thinking that missionaries are so one-dimensional as to only want to save your heathen soul from damnation. I have met some who are honestly men of the world: for instance a chain smoking Catholic brother in his 60’s from Baltimore who had lived with Taiwanese aboriginals for donkey’s years up in the high Central Mountain chain. But I have also bumped into nut-jobs who are trying to found the New Church of Christ on Earth in some far-out province in western China. At any rate, these people all get their hands grubby; they know stuff that the Wall Street Journal man will never know (and they also already know all the stuff the Wall Street Journal man knows)

So for all the CEO’s out there who want to get a foothold in the Chinese economy, don’t read books by Ivy League Professors; read books (all two of them) by sex-crazed expats secreting their trails of slime across the Middle Kingdom. Or, on the other hand, read books by missionaries (they are equally as weird but they write more books).

Alternatively, you can read Chinese accounts of Chinese life, which are increasingly available in translation. If you want a good understanding of just how truly fucking weird modern Chinese life is, check out The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu. The stuff in this book would give Nick Cave material for another five albums and two books. If white trash appeals to you, wait to till you check out yellow trash. Amazing! Well, thats not entirely fair. The book also includes academics, temple masters, village cadres and the like (but also stuff like prostitutes and people who are paid to physically walk dead bodies back to their home villages ... during the Cultural Revolution!).

For a good book on the grossness of Chinese modernity, check out I love Dollars by Zhu Wen.

A good Western writer on China is a guy called Peter Hessler. He is by no means a dodgy expat but nevertheless has an intimate understanding of China and is a wonderful writer. Two of his books are Rivertown and Oracle Bones.

Literature and Evil

2010-07-09T02:17:00.000-07:00

In the picture to your left is the tombstone of writer Charles Bukowski, a lay-about drunk who somehow managed to write some really good prose. I say “somehow” and yet his books are 100 percent reliable upon his debauched life-style. His characters (usually just him as him) are unflinchingly unapologetic wastrels, permanently sozzeled and always fucking the most dodgy of woman (who also, needless to say, have a taste for strong drink); when he does manage to find work, it is packing carcasses at the abattoir, delivering newspapers with hobos who like to suck each other off and the like. He usually quits his jobs on the first day. This was how he really lived his life (only becoming famous much later on). He was a man who had a strength which I lack. I have always looked up admirably to rotters singularly engaged in lives of vice. They were – and are – unwavering in their pursuits. I wavered; I am weak.

You will see on Mr. Bukowski’s tombstone the words “Don’t Try”. The first time I heard that he had this engraved I thought: this is a homage to slackers around the world! A kind of plea to drop out of mainstream society (but certainly not to “Tune In” as Timothy Leary would have it). In actual fact, the “Don’t Try” refers to his attitude to writing. The logic being that when you try to write, you write shit. I guess this is a bit like Alec Baldwin in “Team America”: “good acting”, in the film, is when you really try; you squint up your face and pronounce your words in a very severe and profound way. No doubt, we have all seen – and done - the written equivalent of this. Here is an academic instance of it:

As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (”Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

The guy who wrote this, Steven Levine writing on Manet (1996), should have known better. And yet, in 1996, I was probably trying to construct sentences of equal, if not surpassable, brilliance (my only consolation is that in 1996, I was probably twenty plus years younger than he was). For more laughs on bad academic writing, see here. At any rate, as I have mentioned before, my day job is to write in an academic context. Most days I don’t feel like writing. When I do begin to write, what usually happens is that a very cruel committee of people appear in my head. This is my audience. This is who I write for. I ignore Bukowski; I try; I create this audience and yet at the same time, I do not create them; they simply arrive, uninvited (although the paranoid side of me immediately thinks, again, of the “mystery man” in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, who replies to the question: “How the fuck did you get into my house?” with: “It is not my custom to go where I am uninvited”).

These people who I write for are sadistic perverts who wear the insignia of authority. Each sentence, each phrase, they scrutinize and snicker at; they bounce back with better counter, arguments; they think I am a racist, sexist, classist, imperialist phallus, oozing toxic linguistic cum all over the place. They berate, they taunt, they jeer. And every time I say “fuck you!” to the imaginary audience in my head, they return with greater vengeance. When I rebel against them, I am actually rebelling for them, and they laugh even harder. This committee, by the way, are actually real people I have met and known in my life (although behind them I think lurks the mythical figure of Satan himself). At any rate, I have found Freud useful in this regard. The super-ego is that side of you which is supposed to be ethical; the part of you which says “I should do this, I should do that”; “I ought to do this”..... but should/ought for who? The should/ought is actually an imagined “big other” in your head which is essentially a psychic mechanism which maintains a certain cohesiveness of the social order.

But...and here’s the thing... it is not actually very ethical. If you listen to the “I should”; or the “I ought to too much” it begins to become really cruel, asking you to perform tasks which you simply cannot attain (see this explanation of the phenomenon via a wonderful clip of this here throuhg a reading of Hitchcock’s Psycho by Zizek). I have seen this in the living flesh when teaching in Taiwan, with parents who will tell their kids stuff like: “I am very sorry Xiao Xiao, 96 percent on this test simply isn’t good enough!”

Its parents like these which enter my body every time I open Microsoft Word.

So the idea is how not to follow these ethical demands; how to ignore them; for in their purity, they are monstrous; like getting too close to the sun. A bit like that woman in the film by Takashi Miike, Audition: a Beautiful, pure, virginal Japanese woman is pursued by a love-struck man. As he gets closer to the object of his desire, you begin to realize all is not well: She keeps another lover in a hessian sack and feeds him on her own vomit; by the end of the film, she’s sticking needles in the star-struck lover's eyes and hacking off his legs with a saw.

She is who I write for. She is you.

Well, not exactly. The reason I started this blog was to break away from the committee. To write what I liked with no consequence. But I am finding that as more people read the blog (ok, still only a handful), a new committee arises, making new demands, new injunctions. Yes, that’s right, I am already breaking Bukowski’s cardinal rule – I am starting to “try”. And as I try, I lose faith; and as I lose faith; I try harder; and as I try harder, the demands become greater; and as the demands become greater, the crueller the audience gets; and the crueller the audeince gets, the more I want to impress them...and before you know it im in a hessian sack eating my own vomit.

Just say no...

Don’t try.

Grey is the New Black!

