&so this is christmas

2009-04-06T19:40:00.001+10:00

I have a new blog.

I Am The Blob.

There won't be anymore posting here.

That is all.

2007-12-22T01:22:00.000+11:00

Wow, this article is so completely convincing:

BBC NEWS | Health | Humour 'comes from testosterone'

And when I say 'convincing', I should clarify and say that I mean 'entirely, desperately UNconvincing'.

Really. How many articles can possibly be published about gender-related trends that are then linked back to hormones-slash-genes-slash-hard-wiring, all without the slightest shred of evidence as to why 'hormones' are necessarily the culprit for trends in behaviour? Evidently the imperative at work in this article and the research it reports is: "link back to hormones".

And thus we see silly, wannabe-Darwinian claims like this:

He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.

Mmmmm. Of course.

Have these people never heard of 'culture'? 'Enculturation'? Socialisation, etc?

2007-12-12T15:42:00.001+11:00

In lieu of having any better ideas post-thesis, I am applying for jobs. This saddens me somewhat, as I feel that I possibly should have come up with something better to do with my time by now. Perhaps I will benefit from the increased value that time will seem to have once I have less of it for myself? Ah, but then there's the other possibility that worries me - perhaps, instead, all that will happen is that I will be too tired to do anything altogether?

In other news, I am not really tempted by the idea of posting psuedo blog posts on my Facebook page. I am comfortable with the blog format - which seems somehow of 'higher quality' than the Facebook page. Even though this is plainly a nonsensical statement, a piece of elitist rubbish.

I am also toying with the idea of starting a new blog. Now that I am no longer an undergraduate I can shed this childish history etc etc.

2007-11-06T16:21:00.000+11:00

I am writing the last smelly essay of the year. It’s more than the last ‘smelly’ essay – all essays being smelly – it’s the last essay altogether. Of my undergraduate career! Of course, when I say ‘I am writing’ this essay, I am lying. I’m not writing it right now at all. No, I’m writing this silly blog post in the hope that the essay will somehow be written by itself.

The thesis was handed in on time, miraculously.

What else – I just made a whopping $1.80 on the Melbourne Cup. Two years ago, I made 20c on the cup. Last year, 80c. This shows consistent progress, does it not? Forecasts for 2008 suggest that earnings for the Cup should top $2.20.

Other smelly things: the Federal Election; Deleuze; a tremendously awful season in Australian Idol; the leaked Madonna single (‘The Beat Goes On’ – have you heard it? It includes the lyric, ‘Here comes the rain / To wash away the pain’. Seriously! I don’t think there is a single instance of new lyric material in the whole song. She seems to have written it by putting chopped up portions of every other one of her songs in a big hat and then pulling them out at random to form the new work).

Things that are not smelly: the Justin Timberlake concert tonight; warmer weather; wilful overuse of semi-colons; the prospects of a Tatu film; the prospect of soon being able to read things that were not written by a certain M. Deleuze.

2007-10-08T02:34:00.000+10:00

Where am I at the moment? At a kitchen table. With empty plates and things all around me. With chapter one of the thesis open in another window. Looking rather pale. Not quite sure if I'm hungry or not. Not quite sure what to write next about Deleuze. Feeling some strange existential angst that is, I know - disappointingly - only related to the thesis' not being finished. So yes. This is the last post until that fateful day.

2007-08-17T14:57:00.000+10:00

Here is a link to the recently-published report into child abuse in the Northern Territory, Little Children Are Sacred. I've been wanting to read it for some weeks now. I think it will cast an interesting light on the Federal Government's recent intervention / takeover, which has been roundly criticised.

2007-08-03T13:22:00.000+10:00

A few unsystematic declarations.

1. I am beginning to think that The Age stinks. Yes, complaining about the declining tone of a newspaper is an old pastime. Complaining about a nominally left-leaning newspaper even more so (those on the left being ungrateful buggers, forever griping about the unwillingness of the existent, actual world to conform to its not-at-all-defined notion of How Things Should Be). All the same, it goddamn stinks. Queue gripes about sensationalist clap-trap, uninteresting lifestyle blogs, &c.

2. No, that's it, actually. I thought I had a list of insights. But it was just a vehicle for me to put forward my venom about The Age. Carry on.

2007-07-15T19:50:00.000+10:00

Once again, I don't really know what to do with this blog. I think it might only be read by friends who check by out of curiosity once in a while. But now that Facebook has soaked up that function (answering the question, 'what's Catherine up to these days') - what is to be done with this thing here? I'm sure someone must still read it.

I'd comment about politics or music or other topical goings-on. But the thing is, I'm very, very unengaged with the world at the moment. That is, all parts of the world that aren't Deleuze or Hegel scholarship. Which, when you think of it, is probably most of it. The world, I mean.

Secretly, however, I like my blog more than I like Facebook. Oh yes, Facebook is fun. It is nice to get a little bulletin everytime someone scratches their arse, or to know that if I was a man named Harry who only watched Lateline to relish the unresolved narcissistic sexual tension between Tony Jones and Kevin Rudd, that I could join a group called "People named Harry who only watch Lateline to relish the unresolved narcissistic sexual tension between Tony Jones and Kevin Rudd". All the same, I think Facebook indulges proclivities of mine that really should be left to wither in the dark somewhere. These include: the temptation to live in the past; and spending too much time staring at my own goddamn face.

And worst of all - after a hard evening of reading Deleuze talk about differential calculus and the wonderful violence of Ideas, is it really refreshing to go to the internet and look at 20 pictures of my friends living it up in Berlin, or cruising around somewhere exotic in the sunshine? Surprisingly, it is not.

I'll have to leave it there, as I'm about to run out of batteries on my laptop. But if I come up with anything to post, you'll be the first to know.

2007-07-06T17:05:00.000+10:00

At the beginning of "Get Me Bodied", Beyonce announces a cryptic set of numbers amid some seriously spacey-sounding reverb: "9... 4... 8... 1." Ominous pause. "... B Day." Now, as it turns out, this set of numbers refers to the day of Beyonce's birth: the 4th of September, 1981. This, it would seem, is her birthday - literally, birth-day, the day of her birth, her B Day. So perhaps what the phrase 'get me bodied' refers to is the incarnation of the godly power of Beyonce in the form of flesh. Previously she'd been just an immanent force in the universe, but what the B Day marks is the becoming-flesh of Beyonce, her getting a body.

So plainly, Beyonce is working with some sort of dualist mind-body distinction. I just don't know if I can find that plausible! Where are her references? Where does she define her terms?

Good song though.

2007-07-06T02:58:00.001+10:00

Ok, I think I've got the Deleuze reading in hand - 164 pages down, 140 pages to go. If I do 15 pages a day, I should at least finish Difference and Repetition before second semester goes back.

The Hegel, however... I wonder. Do you think it's quite common with these things that you can read words, and yet not really have any idea about what's going on? At all?

Oh well. Downloads of recent days include Justice's † plus assorted others - the Freemasons mix of "Ring the Alarm", The Human League's "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of", some others that I can't think of now. Tatu, Kate Bush, various things from Tim's mix CDs and Destiny's Child's #1s have been in high rotation. Oh and weirdly, I found listening to System of a Down invigorating while going for a run. How perverse!

2007-07-03T23:06:00.000+10:00

It would be bad enough if I was only falling asleep while pushing my brain through page after interminable page of Difference and Repetition. But no. Because Deleuze was saying something about Plato's concept of "reminiscence", I now have Madison Avenue's cover of "Reminiscing" playing in my head. Grumble.

2007-06-25T23:28:00.000+10:00

I'm pleasantly surprised. I've decided to hole myself away for the holidays and do some desperately-needed thesis work. I have devised anal little schedules for myself, and instituted a strict regime of breaks (I seem to only be able to do work if I know that I will be stopping work very shortly). Anyway, I just wanted to report that I am actually having fun reading dense academic texts. I am shocked! I associate work with pain: I have not a drop of the Protestant work ethic within my Catholic veins. But the last 45 minutes flew by, I was so immersed.

Perhaps this is what happens when the cloud of guilt lifts? i.e. When I am not trying to write an essay that is 3 months overdue?

Although I imagine that the actual writing process will have more resemblance to a horrid, drawn out 3 month labour, assisted less by numbing pain killers than sharp instruments...

2007-06-16T16:51:00.000+10:00

Whee!

"Brechtian Faux-Lesbian Russian Pop Film Announced"

In other news, I have a hangover.

2007-06-07T05:39:00.000+10:00

I have just made a dubious analogy between Hegel's negativity and Saussure's account of meaning as being negatively-defined in a take home exam (1500 words on 9 pages of Hegel! Aah!) that is due tomorrow / later today.

I hope this is the last time I will ever have to trot out this 'point for all occasions'. It is a pat little thing that I figured out for a third-year essay I wrote in 2004. Admittedly, I did rather a lot of work on that essay. But since then, I have wheeled it out without thinking or trying to make any new observations in approximately one billion essays, class presentations and class discussions. It makes its appearance like Mick Jagger on stage: same tricks, same moves, no alteration, no originality. Just an energetic routine.

In other news, it is very late, I feel very strange, and my life has otherwise been consumed by Facebook.

2007-05-10T00:44:00.000+10:00

Dear Essay on Lacan and Kristeva,

I noticed tonight while writing you that you don't seem to have any space in your introduction in which an overview of Freud's ideas can be given. This is remiss of you: after all, it is I, your writer, that will be chided for not having defined my terms properly, and launching into a discussion of Lacan and Kristeva without situating their ideas.

It really is too much for you to assume that I can just direct my readers to go away and do their research before putting their greedy eyes on my fine exposition. Even if it is the case - and you musn't share this with anyone - that I wish I could tell them to work out their own concise definitions of psychoanalytical terms before coming to me, begging for enlightenment when they have been, frankly, lazy.

In any case, I'll be seeing you soon. I hope you take these suggestions into account and include them in your body by the time we are next together.

Much love,

Catherine.

2007-05-03T15:49:00.000+10:00

Well, shame on me for doubting 2007's pop output! Because here it is: the anthemic r'n'b power hit of this year: Rihanna's "Umbrella". This song is gi-normous. It also manages to rhyme 'each other' and 'um-b-rella'. And! and! and! Do you remember those rumours that Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm" was actually about Rihanna, who'd been spending some time with Jay Z? Well, this is the song with his rap on it. It summoned the wrath of Beyonce's giant snare drum hit!

The clip seems cool too.

Whee. I'm inspired to make a high concept mix cd. Will post more details shortly.

[Update:] Ooh ooh ooh! Just spotted possible actual lyrical reference to Beyonce's aforementioned song: "You'll coming running to my arms / It's okay don't be alarmed..." Do you see? Do you see?

(Hey, I gave a paper on Lacan and Kristeva on 1 hour's sleep this morning after making my way to class despite a) apocalyptic rain and b) a train derailment. I think I'm entitled to a little cutting loose.)

2007-05-02T19:02:00.000+10:00

I am now sitting within the bounds of the first essay extension for the season. It's only been a few days ("Father, since my last being before the actual deadline"). In the interests of placing myself before the judgement of the Big Other, I thought I might post a small list of tasks I have to complete. Perhaps it will go some way towards convincing me that the amount of work I have to do is finite. Besides, all this inventory-taking seems to work for Adam Kotsko. It might work for me as well.

