Rubbish?
The director of The Piano, Meg Ryan, and Portishead soundtracking the trailer. What more could they do to make sure everyone thinks In the cut is going to be rubbish?
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Shout outs
Particular things of interest to particular people:
- Tom
- Why do
bastards always steal our ideas? Not content with stealing one
idea, they’ve stolen two and stuck them together (see the very
last paragraph for what I mean). - Jack
- An interesting
on the World Service about immigrants and asylum seekers on a street
just round the corner from your house. Sample quote: “The
first day I arrived, I opened the door and I thought, oh no, I
haven’t left Africa. And then I realised, I was in
Tottenham.” - Geo
- More from the World Service.
series about the relationship between the US and Latin America,
from a surprisingly left-wing perspective. The previous edition, about
Coca growers in Bolivia, was particularly good, but unfortunately
doesn’t seem to be available online any more.
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Class traitor
Today I sat in King’s, wearing a suit, reading the
Daily Telegraph, before wandering off to the Senior
Common Room for a cup of tea with one of the evil Lay Dean’s
supporters on the evil college council (the, to be fair, extremely
non-evil Halvard Lillehammer).
how the mighty are fallen.
However, my reading of the Torygraph did let me find this
genius. And it was just a page away from an earnest article by
Felix Bunton (or is it Buxton?) of Basement Jaxx on the importance of
dance music. So the Telegraph is really reaching out for that youth
market, then.
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Objective contradictions
Popbitch quotes something Britney is supposed to have said in an
interview:
Britney: “I’ve been into a lot of Indian spiritual religions.”
Newsweek: “Might Hinduism be one of them?”
Britney: “What’s that? Is it like Kaballah?”
Now, mostly, that’s depressing proof that Britney is as dumb
as a bag of bricks. She can claim to be into ‘Indian spiritual
religions’ but doesn’t know what Hinduism is?
Except… she knows what Kaballah is. Why on earth would she know
that? Does this mean she’s been getting into
gnosticism, materialist Christianity, or the heretical Islam of Hakim
Bey? I’ve wanted to interview Britney for some time, but I think
now it’s really imperative that I do so.
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Hall of mirrors
It occasionally occurs to me to wonder how wierd the world must
look to people who don’t think capitalism is insane. It occurred
to me today during a job interview. Like almost every job, the only
actual qualifications required were not being illiterate and not being
a complete arsehole (for some jobs, you can substitute ‘not
physically disabled’ for the former). There are obvious
exceptions to the whole thing which include some intellectually
skilled jobs, such as doctors, some sorts of engineer, perhaps
computer programmers, and physically skilled jobs such as some
construction work, carpentry, art. But, as a rule, there’s no
good reason why I should get any of the jobs I’ve applied
for. There’s no good reason for any given job to go to
any particular individual. Now, I accept this, and am happy to play
along with the game, pretending that what I put on my CV or what I say
in interviews has some bearing on my ability to do the job, and,
because I know it’s just
bizarre idiosyncracy of late capitalism, I’m not
disheartened by my evident unemployability (everyone else is equally
unemployable, and equally employable, too).
But what about people who think that capitalism works? Who
think that markets are efficient, that wage labour is a free and equal
exchange on the labour market? Do they just not notice that most jobs
are worthless, or that the entire process of recruitment is a complete
farce? I mean, I can see various ways you could avoid concluding from
your everyday experience that capitalism was shit, but for any of them
to be at all convinving, you’ld have to be mendacious or
stupid. I don’t like the idea of dismissing one’s
political opponents as necessarily inferior, but when the
truth of communism is stamped on every aspect of the phenomenal world,
it’s difficult to see what else you can do. Or do
pro-capitalists experience the world in a completely different way to
me, like some horrific hall of mirrors where all the bits of
capitalism fit together perfectly, but in new and grotesque
shapes?
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Aren’t Atomic Kitten great?