2010-07-08T04:19:00.000-07:00

For those of you who, like me, have no idea of how or why the global economy collapsed (other than the vague accusation of "neo-liberal funda-
mentalism"), watch this youtube clip. It is explained in a series of cartoon sketches. But before you think it will explain the implosion in the spirit of a neutral, child-like innocence, keep in mind that it is narrated by the Marxist geographer (yes, Marxists still exist!) David Harvey. But wait! Don't click away yet! He's a very smart, very sensible and very articulate chap. No use of dated, grey terminology such as "super-
structural contradictions of the means of production" ... well, ok, maybe just a little...

Besides, now that global captialism is starting to eat itself alive ("autophagy", I belive the term is called), grey is the new black!

Because I dont know any better, I now believe David Havey's version of events. If you do know better, please explain - preferably with pictures!

Oral Anarchy

2010-07-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went down the road to see the London Improvisers Orchestra do a jam. The orchestra had started playing by the time I arrived; there were about twenty plus orchestra members and about ten audience members. Just the kind of thing I love. For those looking for communist-like forms of social organization to solve the problems of the world, they should probably begin by making a study of this orchestra. At different times in the set, different members get up and begin conducting the orchestra themselves; while this is going on, various musicians are having musical dialogues with various others while they all loosely follow whatever lunatic had decided to run the asylum. There are some quite well known players (Steve Bersford, Lol Coxhill) and also a bunch of people I had never seen before, including a massive electric guitarist with a shaved head and two teeth. While it all sounds like nihilistic chaos - and to a certain degree, it is - the various conductors really push and pull the mass of noise in really interesting directions. Its the movement of it all which counts! One of the conductors was shouting poetry while he was conducting and then got the whole orchestra to sing along with him. If New Labour had stayed in power, there is a good chance that some middle-managment NHS type would have them all committed. But now there is no money left for that.

But the absolutely best thing about last night was this: half way through the first set a dishevelled, balding man sits down and starts swaying as if in a trance. Suddenly he starts howling in the most god-forsaken manner – like cats fucking on a hot tin roof. It was then that I realized that this man was not crazy; no, this man was Phil Minton! For those (surely, very few) of you who don’t know who Phil Minton is, take the voices of Tom Waits, Mike Patton, Ymantaka Eye and Barbara Hendricks, put them in an atomic blender in the seventh level of hell and you get a rough idea of what he sounds like. Alternatively, you can check out these clips of him (here and here). I have wanted to catch him for a while now. The man is a lunatic and looks like someone you might see on a sex offenders list. His singing is even better.

Tristan Tzara must be smiling in his grave.

Here is my shoddy home-made clip of the gig (Minton is on the far left). Catch this orchestra next time they play. Even if you don't know it, it will be the best four quid you ever spend.

The above clips will surely leave you begging for more. Thus, I suggest you check out some of Minton's work with John Butcher, such as the breezy "Mouthful of Ecstasy" which AMG describes as "drunken, dangerous music"; to be listend to soberly and cautiously. There is also "Apples of Gomorrah"; its mental.

Pedal Steel Chaos and the Good Father

2010-07-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you who associate the pedal steel guitar with Americans who live in trailer parks and have big hair, then I would count myself as one of you. That is, I was one of you until a few days ago. Earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of seeing Susan Alcorn, who plays “the instrument formerly known as Billy Ray Cyrus” in a really interesting and fresh way. She picks it and rubs and kicks it in ways that only a person in love with an object can. She was playing with John Butcher, John Edwards (who is, so far as I know, the most energetic bass player on earth), Karoline Kraable and Annie Lewandowski. Leawandoski, who sings (really beautifully) for the band Powerdove, played the inside of a piano with chopsticks stuck in its strings. The pedal steel gave the improv this amazingly rich and dark dimension: it made me believe that pedal steel should now be a staple for the improv scene (improv in trailer parks perhaps?) You can see a crappy two minute recording I made of it here.

Just in case you are wondering what kinds of lives weirdo improv people live off stage (as I do), you may be surprised that they are relatively normal. Edwards and Kraable, who are married, brought their two young kids to the gig. The children sat for a part of the gig with their fingers in their ears, obviously revolted by the racket being made (the children saw the truth! the emperor has no clothes!). Half way through the first session, the little boy walks straight up to John Edwards, who is fully immersed in his playing, and, tugging on his pants asks, “Daddy! Can we go home now!” Like a good father, at the end of the first set, he took the kids home; he no doubt put them to bed and sang a lullaby of the non-atonal variety.

Slavoj Zizek: Rasputin at the Gates

2010-07-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek speak at the London School of Economics (To get a sense of the man in action, see here). Many articles introduce Zizek with a pre-cursor along the lines “academic rock star” and the like. I have thought of Zizek myself as a rock star – but only for the following reason: like the vast majority of rock musicians, their early work tends to be really brilliant and later they become, at best, mediocre. Not only that, but as they pump out increasingly lukewarm work, they tend to increasingly say stuff like “this is the best album we have ever produced” and the like. I remember an interview with Depeche Mode, clearly after they had passed their sell-by date (i.e. the brilliant Alan Wilder had left the band), saying similar such things. At any rate, when Zizek released The Parallax View in 2006 (I think it was), he referred to it as his opus magnus. And yet, besides amazing chapter titles such as “Toward a theory of the Stalinist Musical”, there was a sense of not quite being quite as blown away as in his earlier works.

This is no fault of the book itself. If parallax had been Zizek’s first book, it probably would have made as many waves as The Sublime Object of Ideology (which was his first book). Because here’s the thing – and it’s no secret: Zizek tends to repeat his ideas – not just by using different examples arguing for the same general point – but also using the same examples often in different books. If you are sympathetic to a Lacanian approach to the world, this is not such a bad thing. Peter Hallward has described Zizek’s writing as follows: the author is trying to access The Real with a capital R– that is to say, the Lacanian object of desire which cannot be symbolized or represented but which structures our very being. One can only circulate around The Real of one’s desire but never access it. If you look at it from this point of view then it becomes excusable that Zizek repeats himself and his methods in each book. In fact, I think it is because each attempt to access The Real - each repetition - is different to the one before; it is the overlay of these repetitions which increasingly gives one an intuitive understanding of the absolutely impossibly contradictory nature of reality which he is trying to get at (Lacan always said that you must never give up on pursuing the impossible actualization of your desire!). This position is summed up nicely by the diabolical Fredric Jameson:

“Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code (not even Lacan’s) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in the local terms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.”

See Jamesons's full review here.