The essay topic is ~~horribly~~ open-ended: 'The psychoanalytic subject of language, according to Lacan ("Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious") and Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic Language). You may compare and contrast their models. (5,500 words)

I have to complete only these flimsy little tasks:

1. Write something about the autonomy of the unconscious.
2. Cobble together a teensy weensy account of the subject coming into language.
3. Determine what my argument is.
4. Figure out what Kristeva's 'thetic' is. Say something concise about this.
5. Compare and contrast the theorists, in circa 1,500 words.
6. Climb moral high horse and write introduction. Perhaps linking my lack of provision of overarching account of subjectivity to something he says in Seminar XI about how we shouldn't try to suture up the split that is opened by the unconscious. For only I, Catherine, have privileged understanding of Lacan, and so can reveal to the reader the trap to which this essay topic leads.

I also have to give a talk at 9am tomorrow morning for my coursework subject. I will, again, be speaking about Lacan and Kristeva. This time, however, I have even less in terms of topic guidelines. But I have an image of myself drawing things on the board and standing in an authoritative manner. Like a drunken memory, however, I can't hear the words that I'm saying in this vision.

Right. Now to read. Or to write. Or both at once.

PS. I forget to herald last week as 'Lesbian Utopia Week'. There was much listening to t.A.T.u.

2007-04-01T16:23:00.000+10:00

Following a tip from Guy, I have just got my hands on t.A.T.U.'s best-of compilation. You remember t.A.T.u.: that Russian pop group with the two girls who have dubious claims to lesbianism and outer-space travel. The album seems pretty good - even their ultimate display of disregard for the sacred in pop history, their cover of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?", works somehow.

In any case, I did some background reading. The Wikipedia entry about them is startling. Accordingly, I would like to present some highlights. First, about their choice of image:

Ivan Shapovalov and his friend Alexander Voitinskyi developed plans to create a musical project in Russia. Many stories have been told about Shapovalov's purpose of creating the group, and he even admitted to UK's The Sun in February, 2003,

“ I saw that most people look up pornography on the Internet and of those, most are looking for underage sex. I saw their needs weren't fulfilled. Later, it turned out, I was right. This is the same as my own desires. I prefer underage girls.^[1] ”

With this idea in mind, Shapovalov organized auditions in Moscow during late 1999, specifically for teenage female vocalists.

Secondly, on the origins of their paean to persecuted Sapphic love, "All The Things She Said":

Their first single was released very early in 2000, entitled "Ya Soshla S Uma" ("I've Lost My Mind"). The song describes the turmoil in a girl's soul because she is in love with another girl, but is afraid to as she has the society frowning upon her and asks her parents for forgiveness. Elena Kiper has been credited with the song, and has said that the idea came to her when she fell asleep at her dentist's office, and had a dream in which she kissed another woman. She woke up with the words: "Ya soshla s uma."

A surprising summary of one of their later video clips:

Early in January 2002, the girls began recording their English album first in England, then in the United States. In April, it was announced that Elena Kiper had left the group as co-producer, and that she was being replaced by Beata Andreeva, a former MTV VJ. Later in April, the girls recorded the song and video for "Prostye Dvizheniya" ("Simple Movements"). The video was then released in May and showed, according to the girls, "How simple moves are always in our lives, like drinking water, reading a book," which is what Katina does during most of the video, or masturbating, which is what Volkova is doing.

And quite excitingly, they have amazing plans for 2007:

During the group's press time in France, Yulia announced that the group had plans to begin filming their debut film about the love between two girls that meet at one of t.A.T.u.'s concerts. The script is based on a novel called "t.A.T.u. Come Back" written by a deputy of the Russian Parliament, Aleksey Mitrofanov. The movie is titled In Search of t.A.T.u., and is expected to be released in the same time period of the 3rd album.

The good pop drought of 2007 might lift, in other words.

2007-03-27T16:54:00.000+10:00

I'm not feeling terribly productive today. I got off to a good start - at uni circa 12:30pm, with some speedy note typing-up while on the computers in the library that you need to book to use. It must be the sense of urgency and limited time that led me to work solely on the task at hand. For now that I have a laptop all to to myself, I have spent the afternoon in extended time-frittering.

Some of it was spent looking at the webpages of word processing programs that I might consider using instead of Word while writing my thesis.* I was imagining how nice it would be to do work with those interfaces. Similarly, I spoke with a friend over coffee about the virtues of reading philosophy quickly. 'Imagining the pleasures of work instead of working': pretty standard procrastinatory fare.

Oh and look, now it's 5pm - time to leave the library.

* Alas, this one is only for Macs.

Difference and Repetition page count: 76 down, 228 to go.

2007-03-23T14:03:00.000+11:00

So, I'm now a few weeks to Honours, and not nearly as far into Difference and Repetition as I should be. Current page count: 46 down, (=304-46) to go.

Furthermore, I hadn't realised that actually what I needed to have under my belt before reading this text was an inhumanly firm grasp on the entire history of philosophy in all its nuances. Thus, my 'things to look up' list now includes:

- philosophical discussions of genus and species;
- differential calculus;
- Aristotle on difference, genus, Being etc. --> (Metaphysics);
- Duns Scotus' philosophy;
- Leibniz's philosophy.

Furthermore, it seems that it has been an oversight that I have not yet learned Latin and Ancient Greek.

Back to work, I suppose.

2007-03-13T21:01:00.000+11:00

Progress report

So, on Sunday the final footnote was inserted and the last moral high horse climbed in what I believe I termed twenty years ago 'a teeny tiny essay'. This leaves me, for the first time since June or July 2005, with no outstanding work. I haven't noticed any amazing changes in my life so far. I haven't noticed the spectre of lingering guilt fleeing out the window. But I'm glad it's done with.

What I now do have is clear space to make a run at my honours thesis. So I've been sitting around reading Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. It's - well, I considered saying 'unexpectedly tough', but I think I knew it'd be rather ... difficult. All the same, it is pleasant to not need to be constantly elsewhere. This project will be big, but I'm happy it's mine for the next 7 months or so.

In other developments, I've been trying to teach myself things. The language of cats; how to buy laundry powder; the secrets of planning and keeping busy.

I'm not too sure as to what music I'd like to be listening to, either. I have some notion - from reading Deleuze I admit - that I'd like something filled with different intersecting levels of intensity, cool lines criss-crossing, with not so much sentiment and solid, foursquare stature as my usual pop diet. Something inhuman. With lots of difference and - er - repetition. Right now Ricardo Villalobos' "Fizheuer Zieheuer" is fitting the bill.

Because even though I can't listen to music that I know while studying and reading, sometimes a background of semi-regular noise can provide a nice cushion for thought to take place. Nothing that commands one to join in: I was doing well in the cafe in which I was studying today, for instance, right up until they started playing David Bowie - that is, music that I recognised. From that point on there was more absent-minded guitar strumming in mid-air and clicking than note-taking.

Alright, to read - Walter Benjamin on violence, for a lecture I'm "auditing" (is this the term that one uses to describe 'sitting in on a subject you're not doing'?) tomorrow at uni. Bis bald!

2007-02-20T16:59:00.000+11:00

A quick pointer: Infinite Thought has a really excellent post on Britney Spears' newly-bald nonce. Go have a squiz.

One small essay, sitting on the wall... One small essay...

2007-02-19T20:02:00.000+11:00

One essay down!

One to go...

(Oh, and a thesis to commence. But I have nearly cleared the backlog.)

2007-02-13T13:17:00.000+11:00

I should mention - I decided a month or two ago that angsty navel-gazing should no longer be considered a legitimate source of blog material. I didn't anticipate, however, that this would leave me at a total loss for things to discuss...

While waiting for me to sort myself out, I suggest going here and watching the new Scissor Sisters film clip. It features a Matrix-style plate fight at the dinner table using puppets in a way that I don't understand! Quite incredible.

2007-01-21T15:43:00.000+11:00

Song of the moment: Dharma - "Plastic Doll (Remixed Instrumental)", taken from the rather charming Italo Disco compilation, I Robots. Why is it the song of the moment? Because it sounds like music that could be the theme song to the evening news. This is a universal criterion for me: does it have arresting horn or synth hits? Sudden, urgent but momentary increases in intensity? Yes? Then it is good.

Other songs in this category include:

S'Express - Theme From S Express
The Pet Shop Boys - It's A Sin
Tatu - All About Us
The Pet Shop Boys - Can You Forgive Her?
A brief few seconds of No Doubt's "Don't Speak", just before the guitar solo
The theme music to the He-Man and She-Ra movie, The Secret of the Sword
Laura Branigan - Gloria

(The theme music from what used to be Channel Nine's "Wide World of Sport" could also fit in here...)

2007-01-11T23:46:00.000+11:00

This new Sally Shapiro album is really growing on me. When I first heard the single "I'll Be By Your Side", I was suspicious. It was like someone had taken all my theorisings of the sort of pop music I like - melancholy, shimmery, lyrical content that suggests life melting into tears if it were to be taken by itself, but uplifts and becomes sublime when taken with the magic of pop - and then made a song by recipe, conforming to my formula. It's an eerie feeling: it's like I made this music by my own wishes...

In any case. It's a beguiling album, sung by the most fragile of singers to nostalgic-futuristic Italo Disco atmospherics. Sally Shapiro (an alias, apparently) puts you in mind of the wistful Annie of "No Easy Love". The synthesizers and big snares put you in mind of the overwrought soundtrack to a 1980s film - one watched on VHS tape with terrible picture quality, so that all the sound wavers. It makes me think of back alleys at night - cold, empty city streets, cars sailing past.

There are some great stories going around about the recording of the album, also. From Pitchfork:

The legend is, Swedish producer Johan Agebjörn had to coax little Sally Shapiro out of her self-conscious shell to record "I'll Be by Your Side"-- and once he did, she wouldn't sing while he was in the room.

How good is that??!! Anyway. First defining album for my 2007: Disco Romance.

I know you're my love
Even though
Sometimes
I Believe
I will wake up
From this dream

( - "I Know")

2007-01-03T04:04:00.000+11:00

Well, I can't sleep, so I figure that I may as well use the opportunity to update my blog, even if it is only with griping about my heat-induced insomnia. Better some content than none, eh?

There is nothing so aggravating than tossing and turning in the night. I think I must have worried about every topic possible in the hours that I was lying there, unable to find a position that would satisfy the requirements of a) comfort and b) not boiling to death. I'm sure everyone has their own strange and particular pre-sleeping poses and habits. Mine involve covering my ears with the sheets (a little quirk that I developed many years ago when trying to assuage my guilty paranoia that other people could hear the thoughts I shouldn't be having when I was falling asleep. Just in case anyone in the vicinity was telepathic, I felt that an extra layer of doona between me and the world would muffle my booming internal monologue from the Big Other's prying ears. I'm a little less paraniod these days, but still feel nude with cool, fresh air about my noggin). This strategy is eminently not compatible with gross humid nights like tonight. Nor is any sort of foetus-like position conducive to a body that is radiating large amounts of heat.

