Every morning I wake up on
… angrily reproaching someone, the next time they accuse you of tautology, for missing your use of hendiadys?
… reading this list of rhetorical figures and trying to use them all, one a day?
… photoshopping a Che Guevara beret onto a picture of Alistair’s sister (herself a dedicated proponent of ‘why not try’s), in order to make a hilarious joke about the Che-Leila Youth Brigade?
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Highway Law, featuring Stephen Sauvain QC: Sauvain is a tough prosecutor with a passion for justice, seeking to bring order to the deadly no-man’s-land of the public highway. Possibly in the Wild West (although I don’t suppose they had QCs in the Old West).
It is in fact, however, a book listing laws on road usage. “Keeping you up to speed with the law and practice relating to highways.” Do you see what they’ve done, there?
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For many, these multitudes that are not peoples or nations or even communities are one more instance of the insecurity and chaos that has resulted from the collapse of the modern social order. They are social catastrophes of postmodernity, similar in their minds to the horrible results of genetic engineering gone wrong or the terrifying consequences of industrial, nuclear or ecological disasters. … The monstrosity of the flesh is not a return to the state of nature, but a result of society, an artificial life. In the previous era, modern social order maintained, at least ideologically, despite constant innovation, a natural character – the natural identities, for example, of the family, the community, the people and the nation. In modernity, philosophies of vitalism could still protest against the damaging effects of technology, industrialization, and the commodification of existence by affirming the natural life force. … Every reference to life today, however, has to point to an artificial life, a social life.
– Hardt and Negri, Multitude, pp. 192-193 (my emphasis)
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It’s good to know we’re on the side of the future. The (often forgotten) futurism of Soviet architecture is just the tip of the iceberg. The full thing is on display in the James Bond films, in which the most terrible enemies are both evil communists and mad scientists. It’s particularly good to see this element of the Cold War unconscious being taken out of its merely contingent historical setting and allowed to stand as a concept on its own in Die Another Day (the best of the Brosnan Bond films, by the way). The opening sequence makes a North Korean military base (North Korea, for god’s sake!) look like some kind of encampment from the far future (the massive stone gate, the implausible gun, the hovercrafts, oh yes, the hovercrafts). And on it goes, with the crazy commies making a giant (but environmentally friendly) laser to crush their decadent Western opponents, and seducing spies with their genetically enhanced bodies. That’s what marxism’s all about.
Someone else who knows that marxism is the future (and vice versa) is Ken Macleod. Indeed, the Koreans in Die Another Day are a lot like the Sheenisov, the all-conquering techno-communists from his ‘Fall Revolution’ books. He also knows that marxism is the past, and does a good line in Left in-jokes. I particularly like that the villain of The Stone Canal is a member of Socialist Action, the Pabloists within the GLA responsible for the ongoing stitch-up of the European Social Forum (well, if the Weekly Worker is to be believed, anyway). There’s also this passage, which I think will resonate with anyone who went on the smaller anti-war marches:
My father spotted a young womean carrying a bundle of papers whose headline — no it wasn’t even that, the actual masthead — read ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you try fighting capitalism for a change?’
But after the young woman had said only a few sentences, he stopped her with a smile and an uplifted finger. He looked at his watch and brought the finger down to tap it triumphantly.
‘One minute, twenty-five second,’ he said to the puzzled cadre. ‘That’s the shortest time yet for a member of — let me see —’ he made a pretence of counting on his fingers ‘— a split, from a split, from a split, from the Fourth International to call me a sectarian!’
For those of you keeping score, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! is the bit of the Revolutionary Communist Group (né Tendency) which didn’t become the Revolutionary Communist Party (not to be confused with the Revolutionary Communist Party, who are particularly insane Maoists). The Revolutionary Communist Tendency was a faction within the Socialist Workers Party (not to be confused with the Socialist Workers Party), a dissident Trotskyist organisation. None of these groups, however, are armed with lasers, and so should not be considered serious marxist organisations.
(By the way, the title for this post comes from a label on that most exotic of technologies, a CD player I bought for £10 from Tesco)
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A guy I vaguely know combines something I used to do (philosophy of language) and something I do now (knowledge management, web ‘ontology’, and other shite – I read something at work today which described an ontology as “a thesaurus gone mad�: bloody computer programmers, eh) in an interesting paper on making the internet refer to the world.
Shannon has been in my links for about as long as this site has existed, but who I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in a post, keeps on getting better. Recently, she has been complaining about “whitey mcwhinybitches� and pondering whether traitors can be punished.
Here’s a rather Žižekian take on the Countryside Alliance wankers penetrating parliament, which says pretty much everything that needs to be said about them.’