Reading Zizek in this manner, I think, is a more forgiving stance. And if you, like me, kind of enjoy this whirlpool method of writing, then I strongly recommend Parallax View, whose core theory is that there is essentially a fault-line running through all of being which we can only access from either side of the rift. Whatever side you are on, the other side always seems wrong. And yet it is by holding them both together, in their absolute contradictoriness, that one may access The Truth (yes, he, along with Badiou, are both fully into this dirty word). Zizek’s corpus is exactly like this. In fact, an author of one of the numerous introductions to his work, Sarah Kay, explains how painstaking it was to write a book on Zizek because the development of each idea is scattered through his various books like the bits in a torrent. So explaining each idea entailed picking out bits and pieces of thought from his frighteningly large publication list. It’s a bit like art historians interested in the work of Marcel Duchamp, tracing how he tries to symbolically depict the flux of four dimensional time-space (an impossibility) in the medium of two and three dimensional objects through the duration of his oeuvre.

One of the reasons that Zizek can write in this way is because he has the luxury of not being (until recently) part of any established academic institution in Western Europe or the States. For a long time his official title was “Researcher at the University of Ljubljana” or something like that. He was never there (he even claimed that he got the department secretary to forge his signature on a regular basis so that it appeared as if he were there) and spent much of his time doing visiting professorship stints in the States and Europe. This allowed him the freedom to say what the hell he liked without the threat of not getting tenure and all sorts of other coercive strategies which such institututions employ (largely, I think, like most modern apparatuses of power, in an unconscious manner) in order to make one tow the party line. In the various books of his and talks I have heard him give, he has said some of the following things: that when the revolution comes, one of his critics, the insufferable Simon Critchly, will be the first to be shot; that Wendy Brown’s political theory did not go far enough “because she is a woman”; that Judith Butler is “a stinking Lesbian”; that Heidegger was at his closest to the truth when he became a Nazi sympathizer; and (at last night’s show – and a show it was) that the chair of the event should be sent to a Gulag. I suspect that these kinds of outlandish jokes are one of the key ingredients in his popularity – they are, I think, at least part of what drew such a large crowd last night (in which there were two video-feed spill-over rooms and a packed lecture hall).

I myself am absolutely unapologetic about enjoying this aspect of his work. I love his jokes – he is, when on form, as good as the best of comedians (I think he is much funnier, for example, than Bill Hicks). And his filthy wit serves that time old social function of being a critic of contemporary social issues which is left mainly to the likes of newspaper cartoonists and the like. I don’t think it is the case that most academics feel that they can’t be funny in their professional capcity; no, I think it is more the case that most academics aren’t really funny. How many lame jokes have you had to sit through in conferences and talks and then pretend to laugh far more than is warranted just for the relief of easing the tension in the room. None of that in Zizek’s talks: he is, as David Graber once said in an attack on his work, “a gifted comedian”.

And the truth is that if he were a tenured professor at Harvard or some similar Ivy League type place, he would either have to zip up or get fired. I mean, look at Harvard's former head-honcho Larry Summers – what he said which led to his dismissal is like a Barbie Doll’s picnic in comparison to the stuff Zizek says and he got the sack (although being a grand architect of neo-liberalism, perhaps what he did say is far scarier, which brings to mind an even more terrifying thought...thank god Zizek is an academic and not in charge of the US treasury!). Zizek is popular (in part) for the same reason that Borat is popular. The celebration of choice, the right to happiness, universal democracy, the rapture of cultural difference and all sorts of other clap trap are insidious and repressive forms of power. And, like the laws of gravity, where there is repression, an amazing space for dark and brilliant humour almost always opens up (that is also, by the way, why English humour is really funny and it is also the reason why official comedy in repressive regimes is profoundly unfunny). The fact that the jokes that Zizek makes are funny at all, points exactly to where the mechanisms of power lie.

The first time I read Zizek was ten years ago when I was doing a masters degree in english lit. It was a depressing time to be in academia because it was at the height of postmodern stagnation. You had to be radical; you had to quote Derrida, you had to expose the hidden repressive mechanisms of the text: it was a tyranny of differance. It was very easy to see what was going on but, like a very (and I mean VERY) mild version of the Cultural Revolution, criticizing this time-honoured hypocrisy, in which a radical and liberating ways of thinking are quickly re-absorbed back into the institutional power formations they are meant to undermine, could get you into trouble (bad grades and so on). And so reading Zizek for the first time was like a gift from god. His ruthless exposure of this nonsense (which, as I have stated, could only have arisen from outside of mainstream academia) was like a light at the end of a very dark tunnel for me. Not only that, his amazing gift for explaining difficult philosophical concepts in amazingly simple ways just blew me away (on this point, Zizek remains un-flakey largely because he knows his philosophical texts inside out. I have seen a pedantic Heideggerian interrupt one of his talks to challenge some or other nuance of a particular point: Zizek snapped back with “No, No, I have done my homework on this point!” and proceeded to go into footnotes, page numbers and editions of whatever text of the “late Heidigger” which was under discussion). Keep in mind that Zizek's clarity was introduced to me at a time (a time which I fear still persists) in which it was seen as virtuous to write in convoluted and obscure ways. Zizek’s Enlightenment-cut-through-the-shit style of writing gave me, at that time, the same feeling as when I was 17 and popped – to this day – the largest zit ever on my fore-head; it sprayed the mirror with pus and blood and blocked out my reflection in the mirror. Sublime!

Anyway, so yes. To bring me back to the beginning. In Zizek’s recent works I have found nothing like that zit. I know his game now, I know his strategies, I am more familiar (thanks to him) with the philosophers he likes (Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Kant and more Hegel). His last big book, In Defence of Lost Causes was mediocre. The best idea he has had in the last few years is that Capitalism now functions much better without democracy and which can be seen in countries like China today. I like this idea. But it is more just like another wedge which can be added to the larger pie. Also, he seems like more of a charlatan these days, as can be seen in this very so-so interview for the BBC “grill you alive” talk-show, Hardtalk ; Some of his ideas are just plain dumb and you get the feeling that as he becomes more famous, he increasingly risks the Banksy effect – becoming a commodity spectacle. Not only that, you often get the feeling that he actually loves the attention and success (in a bad, sleazy, egotistical way).