And so I've been overthinking. Everything. From phenomenological questions about how I process thoughts and feelings (what is a thought? Do concepts exist before the feelings and things that they describe? Do I only think that words fit entities in the world because the words shape the things that I am looking for in the entities? Is this all just a tautologous circle? What is thought anyway? And language? Am I just a mass of chemical reactions that I like to think of as consciousness? And what happens when we die anyway? What is death? How does time work? My experience of it, I mean. What does it look like? Does something come after time? etc.), to considerations about how I relate to gender and sexuality, to miscellaneous ponderings over memories... I've done it all.

Actually, that list of questions looks quite funny now. I can laugh at my own small neuroses. Well, particularly after having a slice of toast and a cup of tea while creeping around the house, trying not to wake people or sound too much like a burglar.

And oh bugger, I've just woken my girlfriend. Whoops.

Happy new year folks. I think I'm about to make my second attempt.

2006-12-12T14:33:00.000+11:00

Is it just me or does the idea of a 'listening tour' sound particularly silly to anyone else?

In other news...

- Essay count: down to two teeeny weeeny ones that should be done by 2011 or so.

- The officially anointed 'feel good Summer album of 2006-7' : Basement Jaxx's Crazy Itch Radio. We say yes to carnivalesque banging Balkan knees-ups! And surreal, exuberant vocalists that sound like muppets.

- Am surprisingly still not sick of "I Don't Feel Like Dancing". Though while out at a plastic franchise Irish pub the other night, I noticed that it blent in seamlessly with the ABBA-heavy, daggy mix of pop classics that was being played in order to make people feel safe / signify "good times" in a Gold FM kind of a way.

2006-12-07T02:02:00.000+11:00

I'm not really sure why I feel compelled to write things down and record them. Is it simply that it gives more permanence to the 'I', to see yourself - well, not really yourself, but the self of a few moments ago - reflected back at you? Could well be. I note of course that I felt compelled even to write down my queries about writing itself.

(I am reminded of the scene in Sartre's Nausea in which Roquentin writes some words on the page and then only seconds later, after the ink has dried, feels no connection to the words before him. What relations do these objects of my creation have to 'I'? My second thought following this is, of course - Roquentin was a man who had spent a very long time by himself, with only his thoughts.)

If only it weren't so arduous to attempt to get the contours of language to follow the suppleness of thought, in which everything is presented whole with assumptions and connections already made and present.

The question is: why get language to follow thought anyway?

Anyway. Time to retire for the evening. Only two teeny-weeny little essays to go and then I ascend into realms of freedom in degrees unknown to mankind ever before in history. Or so I like to imagine it.

(Make sure you catch some La Rochefoucauld quotes!)

2006-11-19T21:02:00.000+11:00

The worst part of a hangover is not the headache, the tiredness or the sore neck (too much violent dancing, always - yes for me hangovers are literally pains in the neck) - but rather this sort of existential dis-ease that settles over my life in the afternoon of the day after the night. Too sluggish and empained to do anything productive or even to cobble together some vaguely fruitful time-wasting, I sit about with this awkward pall of stillness over me. There is really nothing that can be done in the period, but to wait.

Fortunately I was babysitting tonight. The children pulled me out of my gloom. They're at home on a school night: such a happy, relaxed time, the evening. Talking and making silly jokes over dinner, watching Keeping Up Appearances as if it were a new TV show. This cheered me (though I did nod off on the couch while watching Kath and Kim with them). Often the manner of these kids - their domestic set-up reminds me so much of my own when I was younger - is a good prompt for me, not to worry so goddamn much.

(And so now their babysitter is downstairs blogging about the higher meaning she extrapolated from the evening - instead of actually, you know, doing her job - instead of making sure they're turned off their lights, aren't running amuck, et cetera.)

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. I've been postponing everything in my life again. Silly habits. But not unmasterable ones.

2006-11-03T20:45:00.000+11:00

yes
...............................................

my life is presently a vaguely-defined causeway through which various essays are attempting to limp their way through, out onto the white light at the end of the tunnel (which has a cursor blinking on it, of course). All the same, there are a few things that I'd like to share with you. All over the shop, of course. But they're things that made me say yes.

1. Ciara - "Promise"

Yes. A steamy ascent of wah-wah guitar and then it emerges all at once from the mist. It's majestic, slow, rolling, as though Ciara were declaring her love from a canopy atop a procession of royal elephants. She reaches right to the edge of her vocal range, sticking on the declaration that it's you, you, you...

The ILM post on the topic has some interesting observations. The Lex writes:

"part of my obsession with ciara is i think her so very limited range - i keep holding my breath in case she runs out of things to do with it but she keeps utilising it in ever more seductive ways. [....]

i think the fact that ciara trained as a dancer rather than a singer is so key to her music - her sense of rhythm is impeccable, even on a lush, sprawling ballad like 'promise'. basically she sings as if she's dancing, her phrasing seems choreographed"

But above all, it's lush and luxurious. It puts me in mind of long, billowing trains of silk. Endless generosity, the very moment that a glorious future opens out, when the path ahead seems certain.

The clip, while not as amaaaaaazing as I deemed it to be at first, is still very much worth watching. If only for the bit with the microphone alone. It defies belief! (While you're there though, make sure to check out the clip for "Oh" - what a riff, what a groove, what a spasm-y, rant-y delivery from Ludacris!)

2. Different Maps: "City Has Sex"

[If that link doesn't work, try the main page - entry from October 24th.]

A blog post which crossed a number of thoughts and concerns of mine of late. On sex, the attempt to claim a marginal position - on what is missing. I'm yet to articulate my thoughts on the matter. But to this piece, I said yes.

3. Seneca, Letters From A Stoic

Have I become sensible and moderate in my old age? Perhaps. But all the same, here is a book that reminded me that there is no need to embrace a venomous mode of living.

4. Rogue Traders, "In Love Again"

Yes, I will dirty my good name! So simple, both the embrace of new love and the affirmation that it's happened before, will happen again - all contained in the mantra: again, again, again, again, again. [Nietzsche's eternal return?

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.']

It surges, it is insistent, it is resigned and yet uplifted. For what more could I ever ask?

5. Madonna - Jump (Jacques Lu Cont Mix)

Yes! It is that time of year again - our favourite man is remixing the goods once again. I think this is almost a return to the fine form of 2004-5. Particularly great is the slight shift of the timing of the vocals in relation to the beat. Less groovey, more brutally insistent: just take my hand. How he manages to recreate in sound the feeling of running past buildings very, very fast - of wind rushing by, of build-ups to launch - is just beyond me. But mark my words: Yes. I am ready.

2006-10-16T18:45:00.000+10:00

Madonna, rapping in "American Life":

I got a lawyer and a manager
An agent and a chef
Three nannies, an assistant
And a driver and a jet
A trainer and a butler
And a bodyguard or five
A gardener and a stylist
Do you think I'm satisfied?

Obviously this was the problem. Three nannies, five bodyguards - but only one lawyer. Perhaps if Madonna had handled her staffing properly, there would have been someone to check up on the adoption laws in Malawi before this circus ensued:

Malawian law prohibits adoptions by non-residents, but officials are granting an exemption or waiver to Madonna, who has confirmed her intention to adopt the child, who lives in a dilapidated orphanage near the Zambian border.

[....]

Eye of the Child, the leading child advocacy group in Malawi, said the request for an injunction would be filed in a magistrates court in the capital Lilongwe on behalf of about five dozen non-governmental organisations.

Oh Madge.

2006-10-15T18:26:00.000+10:00

Work Blogging

part 3

While filling in time at work, you've really got to fight if you don't want to turn into a passive, empty-brained vessel, don't you? Customer after customer coming in: one is already in a largely reactive mode, responding to demands - but this results in more of a nervous strung-out feeling after finishing a shift. Not bloat brain.

For when there is time to be filled in, it is easiest to go the other way. To idly internet browse, to zone-out, to flick through magazines. Constant stimulation. Looking at the clock, eating another biscuit. Clicking through to another blog. Everything has to come from outside: you cannot engage yourself with the world, but must rather be engaged.

The same logic applies with at-home procrastination, of course. The short-term pleasure principle constanty satiated, devouring more, one more Youtube clip, one more article, one more check to see what's been updated since you last checked (2 minutes previously). At the end, one has under one's belt what? A big bloated brain, a big bloated belly, a sense of guilt (safely repressed) - but a brain that has as much sharpness or solidity as a soggy facewasher.

Reminding us of what, boys and girls? Well, that inertia breeds only inertia. Lying about only leads to more lying about. The less you do, the less you feel able to do anything.

2006-10-13T17:09:00.000+10:00

Justin Timberlake - Man or Machine?

Proof: Justin Timberlake is a robot. He is a machine!

Also be sure to check out the clip for "My Love". High concept, black and white, featuring formation dancing, slow-mo emblems from the song tumbling towards the screen ... and an elastic band stretched between a woman's shoe and a man's arm. I'm sorry to gush, but all my buttons have just been pressed.

...

We are in the hands of a master, ladies and gentlemen.

2006-10-10T21:52:00.000+10:00

The Nobility of Pop

Christian Falk ft. Robyn and Ola Salo - "Dream On"

A simple pop song that seems to lift its text from one of Jesus' sermons on the mount. It addresses itself to thugs, bad men, punks, thieves, pigs, snitches, junkies - tells them that for one night they won't be persecuted, double-crossed, lying in a gutter. The percussion lopes gently and puts me in mind of an orchestra of spoons mixed with gentle pops. Quite extraordinary. Supported by warm synthesiser notes that see-saw across the octaves, decorated with dreamy treble-y burbles. A beautiful promise of hope.

2006-10-09T20:22:00.000+10:00

No Sleep Makes You Stupid

No sleep makes you stupid. The mode of the world's interaction with you? Assault. By clock.

(How did you miss that tram stop? How did you misread that roster? Twice? And again? Are you on your way yet? Just calling to see where you're up to. No that's fine, take your time, no rush. How come you seem so out of it? How could you leave it there?)

Rest, the only response to buffeting. Buffeting, which always ensues when you rest.

2006-10-09T18:16:00.000+10:00

Interesting piece by Robert Manne in The Age today, "In Search of Howard's End". These remarks seemed particularly pertinent:

"In comparison with the security and serenity of citizens in the postwar boom, what is unusual about our own time is the curious combination of well-being and anxiety. Very many Australians are aware that they have never had it so good. Because of the unprecedented levels of private indebtedness, however, the high vulnerability to interest rate rises and the increasing levels of job insecurity, many are far from convinced that the good times will last.

The preoccupation of large numbers of citizens is now individual and familial well-being. The main aspiration is to acquire, or at least to hold on to what has been gained. Politics is accordingly even more thoroughly reduced than usual to judgements about the economic competence of governments."

It struck me that this paradoxical combination of contentment and anxiety - a happiness that is too reflexive, too aware of what factors have gone into producing our materially comfortable life, bristlingly sensitive at its edges, where it touches the fear that all this may be gone tomorrow - links to the phenomenon I discussed in passing, rationalised contentment. As I described it at the time, this is the sort of compulsion that is found in reflections on our current mode of life to state again and again that we are happy. A suspicious statement to make and reassert, as I mentioned my linked post.

