Rather self-aggrandising, really
I’m going to Spain for a couple of weeks, including spending some time in a farmhouse which is in the middle of a) Galicia and b) nowhere, so there probably won’t be many updates for a while. In the meantime. I’ll leave you with the track-list of a CD I put together for the occasion (at least half stuff I’ve recently downloaded from Fluxblog which I feel I can’t do without for two weeks):
- Go Team – ‘The power is on’ At some point this will turn up soundtracking the pink bloc on an IndyMedia video
- Girls Aloud – ‘The show’
- Lolita Storm – ‘Dancing with the Ibiza dogs’
- Whigfield – ‘Think of you’ I have 30 seconds of an incredible Spanish remix of this on a tape somewhere. Perhaps I’ll be able to track down a full version
- Lambretta – ‘Bimbo’
- Sugarlips – ‘Piece of me’
- Estelle – ‘1980’
- Rhianna – ‘Oh Baby’
- Ghostface Killa – ‘The sun’
- Skepta – ‘Serious Thug’
- Bran Van 3000 – ‘Love Cliché’
- Rachel Stevens – ‘Some Girls’
- The Streets – ‘Fit but you know it (Poj remix)’ Even more stop/start than the original, even more Status Quo
- Bran Van 3000 – ‘Go Shopping’
- John Coltrane – ‘Summertime’
- O-Zone – ‘Dragostea Din Te’ Apparently, this has been franchised out in most of Europe (like ‘Kiss Kiss’ was). I’ve yet to hear the Italian house version
- Electrelane – ‘I’m on fire’
- Leningrad Cowboys – ‘Happy together’ Not their best, as it doesn’t include snippets of the Soviet National Anthem, but still pretty good
- Britney Spears – ‘Breathe on me’
- The Streets – ‘It’s too late (High Contrast remix)’
And some Cornish opinions:
- McFly sound more like The Beatles than Oasis ever did
- Jamelia’s ‘See it in a boy’s eye’ is conceptually the best R&B song for ages, possibly since ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’. The woman vs machine conflict between the verse and the chorus continues throughout the song until it resolves itself into some kind of splendid cyborg recapitulation.
I plan to make a concerted effort to finish The Phenomenology of Spirit over the next two weeks. Wish me luck.
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My solution is to read Agamben
The Onion is on the ball yet again. It’s an interesting problem, and one I’ve been thinking about for a while; how can we translate the venality of the American and British governments in general, and the occupation of Iraq in particular, from a general ontological feature of the world into a cause for action? Hence my promised, but never delivered, post based on the Baudrillardian provocation that the occupation of Iraq is not happening. I once saw Alex Callinicos give a lecture about postmodernism. He began frothing at the mouth when he discussed Baudrillard: “Do you have any idea,� he said, “how difficult it is to build a mass movement against a war when intellectuals keep insisting the war isn’t happening?� This presents us with the amusing image of Callinicos canvassing on some high street, being continually rebuffed by people who object to signing a petition against a non-existent war. But also, of course, Callinicos’s complaint isn’t actually a refutation of Baurdrillard, but a confirmation. A hyper-real war, a war that exists somewhere completely other from where we are, is incredibly hard to organise against; that’s why capital’s so keen on them.
This is particularly true of Abu Grahib. The perfect anti-war opportunity: hard evidence of the brutality of occupation for everyone in the West to see. Everyone in the country talking about their outrage at what was going on in Iraq. What response could the anti-war movement muster? A couple of thousand people demonstrating in London, which is, let’s face it, pathetic. But it’s also not surprising: the pictures coming out of Iraq are spectacular, and the essence of the spectacle is to alienate people from any possibility of action.
In fact, I suspect, Abu Grahib marked the death knell of an already moribund anti-war movement, and demonstrated the failure of the tactics pursued by groups like the Stop The War Coalition. As my new facourite ultra-leftist says explicitly, and the Onion article above makes clear, anger is no basis for political activity. Getting pissed off at pictures in the paper just feeds the spectacle. Our response to homo sacer in Iraq needs to be something else.
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The best middle-eighth ever?
“Trade agreements and commodity price-fixing, / patents and intellectual property rights. / They lock them / into paralytic dependency.�
Asian Dub Foundation feat. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘Colour Line’
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Big brother is toppled!
Three weeks ago vs today
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Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Or, I should say, the chicken… Michelle gets fatter, more articulate, and more attractive with every episode of Big Brother I watch.
While I’m talking poetry, I think this is a genuine Haiku, although it’s too dialectical to be a good one:
Pork-pie hats at work
The forecast predicted rain
Trendies with dry heads
It also owes rather too much to Alistair’s anonymous text contributor.
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The uses and disadvantages of philosophy for life
Since I discovered that there have been philosophical developments since Hume, I’ve tended to be a bit dismissive of analytic philosophy. Compared to philosophy on continental Europe since Hegel (or, which amounts to the same thing, since Napoleon; and the fact that an analogous claim wouldn’t work with anglophone philosophy is, I think, telling), analytic philosophy seems frustratingly and sometimes stupidly remote from political concerns.
But perhaps I’ve been too hasty. It turns out a de re/de dicto confusion can get people killed. Nick Cohen (quoted here by Norman Geras) writes:
Traditional Left-wingers would have regarded Saddam’s totalitarianism and the Taliban’s terror regime as their worst nightmare. They would have shown solidarity with its victims.
Cohen’s right, of course, that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were anathemas to the left (although ‘totalitarianism’ and, even more so, ‘terror regime’ are ideological bullshit). That’s why I seem to recall spending a fair amount of time in the late nineties with my incipient leftist school-friends, despairing at the state of Afghanistan and the way America’s allies had clusterfucked it (respect to Lenin for the use of ‘clusterfuck’ as a verb, BTW), or why so many of my student comrades in CASI and Voices in the Wilderness spent so much time thinking about ways Iraq could be freed of Saddam Hussein.
So it’s odd that Cohen implies that the anti-war left did not show solidarity with the victims of these regimes. Of course we did: what differentiates us from Cohen and Geras is that we didn’t stop showing solidarity with them when they ceased to fall under that description and instead became victims of America or the UK.
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Mysterious
Who is putting up Class War stickers all over Cambridge? And are they the same person putting up WOMBLES stickers? Is 20 years of anarchist sectarianism to be set aside so lightly?
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I once broke my arm here
Near Keld, Swaledale, North Yorkshire.
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Rachel says they sound like late Placebo
The Broken Family Band never made sense to me until I saw them this evening and realised the curious link between English folk and British alt-country via Will Oldham.
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