I’m not really up for explaining this in great detail, but Atomic
Kitten are pretty great. I mean, I’m all in favour of unchallenging,
identikit pop music, and Atomic Kitten seem to have cornered the
market for the stuff. Their new song is particularly good in that
respect (although obviously not up to the heights of their cover of
‘The tide is high’).
‘I know where it’s at’ by All Saints is now on the radio. Easy
to forget how much they used to sound like Atomic Kitten.
Also, Shaznay’s Lisa Left-Eye impersonation is absolutely
hilarious.
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The meaning of ‘pro-war’
The splendidly named, and generally pretty interesting blog,
has a great article about just how far ‘pro-war’ liberals take their
approval of war. In particular, the post quotes something Blair is
supposed to have said off the record, “They (critics of the war) ask
why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot? Yes, let’s
get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you
should.� First of all, this has the logical consequence that pro-war
liberals don’t see war as an ocassional unpleasant necessity, but as
an integral tool of an ethical foreign policy. In other words, they
subscribe to the medieval idea of the just war or, to put it more
crudely, the crusades (and I do like the idea of telling Nick Cohen
that his oh-so-‘humanitarian’ support for war in Iraq is
medieval). The pro-war ‘left’ is pro-war in the full-blooded (no pun
intended) sense that it is in favour of a continuing, endless war to
impose moral perfection on the world.
Further, though, the idea that, when you can intervene, you should
do so, quite absurdly ignores the way in which prevailing political
conditions structure when interventions are possible. Tony Blair’s
high-sounding idea doing whatever good he can do actually means doing
whatever ‘good works’ support US interests, because it’s certain
that those are the only ones he will be allowed to do. So fuck the
pro-war left; it’s odd to remember that there was a period just
before the war when I thought their imperial ravings might be a
critique for the anti-war movement to take seriously. Anyway, the
anti-war left has enough to worry about on its own, such as
what the hell our response to the occupation of Iraq should be (I’m linking to this because it poses the questions well, not because I
agree with its conclusions).
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I like anarchists
I was at the Anarchist
Book Fair in London yesterday, and it was great fun. One of the
great things about anarchism (certainly, one of the things which makes
anarchism better than the traditional Marxist left) is the diversity
of ideas or, to put it another way, the crazy shit they think up. In
one room we had the Green
Anarchist primitivists, next to a group with a large (and
hopelessly misspelled) banner calling on people to overthrow the
oppressive class divide between doctors and patients and start a
non-hierarchical health service, opposite a stall of books on
magic, just round the corner from a situationist/workerist
alliance (Can dialectics break bricks next to pamphlets
on self-valorisation). You don’t get any of that at
bastards from the Anarchist
Fedaration had a little stall in the corner, but they were being
rightly ignored.
Beyond the enjoyment on offer from all the mentalism, it’s
brilliant to find any political grouping with new ideas. Besides,
throw up enough craziness and you’re bound to get something right. The
Green Anarchists had
Black’s Anarchy after leftism on display, and,
crazy as Black is, and Marxist as I am, I’d still choose him
over leftist anarchists like Bookchin or Chomsky, and, minus the
new-age bobbins, chaos magicians like
bookshelf next to other dissident ontologists like Deleuze and
Guattari. There’s more truth to be found by being interestingly
wrong than trying to force the world into
photocopied out of Lenin. So, I’m not an anarchist, but I do
like them.
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Julie Burchill
always tell you at school how many people communism and fascism
killed, but never ever how many people capitalism killed, because a)
they wouldn’t know where to start and b) it would never end.
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Guy Debord
Revolution is
not ‘showing’ life to people, but bringing them to life. A
revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not
getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders,
but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at
least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. The cinematic
spectacle is one of the forms of pseudo-communication (developed, in
lieu of other possibilities, by the present class technology) in which
this aim is radically unfeasible. … In appearance a film-club
discussion is an attempt at dialogue, at social encounter, at a time
when individuals are increasingly isolated by the urban
environment. But it is in fact the negation of such dialogue since the
people have not come together to decide on anything.
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