I think Manne's comments on middle-class Australia's hyper-awareness of 'how good we have it' provides some insights into the material preconditions of this paranoid rhetorical mode. Rather than feeling of truly prosperous and abundant, we have these constant reminders of our precarious situation thrust at us from all sides.

2006-10-05T04:41:00.000+10:00

I've posted this before but it's time again to post this poem by Charles Baudelaire. It is... appropriate, shall we say.

The Clock ("L'Horloge")

The Clock! a sinister, impassive god
Whose threatening finger says to us: 'Remember!
Soon in your anguished heart, as in a target,
Quivering shafts of Grief will plant themselves;

Vaporous Joy glides over the horizon
The way a slyphid flits into the wings;
Each instant eats a piece of the delight
A man is granted for his earthly season.

Three thousand and six hundred times an hour
The Second sighs, Remember! - Suddenly
That droning insect Now says: I am Past
And I have sucked your life into my nostril!

Esto memor! Remember! Souviens-toi!
(My metal throat speaks out in every language)
Don't let the minutes, prodigal, be wasted-
They are the ore you must refine for gold!

Remember, Time is greedy at the game
And wins on every roll! perfectly legal.
The day runs down; the night comes on: remember!
The water-clock bleeds into the abyss.

Soon sounds the hour when Chance the heavenly,
When Virtue the august, eternal virgin,
When even (oh! your last retreat) Repentance,
Will tell you: Die old coward! it's too late!'

2006-10-02T03:14:00.000+10:00

[Part Two. You can find Part One here.]

In lieu of everything else that can, should or could be written tonight, I want to proclaim the eternal truths present in that piece of pop confection, Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair". I keep putting off writing about this song. Indeed, in some ways, perhaps it would be best if I never wrote a piece about it at all, for how else would be best to get at the article of faith at its core: 'Tonight, the world does not exist' ?

The singer seeks a happiness that comes from renunciation, from an escape. This is not a Nietzschean embrace of the world: this is not I have willed all of this, but rather the hopeless grasp for an exception, a halt, a pause, a cessation in time. And so, how joyless Jessica Simpson sounds as she runs through the motions - All night, let's rock, the party don't stop... Catch-phrases spilled out without any real conviction at all. Chanted like a room full of lapsed Catholics would drone the "Our Father".

Interestingly, what makes the exception - what is out of the box - is the public eye. The cameras. Others watching on. This is what can sublimate the banal pain of the daily grind: becoming a spectacle. Thus the magical-sparkle of synthesiser bubbles in the song's opening bars. We are lifting away from the real world.

Nevermind how heavy and laboured that "Holiday"-esque guitar riff sounds.

Regardless of all the contradiction: the implied importance of getting the official green light to have fun, wholly undercut by the denial - who cares...

(Answer? The singer, obviously, much as she attempts to effect euphoria as a panacea for the ache within...)

The song is a most polished, paradoxical mix of the joyful and the joyless. It envisages pleasure that could only come from people and emotions staying away: the central, broken down insistence to her girls: Give me room / To shake, shake, shake... Don't touch me! in other words.

Which puts me in mind of Marcello Carlin's words about Saint Etienne's "Stars Above Us":

even the temporary rooftop relief of "Stars Above Us" is tempered by the knowledge that, 14 years after "Nothing Can Stop Us," the reassuring reflex is now "nothing can touch us." The fear of being touched ("Side Streets" is remarkable; music by Tom Jobim, lyrical plot by "Robert De Niro's Waiting." The not-particularly-hidden deathwish of "Maybe I'll get it tomorrow") means that no one can touch you;

2006-09-30T16:25:00.000+10:00

This city was not built on rock n roll. No: it was built on a MOUNTAIN of paperwork. And this is rationalised society, my friends.

(This occurs to me as I sit in a Law Library. Like the man from the country, I went to beg admittance to the law. I got in, however.)

There is a grand final going on somewhere. I was in the sun when this happened. The city was bright, but somehow still. As if this day was already a memory.

2006-09-27T08:02:00.000+10:00

Better than I could have said it...

A post by Infinite Thought on the critique of capitalist female reason - why "women can't be friends under capitalism" - goes some way to putting a finger on what I found so creepy about Sam in the City's piece, "Why I Love Men":

I always knew I was the kind who got along better with the boys at birthday parties than the girls. By the time I entered university, I had become a full-fledged member of the boys' club, and it was then that I made up my mind that blokes were the best sorts of friends a girl could have. They didn't want to borrow your shoes, use your lip gloss, steal your boyfriend or compare their body fat ratio to yours - ever.

2006-09-23T06:17:00.000+10:00

Oh dear. I've become so tired that I can't feel anything. It's a little bit like my brain is wrapped in carpet.

2006-09-23T03:37:00.000+10:00

Madonna Defends Crucifixion

"Pop star Madonna has defended staging a mock crucifixion during her record-breaking Confessions world tour, saying it was not "anti-Christian, sacrilegious or blasphemous" - but a plea for people to help one another.

[....]

"She added, "I believe in my heart that if Jesus were alive today he would be doing the same thing.""

That's right. If Jesus were still around he would be doing an international stage show tour. Grossing $US193.7 million. Performing all the hits from his back catalogue. Out of tune.

2006-09-19T11:43:00.000+10:00

On being pulled in two directions

I keep wanting to declare this 'Gwen Stefani Appreciation Week' but I have to give a presentation on the Baader Meinhof gang and write an address for a rally on Saturday instead. The middle ground is so hard to find these days.

2006-09-17T14:42:00.000+10:00

Things in which I take a strange sort of pleasure

Or,

Work Blogging, part 2

1. Asking customers who have bought great mountains of items whether or not they require a bag for their groceries. It is more than clear that they do. What sort of person would even ask such a question, and yet remain impassive, as if it were sensible?

2. Arbitrarily deigning to observe the $5 minimum of EFTPOS transactions.

3. Going to great lengths to fit the greatest possible number of groceries into the smallest plastic bag that we have. Again, my expression is blank and my concentration befits that of a surgeon. The customer is confused.

4. Promenading down busy streets on sunny days while hungover, being bounced amongst pedestrians like a billiard ball, absorbing heat, colour and noise but not sense.

5. Hoisting up all my bags and parcels into a streamlined arrangement and then running like Lola for trains, trams. Adorno was right: it is alarming to see people running in city streets. But as I lope from pavement to pavement, threatening to twist my ankle because I can’t see the road in front of me in the dark, I feel, well, born to be alive.

6. Being disdainful of traffic.

-----

Theme song for the day:

Pet Shop Boys, “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”

2006-09-15T16:23:00.000+10:00

Gwen Stefani writes really good lyrics. This occurred to me after my sister's iPod threw No Doubt's "New" at me the other day. I had forgotten about this song, but I was struck at how well her consult-the-thesaurus strategy works in conveying the tension and difficulty involved in explaining just why the sheer fact of novelty is something remarkable in itself. What is it for someone to be new, Gwen? Well, they're not old, and they're certainly not familiar... er... and come to think of it, to be new is to be different, different from the former. A bunch of synonyms, and the repeated mantra driven by urgent, manic drums and guitar: You. You're new. This song is the glory of stating the obvious.

2006-09-15T15:41:00.000+10:00

Naomi Robson Makes the World a More Hilarious Place

I hap'd upon this the other night. Perhaps it is old news. I don't care. The mere thought of it now makes me smile and laugh.

2006-09-11T23:56:00.000+10:00

The Time Has Come...

The Event has released a demo of its first song, "Boys". Myspace seems to be taking its sweet time in granting us our 'featured artist' page. In the meantime, you can download the song by clicking here: The Event - Boys. Lyrics are below.

----

Boys

I see you dancing
Out on the floor
I see you dancing
Why don't you give me some more?
When we tire of everyday affairs,
This is the place that we go

Boys, you know they have all the fun
They've got tight blue jeans and mascara on
Can we go dancing to my favourite songs
'Cause I, I'd like to see them dancing

I want to go dancing
Out on the floor
Being at home is no fun anymore
Watching the boys, you know I just don’t care
So come on now, I want to see you there

Girls, is it worth your while?
They don’t want your number or your pretty smile
But some boys make you feel so good inside
That it’s fine, just to see them

Boys, you know they have all the fun
They’ve got tight blue jeans and mascara on
Can we go dancing to my favourite songs
‘Cause I, I’d like to see them dancing

You are the object
You’re the only one
Who’s having any fun
Without pretension
Or reason to care
For those who watch on

2006-09-11T19:04:00.000+10:00

There are some songs that I want to turn up so loud that they are no longer communicated only in the spectrum of sound, but rather start to push the limits and banks of the streams by which they travel towards my ears, becoming something else - not colour, not taste, but every sense at once and meaning-in-itself.

Does this make sense? The desire to be not the senses, but the thing-in-itself that produces sensation.

There's a marvellous bit in an essay from Roland Barthes' Image, Music, Text - the one that comes just after "The Death of the Author" - in which he says something about how, when listening to (Beethoven? I forget the example - I don't have the essay with me), everyone wants to be the conductor - that is, to be the whole song. He begins the piece with a comment about how people don't play piano anymore, but rather listen to recorded music - and so the instant connection between moving muscles and tendons and sound is no longer there (I'm bastardising the quote horribly, I know).

This made me reflect the other night, that the closest I ever come to escaping the always-just-missed-the-moment, reflected, second-order nature of consciousness is by playing piano or singing - that is, making music myself, producing sound... For moments at a time, I can be both object and subject!

When I feel drawn to dance, this is what drives me. And it's also what I feel when I run with pumping music in my ears at the gym: the desire to be shattered into a million pieces, to run inside the song. When I first started going to the gym, and began running in my little bubble of sensory stimulus -- I watched the TV in front of me -- music videos -- dancing, edited, cut up, sculpted people -- colourful manoeuvres, perfect products -- I thought to myself: Ah, this is the ideal that they want us to attain: to be only an image, something with only externality.

In particular at the moment, there are two songs that are just so perfect, so pure, that I could cry whenever I listen to them. The first of these is Gwen Stefani's "The Real Thing". The other is the Michael Mayer remix of The Pet Shop Boys' "Flamboyant".

I'd like to write more about these, but ... well. Not only do I not have the words, but The Event calls. No time, no time.

------------------

Addendum: There is a third song in this category, now I think about it: Jessica Simpson's "Public Affair". There will be words for this, however. Soon.

2006-09-09T22:55:00.000+10:00

And Now For Some Good News

From The Age: Pitt: I can't marry Angie

"Actor Brad Pitt says he will not marry Angelina Jolie until restrictions on gay marriage are lifted, the star said in an interview released today."

Not only attractive but ethical too! What more could you want in a celebrity couple? Brad and Angelina for King and Queen of the world! Adopt us all, great Über-folk!

Er...

In other news, one of the kids I am babysitting is reading a picture book entitled Hair in Funny Places. Poor child. At least the book has the decency to portray hormones as ugly, hairy, nasty creatures that will wreak havoc and chaos upon the body. I'm glad they are upfront about this. Run free and topless, children, while you still can...