MP3 blogs are rocking the Swedish tip. There’s some hip-pop featuring the singer out of the awesome Lambretta. And, very much in the style of Lambretta (or Annie, or other Swedish Avril Lavigne-lite pop, although not Swedish), there’s comedy name specialists Portobella with ‘Covered in Punk’.
Astute words on Wiley (and the song in question, which probably is as good as is claimed): is Wiley’s flow a kind of lyrical equivalent of 8-bar? That is, the repeated words create a structure around which Wiley can vary the tone and tempo in ways which would otherwise make the rap completely incoherent.
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So. Farewell then, Radio 1 not sucking.
I heard the latest signings, JK and Joel, the other day. They were reading out readers’ messages to their boy/girlfriends and encouraging listeners to listen out for the alarm that would announce the competition tickets for what is, in effect, the Radio 1 roadshow. So I turned over and listened to Stray FM instead. Well, obviously I didn’t (apart from anything else, I was in Cambridge, not Yorkshire), but I might as well have done.
Still, they did play Britney’s new record, which basically redeems them. Incredibly, it manages to be even better than I’d hoped, incorporating something that sounds like a sample from ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ and a breakdown that threatens to turn into ‘You’ve Got That Vibe’. The splendidly tautological lyrics are intact – I may be reaching, but I thought “I don’t need permission, make my own decisions; that’s my prerogative,� was a rather good characterisation of the strictly empty character of bourgeois individualism.
The video’s quite good, too, particularly the beginning (you can apparently watch it at Yahoo but I couldn’t get it to work. There’s also a really big version available to download). Incidentally, World of Britney is carrying a kind of spoof future timeline for Britney, including her having a child called ‘Justice’, which would be pretty awesome. Oh: while listening to ‘My prerogative’ again, I’ve just noticed what appears to be the bass line from ‘Red Right Hand’, which was unexpected.
I’ve also been listening to Dizzee Rascal’s Showtime, which is excellent. He’s not as happy as he might seem from ‘Stand up tall’ and ‘Dream’, but he is still rapping very well indeed: I particularly like the line, “There’s so much drama in the LDN, it’s kind of hard trying to find legal money to spend,� which reminds me of a post I’ve been planning to write for ages about Jay-Z and Kanye West’s detournement of Biggie Smalls (originally inspired by an interesting criticism of the de-politicisation of hip-hop). The track from which that comes, ‘Imagine’, is probably the best on the album; like ‘Stand up tall’ it reminds me vagueley of something that was happening in UK dance music in the early/mid 90s but I can’t for the life of me think what (the closest I’ve come so far is Dreadzone, but I surely can’t be thinking of that).
“Respect the music.� That was your. Catchprase.
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I spent the weekend in Edinburgh, staying with a great guy with a lot of experience of anarchist organising in Edinburgh (the walls were covered with anti-poll tax posters and the rooms were filled with boxes dating back years full of Edinburgh Claimants Union documents), who is now working on Chiapas solidarity stuff (Edinburgh and Glasgow are twinned with the Zapatista Autonomous Municipality “16th February�).
Anyway, it took a while to find some tea among the various fruit infusions. But it didn’t take long to find the anarchism: almost the first thing I saw when I turned up was a copy of the now-legendry autonomist Marxist collection Semiotext(e) Italy: Autonomia/Post-political politics, which impressed me greatly, as I’ve never seen a copy in the flesh before or, for that matter, met anyone who was connected to those networks back when the collection was published (in 1980).
And, as everyone knows, the answer to the question above is: “Because proper tea is theft.�
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Should paella have hard-boiled eggs in it? I cooked some last night, and added an egg to supplement the last of some special-offer prawns, but was then stricken with worry that I’d perpetrated a terrible Spanish/Anglo-Indian confusion.
On which note, am I the only person to think that the decline of kedgeree at breakfast is yet another indictement of late capitalism?
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I’m slightly concerned that the globalisation movement’s experimentation with alternative forms of political practice, shorn of it’s rigorous neo-Situationist theory, may have to bear some of the responsibility for Fathers4Justice.
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However, I would have thought that, by this point, Stagecoach would have developed some competence in their sideline of running public transport. Apparently not, though. They’ve abandoned the concept of a timetable, in favour of a broad claim that busses run “every ten minutes,” a claim which appears to be based on pious hopes or (at best) guesswork. The C2, which goes to the hospital, skirting the busiest parts of the city centre, arrives every five minutes or so. The C1, which goes right through town to the train station (and, also, to where I work) runs every 20 minutes if you’re lucky. I’m no public transport expert, but I think I can vaguely see a way to fix that.
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