So it came as a great surprise last night, when he did an amazing performance (it is a performance that we all want to see). He was funny, outrageous and tangential in a way which made the talk even more brilliant (and the very tangents which a Hardtalk-style interview would not permit). In true Zizek style, i.e. “and ... you know, another thing is...”, he promised to conclude his talk about eight times and just kept on talking. As for the content of his work, it was the usual shattered mirror of ideas which somehow all link up at an unconscious level (I said to my friend, as we were leaving the talk, that it was a bit like watching a good movie while stoned: you know it was a really good but you can’t really remember what happened or what the hell it was about).

Finally, the basic idea of his talk was this: the environmental problems which we witness today cannot be solved by using capitalism as a tool of thought. The idea of commoditizing nature (i.e like carbon trading, selling water and such things) will not work because the logic of capitalism is fundamentally infinite accumulation in a finite space – the very thing which is messing up the environment more and more. In this sense, we need to think of new ideas, new ways of social organization outside of the logic of capital. He used the example of the recent announcement of the closure of Middlesex University philosophy department as an increasingly worrying instance of how new and alternative thoughts are being cut out of the picture. He ended with a plea for more radical thinking and a renewed place for the role of the university amidst the crisis. He called for new forms of community action, a kind of “terror” (in which people will be forced not pollute) and all sorts of other very tentative but interesting ways of getting ourselves out of this problem. As usual, Zizek achieved in me what all good lectures should do but which so very few do: the idea that being in academia is not only useful but now, increasingly, crucial to the survival of the planet. How very flattering! More please!

Go here to listen to a podcast of the talk.

The Butcher of Dalston

2010-06-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

I have recently started becoming a fan of improvised music. I particularly like the free jazz variety and some of the electronic stuff too. My turn toward this kind of music (if you can actually call it music) stemmed from something akin to the beginnings of a mid-life crisis. From the previous post, you can tell that as an adolescent, I was obsessed with Death Metal and grindcore and the like. This gave way in the early 1990s to a love of alternative music with all its suspended chords and flanger effects and people singing as if there noses were blocked. This music touched a sublime and beautiful pain within me – even though I knew on another level this sort of behaviour was completely cringe-worthy. But at that time, the sublime trumped the ridiculous. In my mid-20’s I started getting back into death metal – at first, I pretended that I was only listening to it again to be ironic – a kind of wry distance between me, the wizened 27 year old, and the in-your-face narratives and imagery of disembowelling, necrophilia and other extreme forms of male heroics. But that did not last. You know the scenario where two mates start play-fighting and then it quickly spills over into a real fight? Well, that’s what happened with me and death metal. Before I knew it, I was listening to metal 24/7. I could spout off lyrics off the latest Abscess album (“raping the multiverse” is my fav.) and was tracking down extremely rare bootlegs from poodle-headed, Tampa techno-death outfit, Nocturnus. I also started going to concerts. However, at these concerts, I found that I was not able to perform the role of a metalhead anymore. I could not wear the black T-shirts with unreadable logos, I couldn’t bring myself to do the devil horn signs with my fingers. When the lead singers would tell the crowd that we were all here tonight doing Satan’s work, I immediately imagined someone like my boss or supervisor walking through the door as I pledged my allegiance to the forces of darkness. This was not good. All I wanted to do was to get as close to the lead guitarist as possible and watch him play complicated riffs. If I had the money, I would pay the band to play in my living room and no one else would be allowed to watch.

Another frightening thing, which happened not only at these gigs but in many other areas of my life, was that everyone else seemed increasingly – and worryingly – younger than me (recently I was shocked to see a very interesting book written by someone born a year younger than me: “Get used to it!”, a friend said in response, “its going to happen a lot from now on!”). The people at the metal gigs who were my own age were even more distressing; dressed up looking like Tom Warrior (see below), they seemed really fucking lame: I imagined that many of them still lived at home, their record and comic collections only surpassed by their porn collections.

Along with the metal, I persisted, until recently, listening to more mainstream music. But what I have found is that I am in the position of listening to bands which I have liked since I was 16 and which are still going. Of course, very few bands manage to produce good stuff once they give up the sovereign life of drink, drugs and sex. And so the relationship I have with bands like Depeche Mode; Pixies derivatives (Frank Black, Kim Deel); Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins and so on is like a relationship between a couple whose marriage is fucked but continue to “try and make it work”. In desperation, I have tried to listen to some of the new hip bands (all of whom are younger than me). The vast majority of them – the Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party; Babyshambles - suck. They dress though they are some sort of Bladerunner replicants of the early 80s and sound like Robert Smith. I am now in the frightening position of having lived through both an authentic cultural movement (yes, authentic, even though it was the 80s) and its revival. In my late teenage years and early twenties, along with the grunge thing, came a weird 60s and 70’s revival embodied in bands like Jamiroquai and Oasis. Although I had never experienced these earlier periods, I confidently imagined exactly what they were like at the time. But actually, I was only imagining them through popular culture and photos of my parents during that period. But now that stove-pipe jeans, quiffs and moustaches are back, and that my references to them are not just popular culture and photographs but actually the phenomenological memory of experience, its a whole different ball-game. Because I have lived though this second revolution of this eternal return, I do not find these things stylishly ironic; rather, they make me reflect on my own mortality. I feel like telling “the kids” on the street: “this shit has all been done before” but this just reminds me of being blind drunk at age 16 at a bar while an even drunker 40 year-old with a mullet, handle bar moustache and a leather jacket told me that Metallica were a bunch of pussies: "Black Sabbath", he slurred, "had done it all before". Could I be becoming this man?

To end this tangent, I propose a theory: as the emphasis on the infinite creativity of capitalism intensifies, the space which the system occupies (both mentally and physically) becomes smaller and smaller. We have to go back to the past more and more and the space between these revolutions becomes smaller and smaller. No more pomp of European Neo-Classicism, a mere few thousand years after its first incarnation in Greece. No. Now it is the 70s in the 90s and the 80s in the year 2000. The past is catching up on us like a motherfucker. Soon it will be like a line on a graph which tends toward zero but never quite reaches zero. Zeno’s paradox; metastasis. Are we living in a world where our only hope is a magazine like Chap in which radical is defined by borrowing from styles 100 years ago (now, if it were a hundred years ago in Somalia, that would be interesting ... but Victorian England? – how very conservative).