But not while I'm babysitting or anything. Not now. I'm not that kind of babysitter...

2006-09-07T09:38:00.000+10:00

Work Blogging

Ooh, it looks like I can post from work after all. Well, let me begin by telling you that this morning was pain pain pain. Up at 6am after having (only 3 hours' worth of) dreams about not being able to get to sleep. But the sight of the Eureka tower almost made the agony of de-shelling myself from pyjamas worthwhile. It looked like a silvery-gold wafer against the pink and blue sky - like something out of Gattaca.

Meanwhile, I just got "thanks sweetie" from a customer after selling him the Herald Sun. Yugh.

[...]

Managed to master my most dreaded task: changing the paper in the EFTPOS machine. It is a fine art, but needs to be carried out with the speed and precision of a grand prix pit stop.

[...]

Other most hated small task: opening plastic bags. I cannot do it. I am fully aware of the customer's expectant eyes upon me as I slowly, slowly attempt to make an opening in something that clearly wants to stay closed. But I am all peace and serenity in the face of their impatience, quietly intoning to myself: 'now, let me seeee...'

Assorted amusing highlights have included:

- grappling with a parcel half as big as myself. My method of transporting it began with something approaching a clean and jerk - well, just the clean, really - after which I moved towards the back room via not so much a walk as a travelling squat.

- losing my new $50 security pass ten minutes after receiving it;

- spending time in a fridge wearing a t-shirt. (That is, I am wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. The fridge was not.)

But I've been playing the Pet Shop Boys' Very and Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense at inappropriately loud levels, so it's not all bad. No, it's not bad at all.

2006-09-06T14:19:00.000+10:00

New Justin Timberlake album heartbreakingly good...

2006-09-05T21:13:00.000+10:00

Agh agh agh agh agh. All I want to be is song. I'm so tired, so hungover, my brain feels heavy and immaterially light all at once. But imagine that, to come back as music: sharp, shimmery, balanced, powerful.

2006-09-04T01:16:00.000+10:00

Idiots.

Jews in fear of hardline uni groups

RADICAL left-wing groups at Melbourne universities are exploiting tensions in the Middle East to promote anti-Semitism and recruit members, according to Jewish student groups.

[....]

There have been several incidents on Melbourne campuses, particularly between the Socialist Alternative Group and university Liberal Party groups.

In one, a Liberal was grabbed by the throat and threatened. In another, security staff had to separate Students Against War and Racism and Liberal Club members waving Israeli flags.

2006-09-03T01:08:00.000+10:00

After a week or two in which I have been working - wage slaving, so to speak - after quite a long period of unemployment, I remember what it is that regular shift-work teaches you. It changes the very nature of time, shows you how to break it down so that it really can fly. Hours are worth less - they need to be, if you are to make it through the day. And even now, in what is nominally the dead of night, I can think to myself 'well, yesterday I was getting up only 4 1/2 hours from now...' In other words, even the night is broken down. I'm sure there is something lost from the immanent weight of hours.

Which puts me in mind of these bits of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness:

"The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man's consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man's immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.

[....]

Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable 'things' (the reified, mechanically objectified 'performance' of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality) : in short, it becomes space."

Incredible, no? Time collapsed into space.

(All this talk of 'whole', 'organic', 'natural' humanity makes me a bit suspicious - I'm sure Lukacs was an old romantic at heart. I'm yet to weight my inklings with any thorough exegesis of the text, however.)

2006-09-02T16:15:00.000+10:00

Warning Signs

Perhaps I do spend too much time thinking about pop culture after all. I immediately clicked this BBC headline just now:

Paris regrets Iran nuclear stance

... because the first thing that occurred to me was "Wow! I wonder what Paris Hilton has to say about the current international treatment of Iran!"

...

The next thought was, of course, "Oh. That Paris."

2006-08-31T21:48:00.000+10:00

Soon my pretties...

The Event will be making their first song available to download. Watch this space.

2006-08-30T22:22:00.000+10:00

The music that I listen to is cold. Its reverse side is melancholy, the sharpness of desire. I start to wonder: is warmth possible in music? Can it be anything other than the flipside to yearning?

Is there any music that is truly hot or human?

2006-08-26T01:58:00.000+10:00

So, I read Lukács saying this:

"Marx has often demonstrated convincingly how inadequate the 'laws' of bourgeois economics are to the task of explaining the true movement of economic activity in toto."

And now I have Toto's "Hold The Line" in my head. Sigh.

Catching a plane in 4 hours and 18 minutes. I feel increasingly like spirit without body... I am losing my material substratum, people...

2006-08-24T23:01:00.000+10:00

Strip-show Continuum

Of late I've been interested in the idea of musical continuums. It started with this ILM Haircut House thread: haircut house being a classification of music based not so much on songs' aesthetic / sonic qualities as on the venues and scenes with which they might be associated. In the case of haircut house, the sort of venue would be The Prince, and the scene would be populated with people who look like this:

People protested in the ILM thread that there was no connection at all between the sorts of songs that were being nominated - Inaya Day, Rogue Traders, Tiga, "Four to the Floor", "Drop the Pressure", etc. And of course they were right. These songs form a category, a system of meaning, as much a bunch of random of people standing at a bus stop would. Nonetheless, they are there in series, and despite the fact that the label 'haircut house' is a chain of significance that does not originate strictly in observance of songs' common aesthetic features, it is useful and meaningful as a term of classification.

Likewise, one could well define a 21st birthday/uni ball continuum, which would consist of "Put Ya Hands Up", "Love Shack", Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", "The Grease Megamix", "Footloose", "Dirrty" ... and so on. The recognition when these are played is that they are 'classic' songs: they are indicators that you and your fellow party-goers share a great deal of common cultural history, watched the same early morning video shows, had the same songs on the stereo in the common room at school, etc. They draw their meaning not only from the fact that they are predictably, relentlessly played at balls and 21sts, but also from an assumption that they bear, for the crowd, an exemplary danceability that is inextricable from the nostalgic memories that they evoke. All the same: aesthetically, "Groove Is In The Heart" and "Put Ya Hands Up" are a million miles apart. But they squarely fit within this continuum.

Sometimes, one is presented with a criteria for a new continuum that makes fundamental sense, retrospectively puts together so many connections that work so well, even though you had never tried to link these songs to the one trend. 'Yacht Rock' is a good example of this. Everyone has felt it: laughing as you realise that this new category works so perfectly, describes something you always knew existed, but just didn't have a name for.

At other times, however, new continuums manifest themselves which just will not square themselves with your pre-existing notions of the proper order of the world. And for me, tonight was such a night.

Yesterday evening, my sister and some of her classmates went to see a strip-show at Spearmint Rhino, as part of research for a play they're doing later in the semester. Apparently, by and large, most of the dances/dancers were quite boring - though some were terrifyingly athletic. She described the crowd as either 'corporate' or 'after-work'.

But apart from her description of the dancers, the dancing and the patrons of this 'gentlemen's club', what truly surprised me about the night was her description of the playlist.

Some made perfect sense - The Pussycat Dolls' "Buttons", for instance: burlesque-y stripper popstars singing about loosening their clothing - all seems to be well. Ginuwine's "Pony" was also untroubling: slinky, sexual, suggestive of writhing - check, makes sense.

Others were unexpected, but reconcilable nonetheless. Goldfrapp's "Ride a White Horse", for instance: while I am a little surprised that it could find resonance with people who actually do drugs and pursue the hedonistic life that the song proclaims, much like with Little Britain jokes, I concede that I suppose it could be enjoyed without the four layers of irony and reflexivity that makes my consumption and appreciation of the cultural artifact infinitely superior to that of those who would, like the bogans I work with, take things literally, at face value.

Some selections, however, made no sense, and will trouble me as I try to sleep.

Specifically: one dancer performed a strip act, accompanied by Rage Against The Machine's "Renegades of Funk".

...

...

???

Personally, I was flabbergasted. The song name-checks "Chief Sitting Bull, Tom Paine / Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcom X". It bears the refrain "Destroy our nations". It is performed by a band that is inescapably linked, in my mind, with Seattle and the anti-globalisation movement. They shit on about exploitation all the time. And yet, there it was: just loud, guitar-based rock for the boys that shouts cool phrases about funk and stuff. Hip.

All of which goes to demonstrate: there is nothing inherently political about aesthetic entities. There are no subversive essences. There are only continuums and meanings that come from the current situations of songs, from constellations that will shift and re-shift no end.

------

This will be the last post from me for a few days - I'm off to Sydney for the weekend to give a paper at this on Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, possibly subtitled "Reification, people!" I'm in the program and everything - I must exist. It should be an interesting few days.

2006-08-24T04:43:00.000+10:00

'Tonight The World Does Not Exist'

Part 1

So sure, we've established that I have a penchant for pop songs at the abyss. It is no secret that brushing bittersweet sharpness against the grain is something that draws me in. But all the same, there are some songs I am just not sure if it it, or if it is me. Are these sad songs? Is there really a melancholy in this? Or am I just putting it there?

The songs that I have in mind, that prompted this post, are Jessica Simpson's "Public Affair" on the one hand, and Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie", on the other. These are songs that speak of pleasure as tied to a moment in time - that is, they address 'tonight'. Before speaking about them, however, I want to write about two related, but nonetheless quite different, treatments of time in pop. I will return to Shakira and Jessica Simpson in a later post.

Tonight Is Forever

When pop songs speak of 'tonight', an answer is proclaimed: tonight! I have been waiting, and now this hallowed place in time - evening, that reserved place in what is otherwise the flow of humdrum days - has brought me the answer to my woes! Witness: Jennifer Lopez' "Waiting for Tonight"; Amber's "This Is Your Night".* Both proclaim that the moment is the answer! And moments last forever, according to this calculus. They are a sort of revolution that resolves all previous disquiet and inner turmoil. They are answers. Life, humanity, the singer's heart - these were problems, but tonight the answer, the solution has arrived. It's almost dream-like, really - desire is presented here as already having been fulfilled.

To take the above examples, J. Lo (does this name apply retrospectively?) sounds as though she has just emerged from a war zone. All she can do speak of is how bad it's been: "tossing and turning", "holding on". Amber, meanwhile, can't even believe that this blissful moment has occurred, "it's too good to be true". The paradigm shift has been so immense that she can hardly wrap her mind around this new qualitative state in which she feels "so brand new".

The key thing here is that the moment is linked with 'eternity'. For Amber, between now and the "morning light", there will be "forever and ever". A paradox wilfully affirmed, but nonetheless - in this limited space of time, there is freedom and something eternal. Meanwhile, what a gamble J. Lo has made! Literally waiting all her life for this one moment, the pay-off for years of anguish received all at once in the arms of another. She has staked everything, but tonight - thank god - it has all been gained again. (The knight of faith or what!) No mention of tomorrow, natürlich.

Because, as we all know boys and girls, the moment is not an answer. As ever, what is proclaimed in song flies in the face of that which is 'healthy' and 'sensible'. Time is fleeting, as we all know - here today, gone tomorrow.

All the same, what constitutes the jouissance, the guilty pleasure felt in listening to and believing these songs' professions, is that they fly in the face of everything sensible, of everything that reasons. We all know that tonight is but one night, temporally limited, nur eine Augenblick.

