Lacanian links
Glueboot wrote a post a while back about lucid dreaming or astral projection, as it’s also known (although she doesn’t use either term). This reminded me of my experiments in that direction as a teenager, inspired by a varied collection of text files downloaded from bulletin boards (check out the ‘occult’ section in particular). I was never much cop at it, though – I never fought my spirit adversary, or anything like that.
Still, the interest survives to some extent, so I was interested to come across this crazy magazine (it takes a while to get started, but by the time it’s got on to talking about Aleister Crowley and aliens, it’s pretty good). There are interesting similarities to (courtesy of k-punk) this piece on William Burroughs and hyperstitiality (a concept Grant Morrison seems determined to expound through the unlikely medium of DC comics).
Alan Moore (who also writes for Kaos magazine), meanwhile, is exploring more conventional Crowley-type magic in his incredible series Promethea. Particularly interesting is issue 10, ‘Sex, Stars and Serpents’, a kind of Kabbalistic sex scene which struck me as interestingly Lacanian, particularly this passage:
Magicians, irrespective of their gender, are male. Their symbol is the wand – the male member – because they are that which seeks to penetrate the mystery. But once they succeed, then they become magic, they become the mystery, become that which is penetrated. They become female.
You have to wait for issue 12 for Crowley’s joke about a mongoose, and all the way to issue 20 for Crowley in drag riding a camel.
And while I’m linking to things, here’s a good (although regrettably non-Lacanian) post on exactly why Bush=Hitler.
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Autonomous aikido anarchists
I’ve been trying to build up the Cambridge autonomist marxist cadre, currently standing at me, George, Riccardo and, I suppose, Ed Emory (certainly an autonomous marxist, but not necessarily a cadre). Well, my recruiting efforts so far have involved sending Rachel links to Lazzarato and speaking in both knowing and reverent tones about ‘The Italians’. Today Marco Revelli, tomorrow Panzieri, and we’ll bring down capitalism before the week’s out, I’m sure.
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Irish blood, Cornish face
A number of clever people have been praising Morrissey recently. Reading some of these excellent pieces, I can almost see it, too:
Its perversity, its Betjeman ‘Slough’-esque rage and disgust (’Come armageddon come….’) tempered by a grim fascination, a Dubliners-like inertial pull; the o-so English attachment towards that which is ostensibly loathed.
I could get behind that, I thought. Then I saw Morrissey on Jonathon Ross, and the reasons to hate him appeared crystal clear again. It’s odd to say this about someone else appearing with Jonathon Ross, but what’s so unpalatable about Morrissey is his smugness. Ross’s smugness is annoying, a character flaw at worst. Morrissey’s smugness is a whole different thing, a complete (and abominable) moral worldview.
The problem is, Morrissey’s attitude isn’t just “ostentatious absenteeism�, but a kind of studied negative self-confidence, if you see what I mean. He defines himself entirely by opposition to mainstream evaluations: ‘You’re standards are dreadful; we are failures by your standards; therefore we are splendid.’ There’s a smugness in the unassailability this gives him (any criticism is ipso facto praise) and worse, it’s a trivial and unjustified smugness. This is perhaps most clearly and nastily manifest in a song mark k-punk praises in the piece linked to above, ‘The more you ignore me’, but it’s there in pretty much everything the Smiths did too, where cheap irony attempts to disguise the banality of Morrissey’s approach. The negativity on which he prides himself is completely sterile, or so it seems to me. It may be my recondite Aristotelianism or incipient Deleuzianism, but I want to insist that bad things are actually bad. Of course we don’t have to accept all, or even any, conventional evaluations; but we can’t resist them by inversion, or we leave ourselves with no way to harness what positivity (however misdirected) there is in the conventional valuations, and so we have no way to go forward.
So it’s curious to praise Morrisey by comparing him to contemporary indie. I don’t suppose we can blame Morrissey personally for the way in which indie music followed him down a dead-end. But on an ideological level, everything that’s wrong with indie today is Morrissey’s fault.
While slightly reconsidering my position in response to the comments below, I downloaded some Smiths stuff. It seems a lot of people are sharing a rare track called ‘I am the sun, in the air’.
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More street than Dizzee Rascal, it appears
I was doing some work today on the government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation. It turns out that Birkenhead, where I used to live, is the 18th most deprived ward in the country. Bromley-by-Bow, meanwhile, is languishing somewhere in the mid-60s (out of about 8000). Unexpected.
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T GOTHS
Are you aware that International Goth Clothing Rules do allow you to wear all white, as well as all black? It might make summer a little more enjoyable, and has the fringe benefit (pun intended) of being even more defiantly alternative than wearing black.
For future reference, maroon is also permissible. However, you should seek guidance on the acceptable fabrics and cuts.
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Discuss, paying particular attention to ‘Mars’
Have the Neptunes ever lived up to the promise of the first Kelis album?
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Great moments in Empire
I was re-reading it today, to prepare a talk on the G8 for tomorrow. Great bits I missed the first time:
- The American defeat in Vietnam was a victory for capitalism, which otherwise would have been completely destroyed in the 70s (p. 246).
- Consumerism is a good thing, and responsible for the destruction of capitalism (p. 262).
Splendid.
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Finally breaking down
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that, but Reagan’s funeral is live on BBC 2, and the commentators are talking about Margaret Thatcher:
“She always took a black dress with her wherever she went. When the call came, she wanted to be there.�
“There relationship was much … closer … than one would expect of just a British Prime Minister and an American President.�
“Well, I think he brought out the girlish side in her. She liked that he was a movie star.�
We’re now waiting for a 21 F15 salute. Fucking hilarious.
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This is your brain on management training
Notes I took during a training course at work today:… continued
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… timing
An opinion it would have been funnier to have held about a month ago: ‘Fuck You Right Back’ is alright, but it’s no ‘No Pigeons’.
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