Anyway, my greater point is that in the last few years I have been desperately trying to find new and interesting music. I am tiered of rock; how the fuck can supposedly new, innovative bands still have two guitars, a bass and a vocalist and still sing songs with the structure of intro; verse; chorus; verse; chorus; interlude; chorus; fade out. Then suddenly, perhaps out of sheer necessity, something remarkable happened to me. Earlier this year, I remembered many years ago watching David Cronenberg’s film version of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch and really being intrigued by the absolutely bonkers sounding jazz soundtrack which played over large parts of the film. Through a Google search, I found out that this was Ornette Coleman. I then begun to glean the names of various like-minded musicians and began to download their music. A few days later, I came across a saxophonist by the name of Peter Brotzmann. On that same day, while checking Time Out magazine for what was on in London that week, I saw, to my amazement, that Brotzmann was playing that night at Cafe Oto, not too far from where I live. The gods had wished it thus. That night I saw his trio play and I got the same feeling as I did the first time I heard Napalm Death’s Scum or Death’s Scream Bloody Gore. That feeling of holyfuckingshit!!! Here was a music which was as intense as grindcore or death metal but without, at least to my naive mind, any of the bullshit ideology that came with metal and rock. Everyone there looked pleasantly dull, with people dressed as though they were middle aged, middle management types working in prefab offices on a building site (the cynical side of me says that the reason I liked it so much was that finally I was one of the younger members of the audience). But in contrast to this very middle aged, largely male and quite white audience (with a few slightly odd Japanese to boot), the music was completely insane. I think the contrast between the bland-looking crowd (not to mention the players) and the sheer ferocity, the diabolical madness of the music, opened a rift in my very being which I am, to this day, proudly and slavishly pursuing. I keep on getting spilt further into two....its great! Like following a deep Canyon and not knowing what is around the next bend.

Needless to say, I went back two nights later to catch Brotzmann play at Oto again and now I am fully into this music in a way I have not been into music since I was a kid.

So, finally, the photographs which you see posted above are of a gig I went to at the Vortex club in Dalston this Sunday. The main man, saxophonist John Butcher, does not really do “ferocious”. In fact, he has spent the last twenty odd years learning to clinically make sounds come out of the instrument which would classically be considered “mistakes”. Blurts and beeps and ripples and other sounds which have no word-equivalents. One of the things I love most about watching him is his face when he plays. He is an understated, middle age Brit with a PhD in particle physics. He even wrote a book on quarks. He then chucked it all up in order to dedicate his life to making sounds on a piece of metal no one had ever heard before. When this rather demure man produces these ungodly sounds, his face makes wonderful corresponding expressions, including the look of someone about to vomit, someone about to sexually climax, someone busy drowning and so on. This gives a completely new spin to watching live music. It is not only the sounds which produce affect in you – its the way they correspond with the physical appearance of the author. Another thing I am finding really interesting about this kind of music is its flagrant disregard for melody. I now realize that by always demanding melody in my music I had become a slave to it. I, now enlightened (and no less the arrogant for it!), see that melody is only one (albeit very beautiful and effective) way of engaging with the aesthetics of sound. This kind of music helps me see that. The other thing is, that all this music is made up on the spot. Everyone is kind of just going along with it. For all those tossers out there who hear this stuff and say – “oh I could do that” or “my two year old son could do that” - go fuck yourselves. You are cretins and you probably have very crap sex lives. The reason that I can so boldly say this is because I have seen certain improv sessions that don’t really work and ones that work magnificently. Hence, I deduce that if it were all the same crap, I would not be able to make such distinctions. There is an amazing intuition that is at work in a good improv session. Wanky magazines like The Wire would say something like “the musicians are having a conversation” – but that is precisely it. When you are having a conversation with someone (imagine, say, a work colleague who you are attracted to), there are all sorts of little, semi-conscious micro processes going on which each party will pick up on and respond to in different ways (the look of shock, a light trembling in the voice, a fast heart-beat, saying witty or flattering things and so on). Well, a good improv session is a bit like watching a successful pick-up (I am already picturing jazz snobs rolling their eyes ).

And speaking of conversations, after the gig, I bought my first improv Jazz CD (The John Butcher Band’s “Somethingtobesaid”, reviewed by the aforementioned Wire magazine here and pictured below). Not knowing which CD to buy, and having Mr. Butcher standing right next to me at the bar (no back-stage passes, no groupies), I presented him with two of his CDs and asked him to suggest which disc, for a newcomer to his work, he might suggest. He said the one in my right hand was more musical, the one in my left hand more “firey”. My partner immediately suggested I go with the left. And so the firey left it was.

My home-made clip of the gig can be seen here

And a brief interview with Butcher can be seen on this trailer for the improv. doccie Amplified Gesture

On the Fascist Spaces of Siberian Grind Capitalism

2010-06-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a gallery opening in East London. The show, which was titled “Narcissus Trance”, was supposed to be based around an idea forwarded by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It goes something like this: The “present” (that being the current social epoch one lives in) so permeates every nook and cranny of everyday life that it is essentially invisible. It takes no less than the artiste, who is able to “sniff out” (McLuhan’s words) what is really going on in the present. Only the artist has her fingers on the throbbing pulse of the cultural unconscious. To be in touch with the present then, is to be in touch with the future – because we (sheep) are mostly living in the past. Something along these lines. This of course is great for those who are into high-modernist “artist as hero” avant-gardism while simultaneously wanting to be postmodern, decentred subjectivities who’s being is a play of disjointed surfaces flickering over a void (she says while trying not to puke on the keyboard). You can have your cake, and eat it too. And now that we are in the realms of high-wankery, let me play devil’s advocate here and draw on Jean Baudrillard, who famously said that the only art which exists today is art which tricks people into believing that art still exists. While still portraying itself to be on the event-horizon of a world still un-actualized, art is now essentially the circulation of commodity objects whose value is largely determined by their spectacle value. All of which brings me to something which was going round in my mind last night as I walked through the gallery: who the fuck would buy any of the art on display?