Furthermore, every sensible person knows that it is folly to hinge one's whole life on the possibility that love might instill meaning to everything else, might be the missing piece in some already-present puzzle. After all - life is not a question, love is not an answer. To believe otherwise would necessarily involve essentialism, the belief that there is some inherent meaning in life, and thus something truly unique, a qualitative core of significance, in the lover. By this reading, you have as much choice as to whether or not you will sacrifice yourself for love as Jesus did about his crucifixion. It was destiny there, and just as Jennifer Lopez knew that she "had to hold on", so Jesus went ahead with things in the Garden of Gethsemane. If we believe in a 'one', then there is fate, mystical meaning, and God is probably not dead. But alas, he is. Likewise, we are lumped with this existence before essence business, which must apply to relationships as much as it applies to anything else.

But here, with Jennifer and Amber and their emancipating lovers, we pay no heed to such good sense, to rationalized ideals. No, these are instances in which we proclaim the fantasy of meaning arriving - deus ex machina - as we meet our true love. Love should - I hear my superego tell me - be looked at practically. But aha! These songs do not speak to that function. No, they address my disavowed desires instead, and give them justification, the impossible assurance: it could be passion that sets you free.

"This Is Your Night" / "Waiting For Tonight": the shimmering, exhilerating, perfect expressions of all that could not be.

To be continued...

---

* Incidentally, one of my FAVOURITE SONGS EVER, if one was ever allowed to compose such lists. And something interesting that I turned up on Wikipedia's "Waiting For Tonight" article, after writing this post: "Another camp feels that parts of the song sound suspiciously similar to the 1996 hit "This Is Your Night" by Dutch singer Amber." I really did think I'd made two quite-random selections.

2006-08-22T00:36:00.000+10:00

More substantial post to follow soon on, among other things, 'pop songs and the denial of time'. But in the meantime, you can do two things:

1) Some background research (for the coming post - there is further viewing if you feel so inclined);

2) Pray for me as I am inevitably coerced into dancing to "Love Shack" ... Yes against my age and wisdom I am attending one more uni ball in the nether regions of Carlton. Can I handle a dancefloor in which, four years on, "Dirrty" and Fatman Scoop's "Put Ya Hands Up" are still considered to be novel? Only time will tell.

----------------------------------

(PS. The 'index' is quite low if you discount veiled references. True, it is higher than I would have thought if they are included.)

2006-08-20T13:26:00.000+10:00

Goldfrapp - Ride A White Horse

"I like dancing, at the disco, I want blisters, you're my leader."

("Lend me a whole new world
All night
Feel life
oh ooh!
When is there ever sense
To love
This world?
oh ooh!")

2006-08-19T01:17:00.000+10:00

For Those With No Philosophical Imagination

or, ‘We Are All Hezbollah’ = ‘There Is Only Us’

A commenter, Mo, on my post about Hezbollah (and the lack of wisdom in declaring that we are all, somehow, Hezbollah) has diagnosed my arguments as exemplary cases of Western narcissism. This is my response.

In smug Hegelian fashion, I am of course in agreement with this commenter on a number of points. Mo’s right: ‘leadership’ won’t come from the left in matters of finding the “the solution to humanity”.

But nor will it come from Hezbollah. And why? Because we are, quite simply, fighting different battles – none of which are that for some sort of inert ‘solution’ to humanity.

Perhaps our respective fights are sympathetic to one another. I am quite convinced that they have a relationship, in the last instance. But the Western left short-circuits and stunts itself if it cannot wrench its eyes away from the other side of the world for long enough to realise that there are things to do here, right now. (And by that I don’t mean rallies and petitions.)

Now, while I am happy, I suppose, that Hezbollah ‘won’ against Israel – they were ‘the side I was going for’ – I must admit that this is not the prime determinant of the way in which I choose to engage myself politically.

The “real struggle” is not out there somewhere. It lies, rather, with that which my commenter has already declared the death of: the “philosophical imagination in the west”. Mo neglects to make the connection, however, that it is precisely the act of pinning our identity and political agenda to the actions of Hezbollah that kills it. We cannot look to others to lead our fight.

This is even more sharply the case given that we have such a poor bag of conceptual tools when it comes to matters of sketching what our fight actually is – as seen when Mo states that it is that of finding “the solution to humanity”.

Mo accuses Daniel and I of “looking at ourselves and ourselves only”. But when the left looks at Hezbollah and states that they are one and the same thing, they are not really looking at others at all. No, all they see reflected back at themselves are their own hopes for a new saviour. I suppose this betrays the true meaning of stating that ‘we are all Hezbollah’ – it is the ultimate moment of projection. If we are all Hezbollah, it is only because we can no longer see anything that is not our own desperate desire for a path, for a way forward.

I make no apologies for stating that it is better to have some self-knowledge and reflection upon what our position is than to go running after anything and everything that looks like revolution. It is not narcissism but unacknowledged narcissism that is the danger.

I don’t think declaring symbolic solidarity with Hezbollah while declaring that we are useless, we are the inward-looking, useless West cuts much chop. There is no point in fetishising those who are ‘taking action’ in tantalisingly direct ways. Hezbollah has asserted its agency against those who would dominate, but they have done so in a way that is useful for their situation. We would be wise to learn this lesson from them, at least: that one must first begin by creating the problem at hand.

Israel is not at my door, however. No, I am located at a very different place within this global, historical structure. And I will act accordingly, with no need for the reflected light of others’ radicalism.

To be fair, of course, Mo wasn’t really responding to my post at all. He was responding to that phantom, ‘the Western left’, which no one likes. The problem is that this Western left doesn’t really exist: it’s a made-up straw man punching-bag for those people who believe that it is the dithering of intellectuals that holds back the real resistance, the real revolution. (The right uses this definition as much as the left, of course – they invented it, after all.)

Mo and I may agree on a lot of things, but the fact that s/he confused me with this mass of positions that I have not stated or supported cannot go uncommented upon. After all, what is at issue here is precisely the question of knowing what is in front of us.

2006-08-18T01:28:00.000+10:00

The New Men in My Life

It's true girls, there are some special new men that I've been spending my time with.

Hubbah-hubbah.

Hel-lo.

(I really must cease with this drag act of mine. Even I find the tone that I strike confusing.)

2006-08-17T21:08:00.000+10:00

'Pop at the Abyss' - Music that takes a compelling, thrilling joy in the embrace of the loss of control. But what is this joy?

The first part of it is lyrical. "Sugar pie honey pie... You know that I love you... I can't help myself". The sound of one shouting their weakness to the sky! No shame but rather the embrace of self-effacement. "I was defeated, you won the war." The joy and ecstacy in this, recalling the old Nietzschean saw - "He who despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises."

These lyrics embrace and affirm everything that I pit myself against, intellectually and personally. Weakness, placing oneself in slavery. Willingly opening one's arms to mauvaise foi, the capitulation to "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us ... to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us." (Foucault) What joyful seduction! Going about the absolutely ideological in the most reflexive, reflexive fashion. Knowing self-delusion. "... love at first sight? It's an illusion, I don't care." The invitation to others - here I am, I am weak with you, I am open with you, and against myself I accept all that you will do to me. "Baby, I feel like I'm falling in love." "Tell me lies."

Finally, to dance to this. What else is dancing but the attempt to embody the song, to literally be a part of the rhythm?

What else is this music but a challenge - 'I fear not objectification, for I have already objectified myself'? (Except I am too enraptured in my own lack of agency to even bother making any sort of challenge explicitly - challenge is the realm of those who jostle, who still fight, whereas I - oh, I having given up - I am slipping away too deliciously to even think about you...)

Of course, at base this is all old business. The masochist as final architect of their own pain, the one who watches the one who watches...

But what joy, what joy.

2006-08-16T13:15:00.000+10:00

It is possible, then, to suffer from a hangover of the heart. The same grey nausea persists, and 'hair of the dog' is just as much a temptation for those fools who would choose to defer the pain, and confront it at double the strength later on.

2006-08-15T03:42:00.000+10:00

Reasons for Believing that Being Content Is Justified Behaviour

aka The Logics of Rationalised Contentment

Part one in a (semi-regular) series of examples

1. Sam in the City: Guess who's having less sex than you?

So, you're having problems? So is everyone. You are part of a phenomenon! You are not alone. Don't hide from your problems. Problems are good and natural - and ultimately, what we all have in common!

Someone I know had a problem, and this is what she said about it. Lots of people feel like this!

There are averages. You can compare yourself to the average. Some people are way above average! But you'd expect that they would be, wouldn't you?

Here is what a celebrity said! I know you'd usually think of celebrities of being really different to you, but actually, they also have problems too.

It's funny, isn't it - we both think about this problem a lot, right? Go on, we all do it.

2006-08-15T02:37:00.000+10:00

Tonight only!

2006-08-15T02:27:00.000+10:00

Beautiful

The Scissor Sisters' "I Don't Feel Like Dancing"

2006-08-13T20:55:00.000+10:00

Hiss boo, adjusting to normal life after a particularly large weekend. Like walking indoors after being outside in very bright sunshine.

I must learn to make better friends with that uneasy acquaintance of mine, time. We don't get along very well. Oh well.

And now, to compose my definitive statement on the Australian media and political apathy. Hmm. Perhaps it would help if I began by pulling out some of my hair first... Yes, that should do the trick. Less hair. And then I begin work.

2006-08-10T21:55:00.000+10:00

On the question: Why Be Hezbollah?

If and when protestors and those on the left claim that 'we are all Hezbollah' - what do they mean? In what sense do they claim this identity between Hezbollah - a local resistance group, literally the 'Party of God' - and themselves?

Obviously, the phrase 'we are all' identifies some element in Hezbollah that is able to be made universal. I suggest that this element is the figure of resistance. The argument might run something like this: America seeks, via Israel, to set up a whole chain of military bases and sympathetic regimes throughout the Middle East. They are doing this because they wish to gain greater control over the oil reserves in the region, which is of particular importance to America at this moment, because China and India are economically ascendant. America must therefore employ its current military superiority in order to ensure its future economic dominance. In doing so, it pays no heed to the sovereignty of other countries. Against this, then, Hezbollah are enacting the right to defend one's homeland. They are, one could say, resisting the imperialist aggression of America-Israel.

The reasons for which socialists may find an affinity between their own project and Hezbollah's is obvious if one subscribes to this account of events. But Daniel at Different Maps disputes the validity and strategic wisdom of making such a close affiliation with the Party of God. He draws out the dangers:

"Communism cannot offer ideological support to political Islam, without simultaenously effecting to castrate itself in the process. Political Islam ultimately holds to a universalist vision of society fundamentally hostile to Communist ideals."

The question, then, is this. Does Hezbollah's role as a figure of resistance provide sufficient justification for us to stand by it, even though its wider political program is largely antithetical to ours? Even though it is not always wise, but submits to the tit-for-tat imperative and blindly launches rockets into civilian areas?* Can we support Hezbollah simply because it is an agent that resists, and then disregard any other features of this agent?

Or is it the case that the downtrodden left is drawn merely to any example that it can find of resistance, simply because it is so much at a loss for figures of hope? (Discussion in the comments section of another Different Maps post suggests that George Galloway might provide another such compromising figure of "swaggering" anti-US virility.) Do we imagine that against this Goliath, any small boy with a sling and a rock will do?

Ultimately, this is not a question about Hezbollah at all. It is one about ourselves and the places to and reasons for which we look, not only for hope, but in order to conceive of the project that we must take up. It is about not only the methods that we choose, but also the very task that is at hand.

The fast and uncritical embrace of Hezbollah can serve as a trap for our imagination, causing us to be content with a solely reactive role in world politics. After all, to embrace Hezbullah, merely because they are fighting against that which we have determined to be bad, is slave morality par excellence. There is every chance, I feel, that we prejudge the fight and make it always already unwinnable by aligning ourselves with groups, based only on the criteria that they fight against 'a common enemy'.

Socialists must fight, but only after reconceiving the battle.

Daniel closes his post with the following statement:

"Since 9/11 the European left has been lurching confusedly from crisis to crisis, and failing to develop any significant political momentum. The reason for this simple - it has been fighting the wrong war, and in the wrong way. Politically esnared within an analytic scenario of an imaginary force against a fantastic object, it has accordingly found itself incapable of delivering anything more than a hysterical moralistic critique, when what has been needed is a true political critique - subtle, cool and mature enough as to be able locate precisely the various, and very real social points, at which we are ourselves complicit in what we would attack. Only in this way can we seriously hope to stop anything at all."

In other words, the problem may lie precisely in the fact that we are looking to figures of national resistance in the first place.

"... it takes courage to say the truth about oneself, the defeated. Many who are persecuted lose the ability to recognise their flaws. To them persecution seems the greatest injustice. The persecutors are, by definition, the bad guys; they, the persecuted, are persecuted because of their goodness. But this goodness has been beaten, defeated and frustrated, and so it was a weak goodness, a poor, unsustainable, unreliable goodness; for it won't do to grant goodness its weakness, like rain its wetness. To say that the good were defeated, not because they were good, but because they were weak, that takes courage."
- Bertolt Brecht, "Five Difficulties In Writing The Truth"

-----

* (Draw me into no debates about 'proportionality' on this. Obviously Israel has been far-and-above the most amoral, barbaric destroyer of innocent civilian life. This goes without question, but does not, to my mind, make Hezbullah's launching of rockets into civilian areas for its own sake a smart move. One must give the Israeli propaganda machine nothing. There is almost never, if ever, justification, either moral or strategic, for the destruction of civilian targets and life. Lenin's Tomb disputes the claim that Hezbollah's targets were civilian and blindly chosen, I might add.)

2006-08-10T14:30:00.000+10:00

Rationalised Contentment

Mark k-punk writes on the reflexive impotence that characterises the attitude of British youth. They are not merely apathetic or cynical about the state of the world, he writes, as

"they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And guess what? They probably know that too."

I have been wondering what sort of worldview would account for the apparent apathy that exists amongst middle-class Australians. To engender any sort of passionate engagement or concern in conversation with these resigned people often feels like a battle not just lost, but taken up rudely, at the wrong time, when really, one shouldn't be so vulgar and naive as to talk about these things, when after all, it is abundantly clear - is it not? - that

everyone is self-interested, caring only about interest rates and the daily grind;
we can't do anything, because this is just a game played by politicians, and they are only interested in power;
it has always been like this, there is no alternative.

If this is the doctrine - and I believe it is - then obviously it is - like reflexive impotence - a self-fulfilling prophecy. It needs a greater sophistication and development of analysis, however. We need to know how it interacts with outer-suburban hedonism, with Sunrise, talkback/breakfast radio, The Biggest Loser and The mX - and other key nodes of Australian culture.

And a name for this ideology? 'Rationalised contentment'. For if we were naturally happy, then we would not need to remark so much on why it is that we are content. The Australian middle-class does not merely justify being content. It seeks to justify the very assertion, that it is content. Desperately. Again and again. Because I'm in a good place right now, you know? I am happy being single / in a non-monogamous relationship / working casually / being a mother / being a working mother / being a stay-at-home mum / with a new career / playing the dating game / renting / with my body / just being me / ...

More to come...

2006-08-07T21:52:00.000+10:00

Here is an interview with British Respect MP George Galloway, as shown on Rupert Murdoch's Skye News. It's quite remarkable - Galloway doesn't hold back at all in pointing out the biases of the questions given to him. This guy has a steely nerve. If only Lateline was more like this! Or Sunrise or 60 Minutes, as would be the more appropriate comparisons.

2006-08-07T16:30:00.000+10:00

Žižek!

I saw this film yesterday as part of the Film Festival. It exceeded my expectations by far.

Valuable lessons - Žižek's statement on what philosophy provides, that it is not playing with discussion of absolutes that we know we can never reach, some search for 'Truth'. Rather, to his mind, it is a re-staging of questions. (So - to pose a question pertinent to my own present situation: 'what does it mean to be politically engaged?')

Žižek stated himself that he considers his most interesting or important work to be the first few 'big books' that he put out - I forget the exact list, but they included The Ticklish Subject, The Parallax View - whereas all the rest is just 'little bits'. This statement gives some perspective to the perception that I have often heard in web discussions about Žižek's work, that he 'increasingly disappoints' by putting out fluff and re-workings / cut-and-pastings of his own jokes. But just as telling is his statement that he wishes to perform some sort of academic suicide in the public eye. I wonder to what extent his in-your-face rehash tendencies could be considered in this light.

Žižek stated that he sees his role as that of a sort of analyst, thwarting the expectations of those who would approach him as a political sage with all the answers. He seeks to prompt his audiences to re-examine the assumptions and desires with which they went to him.

I must admit that a personal highlight of the film for me was the analysis/interpretation that Zizek performed upon the toy-town that his son had left set up in his apartment. Specifically, Žižek pointing to the feminine power that had been established: there was female Lego sentinel set up on a tower, watching over the other toys. His son had given this female sentinel a companion to keep her company, as he didn't want her to be lonely. There was a "natural lesbian progression" at work in this, Žižek observed.

This produced the best sort of laughter in me - one in which the tone of the joke is not merely personal, merely intellectual, but both at once - laughter at the joyful recognition of truth. I wanted to hug Žižek! But of course, I would never dream of doing this really. At one of the conferences, a fan really did give Žižek a hug, and it was this - more than Žižek's monstrous, sweaty appearance, more than any reference to shit - that was the most abject part of the film, and the only part in which I cringed.

The other most valuable lesson of the film was, of course, the violence of love. A favourite topic of mine.

2006-08-05T02:57:00.000+10:00

Holy Shit

From The Age:

"Two satellite images show the same area of Beirut before and after Israeli bombardment. The image on the left was taken July 12, and the image on the right was taken July 31."

2006-08-05T01:39:00.000+10:00

All I really want to do is listen to The Blue Nile's "The Downtown Lights" over and over again. The song is so sad, yet so beautiful - its pain is made into joy. Of late my penchant for 'pop songs at the abyss' (thanks Tim) has been hindered by my finding many songs too genuinely affecting. Girls Aloud's "Whole Lotta History", Gwen Stefani's "Cool"... The sentiments are sometimes just too accurate. So I listened to dubstep for awhile. Gentle, welcoming, emotionless dubstep. But I may be coming back to pop.

Sometimes I consider commencing my Honours year instantly, just to give myself something more interesting to make chit-chat about in boring conversations with strangers. For similar reasons, I decided against doing a subject on Ecofeminism when I was in third year. It seemed too much to explain. People might think that I wear biodegradable sanitary pads or something.

Aah. The downtown lights...

On High Rotation

Pet Shop Boys - Flamboyant (Michael Mayer Kompakt Mix)
Kym Mazelle - Young Hearts Run Free (now, let's not start reading this biographically)
Cassie - Me & U
Pinch - Qawwali
Japan - Gentlemen Take Polaroids
Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelujah (yes, the Finnish entry from Eurovision '06: Middle Earth trolls sing Spinal Tap-esque glam rock)
Beyonce - Deja Vu (almost 'too funky' - but it's grown on me. Good thing someone let the fire hyrdrant loose on Beyonce before she went kaboom at the end)
Luomo - The Present Lover
The Event - Boys (I'm going to make this stupid thing work if it kills me)
The Smiths - Bigmouth Strikes Again
Skream - 0800 Dub
Roisin Murphy - If We're In Love

2006-08-03T21:20:00.000+10:00

Don't worry - I fixed the glaring typo on the poster below before printing. Leaving out the 'w' in 'Brunswick', so that it became 'Brun - sick': a Freudian slip that reveals my repressed inner-eastern suburban disdain for actual, you know, workers, and people of ethnic origin, naturally. As my sister said when I told her this: "Oh, you have got to try this! Goat's cheese and pear [darling]."*

Putting together flyers in the old-fashioned way is quite good fun. 'Satisfying' would be the better word, actually. Ending up with a tangible block of bold, well-designed slips.** Not to mention the process of putting things through the guillotine. That's what the distribution of information on the internet misses out on: putting your hands on things, seeing them in a delimited way. And then devoting hours to travelling time... Printing requiring leg work, for better or worse.

It's a pity the ISO - and indeed most Socialist groups around these parts - aren't more, well, cyber. Selling print newspapers and giving out photocopied flyers: I mean, sure it's valuable to get out of one's 'comfort zone' (ugh what a phrase, its horror could never be constrained, no matter how many quotation marks I use) and be present in the city or, er, Carlton, lest someone wants to know more. But by and large, the truth should be told, that I think we look both silly and implausible when standing around like this. Petitions and rallies and shouting and ... It seems so freaking old-fashioned and inefficient. And 19th century. And reactionary. Best to treat it like compulsory school dancing classes, I think: learning to dance was never the actual aim, merely something the school pretended we were doing while they knew all along that it was the bonds that came from the exercise that were important.

My ideal revolutionary army, were I to found one, would of course look something like this:

* The 'darling' was silent, but present all the same.

** The credit for the design does not lie only with me, I might add - I had the help of a certain Melbourne University Art History student, who shall remain nameless.

2006-08-03T02:01:00.000+10:00

2006-08-02T00:54:00.000+10:00

I think my post of last night could best be summarised with the phrase: I need to read more. You know how the stomach will eventually begin digesting the body's own organs if it isn't fed? My brain works in a similar way. When I neglect to give my mind new and difficult things to process, it soon turns upon itself, tearing into every facet that I can perceive of my personality. Its critical faculties must munch on something, even if the only thing on the menu is itself. It is not long before it effectively starts eating its own excrement: that is, it begins criticising the very fact of my being self-critical. So. Some Jelinek reading is in order. Mmm, Jelinek.

Stupid super-ego. Silly aggressive death-instincts, freed by the dissolution of my Oedipus complex. If I had one at all, that is. You know the drill - women never developing a conscience because they were never threatened with the removal of their phallus. Ho-hum.

(I challenge The Age's his-and-hers blogs to cover that!)

2006-08-01T02:07:00.000+10:00

Of late I have often been assuring my friends, "don't worry, I'm not that sort of socialist."