This is not to say that it was all bad – some of it was vaguely interesting. I was not disappointed by this. Whenever I go to galleries (which is not very often these days) “vaguely interesting” is often the best one can hope for. It was more the fact that most of it was either video art or large installations that, if one were to purchase, and that one were living in a flat in London the size of mine, would take up about 50 percent of the living space. And this brings me to my next, crucial point: most of the people at the opening were younger (and, dare I say, even hipper) than me; most looked like they couldn’t afford to rent a flat in London half the size of mine (which would mean that the instillation would take up your entire flat – now that’s fucking art!). They also, much to my delight, probably earned less money than me. This kind of gallery space is part of a new kind of global space which at once locates itself at both the fringe and the centre of every metropole on earth. By this I mean that it was not a moneyed gallery. It was run by young people in a very average working class neighbourhood (no New Bond street here) in what appeared to be an old factory (or some other business) premises. If you have ever been to Cape Town, and also happen to have done the gallery circuit there (which must be, like, millions of you), you will have seen very similar galleries, with similarly dressed people, pedalling similar looking art. You will also find these spaces in Santiago, Beijing, Taipei, Sydney and, I might be so bold to say, thanks to an oil boom, Luanda and Lagos. The sameness of these spaces is in part the overwhelming feeling that they are severely underfunded, that their existence is tenuous, and they will probably be lucky if they sell more than one of the pieces. And what really contributes to this precarious form of existence is the fact that most of these spaces portend to the aspiring classes. The white walls, the drinks receptions, those people you always see with pretentious black-rimmed glasses are at odds with the fact that you haven’t heard of any of the artists, that your gallery is in a shit part of town with cheap rent, that no one there looks like they could afford (or house) any of the art on offer.

And yet here is the light at the end of the tunnel. I really like the idea of art that doesn’t sell (like ... ummm ... Van Gogh’s back in the day) and, call me a sentimental drip, but I also like the idea that there is still a space in which new and interesting aesthetics and forms can emerge. In this sense, I am not in total agreement with Badurillard, nor less with his silent partner, that other Canadian, Avril Lavigne, immortalized through the lyrics of her seminal 2002 hit Complicated: “Chill out! It’s all been done before!” I mean, look at the CERN particle collider producing new form of matter ex nihilo (well, not exactly), or the SARS virus, or the fact that the shit that I had this morning is ontologically separate from the shit I had yesterday morning (although the jury is still out on this one). The real question is, how much of this stuff can be appropriated by the axiomatics of Capital with a big C – Piero Manzoni’s canned shit anyone? Banksy’s being snapped up by stockbrokers? Iggy Pop as insurance salesman? Jesus, maybe Avril’s right afterall! So anyway, yes, new forms and aesthetics without all the bullshit. Well, one thing that helps me to absorb the novelty of the world is by allowing aesthetics not to be determined necessarily by human beings. This, of course is itself not a new idea – but put into practice, it is always infinitely new. Once, for example, I was in the Altai Mountains which straddle the border of China, Mongolia Russia and my beloved Kazakhstan. I saw some rocks which had been split into a wonderful series by expansion and contraction over gazillionos of years. The rocks had lots of lovely coloured moss on them. This creation was right below some petroglyphs of Marco Polo sheep carved into a rock about 1000 years before by hunter-gatherers who lived on the edge of the steppe (see first two photos). The engravings looked positively primitive compared to the elegance of that moss and glacial action upon the rock. Voila! Art with no money, no gallery, no black-rimmed glasses and no artist – pure fucking process – just like the paintings of Mr. Bacon, although he would need a few more million years to get his technique as good as those boulders at the edge of the Siberia taiga.

Anyway, this brings me, lastly, to the event which brought me as close to those rocks as I could possibly get last night. This was a sound performance at the gallery by Mick Harris who, as you all know, was the insanely brilliant drummer of the early Napalm Death as well as the John Zorn, Mike Patton, Bill Laswell trio called "Painkiller", whose music reached a much larger audience than it ought to when Michael Heneke used it at the beginning of his wonderful family comedy, "Funny Games" Napalm Death also got some good exposure through John Peel, who gave them air-play at the BBC in the 1980s. Napalm Death was filled with interesting people who, seeing that the grindcore formulae of speed and grunts couldn’t really go any further than it already had, left and went on to do other interesting things. The first time I saw Mick Harris drum was when I was a 13 year old living, at the time, in a shit-hole in South Africa called Welkom. At the time, Welkom was the stronghold of an AWB-led right wing, neo Nazi faction who thought that the Apartheid government was far too left-leaning (The AWB, by the way, was led by Eugene Terreblanche, who I once had the honour of encountering one sunny afternoon long before he was found stripped and macheted by his own black farm labourers in an episode so reminiscent of the Master/Slave paradigm that it would make you want to believe that Hegelian dialects are actually true!) Anyway, a friend of a friend of a friend managed to record some MTV clip of Naplam Death and bring back the video-tape to Welkom . It included this live clip of the song “Scum” (Must watch past one minute to see the drumming get really fast). Watching this was like an event with a capital “E” and probably played no small part in my gradual descent into madness which reached the peak of its ripeness a good ten years later. In fact, a few years after that life-changing experience (thanks to no less than VHS ), the unthinkable happened: Napalm Death came to South Africa (alas! Mick had left the band the year before!) and we got to hang out with band members. On that evening way back then, when rapture could be attained without synthetic supplements, the lead singer, Barney Greenway, sung a cover song of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”,which he thoughtfully dedicated to none other than Eugene Terreblanche. One of a group of biker guys dressed in leather (the ones that consider being into Heavy Metal is listening to “Def Leppard”) wearing the AWB swastika on his jacket, got on stage and punched Barney in the face, bloodying his nose. Jesus Christ! What a night! Pure Bliss! (you can see Barney talking about his SA experience here)

At any rate, Mick has given up drums and now makes a whole bunch of different ambient and electronic dub and noise stuff. His two most famous projects are Scorn and Lull and you can check out this song here, which you should play when going to sleep after murdering someone. This reminds me of a joke my mate Neil told me a few days ago. A guy and girl walk into a forest. The girl says – “Jeez! It’s pretty creepy in here!.” The guy replies, “You think you’re scared? I have to walk out of here alone!”. Ha! Anyway, in finishing, the Mick Harris concert was a disaster because three of four of the speakers the venue provided for the performance blew...thats how fucking rock n’ roll he is! He was understandably pissed. Nevertheless, the bits which I did hear (which he performed with techno-man Karl O’ Connor who gave me and my partner a beer on the house for enduring the monumental cock up) sounded really awesome and began to give me that feeling of being 16 at a Naplam Death concert or at talking to rocks in Siberia.

"There are too many fucking videotapes to choose from!"

2010-06-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I went to the launch of a book called "Choice" by Renate Salecl. It involved her and a few of her mates, most of whom are also high-powered academics, talking about the tyranny of choice in contemporary “consumer society” (as we say). First, a few words about Salecl. I think it is rather tragic that she has the dubious honour of being the ex-wife of the famous Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. I say dubious not because, like many serious, high-brow academic twats, I think he is a charlatan. No, it is a far more prosaic reason than that, which I will describe via the following analogy: For all the woman out there, do you ever recall an instance when you were dating a guy and his friends referred to you as “such-and such’s” girlfriend? (i.e. “This is Jenny, she is Brad’s girlfriend”, or, even better: skip the “this is Jenny” part, leaving you with: “this is Brad’s gal”). In this case (or in the case of Renate, as it happens to be), we understand the woman a bit like how certain philosophically-bent theologians understand god – a very unpretentious term which you can drop at the next dinner party called via negative. The idea is basically that god is so fucking awesome and great that you can only understand him through what he is not. Astrophysicists similarly claim that you can only analyze a black hole via the all the debris circling around it. You cannot see the thing itself cause its black and the space around it is black. So, anyway, yes, Renate as divine black hole (sounds like some orientalist-style porno shot in the Congo). I am not quite sure where this is going. At any rate, when she speaks of things like the fact that no one she knew (including her parents) actually believed in Communism during the Yugoslav regime, you would be forgiven for thinking, Hey! That’s Slavoj’s idea! But actually, when you read the earlier pieces they co-wrote together, you get the sense that she is a formidable and original thinker and must have been meditating on a lot of this stuff all by her pretty self. One of the funniest things she said was that no one actually read Marx in Yugoslavia; she only realized he was brilliant when she was introduced to his works in a philosophy class. Reading him through in this non-State context, she suddenly realized: “Holy Shit, this guy’s fucking brilliant!” (although she didn’t put it quite like that).

Ms. Salecl’s mates are also a very bright bunch (Darian Leader: the first semi sane and lucid Lacanian I have ever come across; Henrietta Moore, an anthropologist who is both terrifyingly brilliant and, well, just plain terrifying; Susie Orbach who is a practicing psychotherapist on -time analyst of Princess Di and Marinos Diamantides who is a legal scholar who is into Immanuel Levinas). This made for something incredibly rare: a two hour academic discussion that was actually really interesting from beginning to end. A major idea bouncing around (and one that is, I think, a major theme in the book, which I have yet to read) is that contemporary capitalism embodies a tyranny of choice. Choice has become a “right”, which is associated with freedom, liberation and all sorts of other euphoric abstractions. The basic argument is that this choice-epidemic of contemporary society is actually a shit deal. It doesn’t make you happy (which is, of course, the basic assumption of those in favour of choice). Two very good examples of this were given: firstly, Leader told a story of a bunch of restaurants lining the road where he used to work in West London. Of all the eateries, only one was packed every day with a line stretching down the road; and of all the restaurants on the street, it was the only one where there was no menu: you were simply given whatever they were cooking that day. The idea behind this is that, people actually don’t want that much choice (unless, of course, the food at that restaurant just happened to be really fucking amazing). Orbach gave another example of a groups of patients she sees – all woman, mainly American, all young, all pretty, all went to the right schools, all doing the best jobs – who are all miserable as sin. All are on anti-depressants and all say that they don’t notice much difference on them. Again, this idea that making the “right choices” in life can lead to misery.

A very Lacanian idea which permeated the talk was this idea that people, in some sense, want to be told what to do, or at least want less choice. I once remember someone telling me that during the rebellions and riots of May 68 in Paris, Lacan said something along the lines of “Don’t these idiots realize? They just want an even crueler Master to replace the one they are trying to overthrow”. In consumer society, it follows on that now that we have destroyed god and become god ourselves (through our right to live out any sexual orientation we please, believe what we please, modify our bodies as we please, consume what we please and so forth), all we land up doing is somehow creating an even more critical inner god (like the really cruel, nasty motherfucker of the Old Testament, rather than that pussy son of his). This manifests itself in the psychotic self-help personality who is always striving to be, in the words of Radiohead, “fitter, healthier, more productive, not drinking too much, regular exercise” and... suddenly ...voila!... you have the perfect American princess on anti-depressants! I guess an important issue is that once you are indoctrinated into this bullshit (of which I count myself as an initiate), you actually don’t have that much choice at all because you will naturally choose the best house you can afford, the best college you can manage to get into, the best car to drive and so on. The fact that you don’t have the best car and the best house or go to the best college is simply a form of moral turpitude: you did not work hard enough, you did not try hard enough and thus the super-ego – that very, very, very cruel side of the human psyche, kicks in with Biblical vengeance (see, the Bible is still useful, even when god is dead). Through a multiplicity of choice, choice disappears.

Henrietta Moore did what a good anthropologist should, and proceeded to fuck up our pre-conceived notions of consumer society by showing how, in different parts of the world, people use and view something like McDonalds in a number of different ways. They are seen – in places as disparate as Beijing and Johannesburg - as places of safety, places with a constant flow of electricity and, blessing of all blessings, places in possession of clean toilets (although on this point I think Henrietta and I must have visited different McDonalds while in Beijing). In this sense, it is not simply global Capitalism homogenising the globe – rather, deciding what kind of burger you want is merely a side show to the real object of desire: taking a shit in a bathrooms so clean you can see your reflection in the tiles (which, for those who have visited a public toilet in China, will realize the thoroughly sublime nature of what I am describing). This touches on a big problem I have with many contemporary philosophers, cultural theorists and the like: a significant number of them are, whether they like it or not, a bunch of elites who often don’t know shit about other cultures, or at least “non-western” cultures. And the increasingly non-western academic elites who are joining the ranks largely come from privileged backgrounds and don’t know shit about the masses in their own part of the world. I don’t like to sound like a bleeding-hearted liberal here – its just that these non-elites, or non-westerners, or whatever you want to call them, make up something like 80 percent of the world’s population. These are the other. We need to know stuff they think and do. This involves taking a stroll outside of the gated community, whether its in Beijing or Johannesburg. Moore, who has worked in Africa for donkey’s years, knows better and we need more thinkers like her in the game.

Finally, I thought that the talk should have veered more into the realm of whether animals make choices and other weird stuff like, , when an atom moves this way instead of that, does it make a “choice” as such (or an “occasion” as Alfred North Whitehead might have put it)? Isn’t choice merely a higher level understanding of a fundamental multiplicity which is going on at every level of reality all the time? Shit, this getting deep and I am beginning to feel lazy, so I will end with the following quote, taken from my favourite cultural icon, Patrick Bateman (who I touched on yesterday): “There are too many fucking videotapes to choose from!”

Where David Lynch Stays When in London

2010-06-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

From the above photos you may think that I am a highly committed voyeur who hung around apartment blocks for ages until I got snapshots which look like something out of “Lost Highway”. Actually, I am a point-and-shoot photographer – or what some have termed a “crap” photographer. The reason I got such tasteful snaps of woman leaning against windows in existential poses amidst surreal lighting is because someone else had already done all the work. Yes, this is a theatre production set up in a triangle of industrial wasteland behind King’s Cross Station in London. The company (Fuel Productions) quickly built a make-shift, no-tell motel in a shitty piece of real-estate at the bottom of which were a bunch of chairs where we, the audience, gazed up through the motel windows into the goings-on of the various desperate and deranged folk living in the hotel. We were probably the most comfortably positioned voyeurs in the history of peeking (which, for a hardened voyeur, is no fun at all). Nevertheless, I am not a hardened voyeur and so it was really a lot of fun. There was no story as such – just various fragmented narratives partially revealing themselves through the different windows of the motel and spilling out into each other in the passage and stairways. The really interesting thing about this format is that it allows you to watch six different stories going on at once. You often are not sure which window to focus on as, for most of the show, the inhabitants of each hotel room are doing different things at the same time (dancing, sitting, fucking, fighting, drinking, playing guitar, eating and so on). However, every now and then they all break out in synchronized dance which is really surreal.

How, the eager reader must now be asking themselves, did the audience who are sitting below the building, hear what they were talking about? Firstly, there was hardly any talking. But secondly, and much more importantly, each member of the audience was given top-quality earphones (the kind, I imagine Flood uses when producing U2 albums) through which you could hear all sorts of weird sounds (phones ringing, screams, industrial drones, rockabilly guitar, the chattering of people, the flowing of water and so on) which drew your attention to particular goings on in a particular room. This is a brilliant idea: using sound to direct your attention toward one narrative (room) and making you partially ignore the other stuff going on in different rooms. This was sometimes aided by lighting, which would highlight one room over the others. It was things like these, which gave the production a distinctly cinematic feel. Very cool and much under-utilized medium for theatre (she says as if some fucking expert on the subject).

If there was any criticism of the piece, it was that it was perhaps a bit too Lynchian. As a long time fan of David Lynch, who has even read some poncy books on the recurring symbolism of his work (see, dear scholarly ones, Michel Chion’s rapturous text on the issue), I picked up a whole bunch of things which you can see in his films: the flowing curtain coming out the door; the flanger/reverb guitar pieces; the distorted voice of lounge-lizard cowboy singing (which, for those of you interested, you can see Mr. Lynch himself singing in precisely this vein here, the ridiculously ominous telephone ringing, the subterranean grumblings of the unconscious which start and stop according to the opening and closing of doors, and so on. Lynch uses very interesting ways of fucking with your mind by collapsing time and space using very simple mediums. Remember the infamous cell-phone scene in Lost Highway? Anyway, the producers do their own, very original version of this (in which I am sure they did not copy from Lynch) in which the maid of the motel opens a door in one part of the building and as she walks through the door suddenly appears in another part of the building, This continues for some time and eventually she falls through the floor at the bottom of the building only to simultaneously be falling through the ceiling at the top of the building (obviously they had like 10 people dressed like the same maid doing this in a brilliantly synchronized performance). Still, there were lots of things which were not very Lynch, including a considerable bit of ballet dancing. Perhaps I have Lynchian paranoia and see his influences permeating every nook and cranny of daily life?

Finally, a word on the venue. This waste-land at King’s Cross, which looks like the site of a Walter Benjamin-style exploration of a kind of Ur- Dickensianism (god, that sounds pretentious), is about to be transformed into a fabulously smooth space of global capitalism ( the kind of space which, of course, we don’t have enough of). Because King’s Cross is often seen as the asshole of London (a place where for those who prefer their crack and heroin not one and then the other, but rather at the same time), this substantial chunk of zone-one behind the train station has been derelict for years. However, Kings Cross isn’t actually like that anymore – people just think it is. They cleaned it up years ago and now “derelict” is quickly becoming, a-la Zoolander, ”Derelicte”. Nathan Barley style ad agencies have sprung up in former Satanic Mills on York Way and the wasteland by the train station is being converted into a bastion of neo-liberal real estate. On the bright side, I live near here and am hoping that it will raise the prices of real-estate in my neighbourhood (we are all implicated in the system of Late-Capitalism, she muses). What is really interesting though, is that it is precisely as the speculators come in and make plans to build lots of shit made of glass and steel (and interestingly now in London, wood) that people start to reify the industrial ruins of the place. It is almost as if they only acquire value once they are about to be erased. Suddenly the traces of Victorian England acquire new value. Or perhaps I am just confusing this with a more general global style which is increasingly obsessed with the aestheticization of industrial decay (which, in our current world, means converting it into profit either through the art gallery or the dark arts of restoration). Anyway, during the show I watched, I thought “God! This is a marvellous venue, why the hell haven’t they been using this for years! What a shame that soon it will be some sterile square sponsored by Disney Corporation or whatever.” And thus, I think like so many others do, including this artist, who has been commissioned to produce instillation art at the site before it is either torn down or tastefully converted for use by the Patrick Bateman’s of the world. Right, back to my day job.

My Laundry...For You

2010-06-22T04:54:00.000-07:00

My job at the moment entails shit loads of writing. In my focused efforts to avoid doing this job, I have decided to write this blog. I presume this too will also involve shit loads of writing. This is already beginning to sound like one of those plots (I am thinking here of the novel/film “The Beach”) where the protagonist flees the immorality of society, only to find that he is that very definition of immorality himslef. I suspect after a few more posts I will relapse into trying to construct erudite but heroic sentences peppered with colons and semi-colons. But still, we need to have hope in this world. And so it is my wish that this blog will involve slightly less wankery than the writing in my day-job. No no meticulous references, no radical and breath-taking insights, no cruel and unforgiving imaginary audience for which I am writing. I have no idea what I will be speaking about but it will surely have to serve one primary purpose: a laxative. Other people’s shit can have an amazing lure in certain contexts (particularly in cultures prone to meticulous excellence - Germany and Japan, I am told); Just think of the serotonin high when sniffing Blue Cheese or when bad smells suddenly become good smells when sexually aroused. You know what I am talking about! Here are my crud-crusted undies. I surrender them to you, The People! Enjoy.