But now I'm starting to worry. Perhaps I am that sort! I am hard-pressed to recall why I joined the ISO earlier in the year. Or to give an account of why being part of a socialist group is my answer to my internal imperative to "get political, political, I wanna get political, let's get political..." Those times that I have attempted to sell Socialist Workers, for instance, I have wanted to wear a big badge saying 'I'm Skeptical'. But then what good would my skepticism do? Certainly none for my image, if this is what I am worried about.

Was I really so swept away by the thought of the glamour of reading and discussing Lukács with people who want to draw practical lessons from these texts? And apply them? Was it all about the card and the gesture of taking a stand?

None of which stops me, of course, from giving a talk / hosting a forum thingo with 'these people' (she says, distancing herself from the group of which she is part) in a few weeks, entitled "'You can't change anything except the channel!' The Australian media and the production of political apathy." Unfortunately, at this stage that title is just about all that I have. Hmm. Maybe I have become (or 'am'?) one of those people that I used to lambast - those that speak about things that they know nothing about. Well. There's only one thing to do about that, isn't there? I need to read!

Which is, of course, why I am posting on my blog. Er...

2006-07-31T22:12:00.000+10:00

Eight seconds into the Scissor Sisters' new track, "Don't Feel Like Dancing", there is a melodious tom fill. Suddenly, all is well in the world.

Which reminds me, I was able to make my first use of the term 'scissor sister' in everyday conversation on the weekend. While working my first shift at new job, being trained by my ex, at least five people asked if we were sisters (to which the answer, by the way, is no, we are narcissists). We laughed indulgently most of the time and avoided the subject. But one guy was persistent in his questioning, and my ex gave him the confusing answer: "Well, I suppose you could say we are a kind of sister". The questioner looked bamboozled, so I filled in the rest: "Scissor sisters". And all was clear! And compromising for all involved.

PS. My apologies for the diagram, for anyone who had the folly of following that Wikipedia link. It's true! It is unnatural! Er...

2006-07-28T05:56:00.000+10:00

I know it's my own fault for reading crap like this, but I would like to state publicly my real dislike of The Age's love and sex column, Sam in the City. Everything abominable about banal, space-filling, life-issues column writing is distilled in this blog. As if the mere existence of mainstream paper-endorsed blogs wasn't bad enough. "Samantha Brett, author of Luv 'n Txt invites you to share your thoughts with Australia's 4.7 million singles. Here you'll find stories, news and tips blended with tales from Melbourne's dating scene." Please, kill me now.

2006-07-19T00:30:00.000+10:00

Grumble grumble. We are not happy creatures, we readers and writers of blogs. I like to imagine that I am going along the "long, slow, dismantling of the accreted wounds and habits that we are" (thank you k-punk), but yes, it is slow and it is long. And it is bound up with things that are ideological through and through. Like love. Ah, when I say the word then sometimes I spit venom. So this is why people become Buddhist. Renunciation probably does seem easier than the constant, reasoned interrogation of the self. To always be two, to be looking back upon oneself... Well.

2006-07-18T00:47:00.000+10:00

A Recommendation

I saw I Am My Own Wife at the Malthouse tonight. It was unbelievably good. You must go and see it. You must.

Write-up in The Age

2006-07-01T15:08:00.000+10:00

Must-hear single of 2006: Nelly Furtado, "Maneater". It is a giant track. It makes me want to dance in the hugest, most strident way possible. It is produced by Timbaland, with drums that make me punch the air and press every ounce of energy outwards.

(Its video does it no justice, however. Just Nelly Furtado floating around in a basement somewhere while looking for her cat. Yes, her actual cat. And for some reason there are lots of people there who start dancing with her. But not in the giant! mechanical! piston-like! way that the song demands. It was a wasted opportunity, to say the least.)

The album, Loose, doesn't even come out in this land-that-time-forgot until the 10th of July, so I don't know when we'll see this single. But when it does - I will have my dance ready (the song urges such giant movements, you see, that I run an even greater risk than usual of looking like a muppet while dancing).

Anyway, look forward to it. It will be big.

[In other news: still writing essays, ho-hum.]

2006-06-22T21:59:00.000+10:00

Good news.

Regular readers and friends will recall that there was an essay that I got a twelve-month extension for, yet never handed in, on the topic of "The development and extension of Freud's ideas in Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I"". It was the cause of much angst (very much). Foolishly, I re-enrolled in the subject this semester. I have nearly pulled out all my hair while working on it.

Well?

It's done.

I sent it off to my lecturer this morning. That was the last piece of assessment for my Arts degree. There was dancing and whooping. I was tempted to pull my shirt over my head and run around the house with my arms in the air (too much soccer). In any case, regardless of what any Althusserian may tell you , I am now free.

Well, apart from these two small essays that I need to write for my German diploma. But after that death of the Freudian-Lacanian mammoth, these ones are a certainty.

2006-06-19T11:41:00.000+10:00

I've just made a new mix cd, which I'm quite happy with. It was partially inspired by seeing Annie the other week, and the rest came from my researching an essay on Freud and Lacan (yes, that essay, faithful readers. I'm making progress, don't you worry about me.) I've also been thinking about masochism, as my next essay is on Oedipalisation in Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Annie has this throwaway track called "Wedding". I always thought of it as being a filler track on the end of an album. Anyway, when she performed it the other week, she introduced it as being about "love and marriage and commitment and everything that is evil like that". While singing, she made gunshot actions with her pointed fingers in time with the "I do I do I do"s in the song. It made an otherwise cutesy song most sinister. Particularly seeing as though Annie's music is bittersweet on her albums, whereas the live performance transformed it into something rather trippy and disconcerting.

So, with this and the death drive in mind - all those aggressive instincts bound up with love, and set loose when we have to give our libidinal objects up - I present to you:

Love and Aggression

a DJ Moley Mole production

1. Annie - Wedding

2. Portishead - All Mine

3. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Trust In Me

4. Burial - Distant Lights

5. Depeche Mode - It's No Good

6. Iggy Pop - China Girl

7. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Melt!

8. The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs

9. Britney Spears - I'm A Slave 4 U

10. Garbage - #1 Crush

11. The Shangri-Las - I Can Never Go Home Anymore

12. Japan - Gentlemen Take Polaroids

13. Luomo - What Good

14. Morissey - The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get

15. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Obsession

16. The Police - Every Breath You Take

17. Air - How Does It Make You Feel?

--

I am particularly pleased with how literally one has to take Britney's profession of her slavery when she is placed next to "Venus in Furs". Likewise, "Obsession" makes "Every Breath You Take" just that little bit more joyfully creepy. And I do enjoy the conversation that's going on between Iggy and Siouxsie - the China girl talks back! And tells him to melt.

And the Shangri-Las? Well, these libidinal structures aren't compatible with the family, you see. Even that profession of love for the mother is rather excessive, don't you think...?

Ah, my studies make me quite perverse.

2006-06-16T03:02:00.000+10:00

Oh dear god no...

From The Age:

KEITH Windschuttle, a leading protagonist in the history and culture wars, has been appointed to the ABC board, further beefing up its right-wing credentials.

I think I am going to vomit on my keyboard. What can we do about this? This country is going to shit... Would a petition help, do you think? No, me neither. But there must be something...

2006-06-15T05:29:00.000+10:00

oh dear i have just read my archives, my friends' archives, their links, the age website, picked my head, felt despair go around at least four discreet spirals,, ... this is horrible. mother, take me back in...

(apologies for gross references. i'm writing/procrastinating on an essay on psychoanalysis. the word 'auto-eroticism' flows from my fingers so easily these days. i attempted to psychoanalyse the child that i babysit. i confess.)

2006-06-15T02:43:00.000+10:00

I just noticed that there is a barely-noticable, but obviously affecting, super-high harmony on top of the chorus in the Veronicas' "4Eva" - above the main two voices. Is it a harmonic? I'm not sure. But it made me think of this rather incredible interview I read a few weeks ago about Mark "Spike" Stent, who has mixed - well, every giant pop star, really, including Gwen Stefani, the Veronicas, the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Bjork... and Madonna, of course. There is a science of pop-music. Those three minutes that blow you apart were put together on equipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds by people that have the sorts of technical skills otherwise necessary for building robots to reach Mars, to perform micro-surgery via the internet. But instead, they are compressed and, via the structures of music, they are used to deliver so many hits to your aural senses in every second that you are left only with confusion, and emotion. It all goes too fast for intellectual breakdown and comprehension - much like a simple thought for someone who is stoned. The elements go past so quickly that it seems profound, immense.

Addendum: counterposed to Stent's method and that article are these comments by Burial in this interview. All the same, note how both Stent and Burial emphasise 'feel'. Don't be fooled by this talk of science, ladies and gentlemen, we have Romantics on our hands!

2006-06-10T01:32:00.000+10:00

I detest I detest I detest, this zombie that I so easily become when the internet is within reach again. Procrastination. Deferral. Deferral of what? Deferral of ... Freedom? Or work? Hiding in the burrow of my study, assuming the pose of work-doing - hey, I'm at a keyboard - but looking at everything except the books next to me. The internet allows one to become passive, a conduit for text, with no need to ever engage a core, focussed thought-process. And so I become blank and numb when taken away from the computer after sitting for hours on end, sucking down everything that I can get my eyes and my clicks on. The world barely seems to be infront of me, after a long session. I have to drag myself everywhere, I become so dependent on stimulus - the act of clicking: 'give me more, give me more, postpone it a little longer, one of these pages must hold the answer'.

2006-06-08T14:49:00.000+10:00

So, Ted Baillieu has come out (no pun intended) in favour of same-sex civil unions: "Baillieu backs gay unions".

Mr Ballieu told ABC radio he supported "the notion of there being a civil union of sorts, which registers relationships". [....] But there should be a clear separation between gay civil unions and marriage, which he called an institution that "needs to be protected and preserved".

What on earth does this mean? 'Protected and preserved'? Has anyone in this entire 'debate' - either here or abroad - ever actually explained what these rubbish catchphrases mean? 'Preserve the sanctity of marriage' and so on. It is taken for granted that gay unions are a threat, that the more they start to look like our, traditional marriages, the more they will potentially... What? I don't follow the logic of this. I don't know what outcome is being threatened. The annihilation or dissolution of heterosexual marriage, amidst a sea of ersatz gay counterfeits?

Perhaps a representative selection of heterosexual marriages could be moved to a zoo or a wildlife preserve and kept there, just in case the wild, natural, man-and-woman-in-the-church variety someday becomes extinct. Would this serve to 'protect and preserve' the institution? I'm sure the Greens would get behind a straight wildlife preserve. It might be our only prospect of a bipartisan approach on the issue.

2006-06-05T18:54:00.000+10:00

Structures

2006-06-04T01:28:00.000+10:00

Wasting your time

Getting informed?

A most interesting article on 'grups', aka 'indie yuppies', hap'd upon while poking about Dissensus. Well-worth a read:

"Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood"

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

2006-06-02T20:12:00.000+10:00

Nearly there...

I should be back from this rather long hiatus shortly. I have the devil of broadband internet access nearby me now... Will it be my download or my saviour?*** Only time will tell.

In the meanwhile, I don't understand it at all, but I've been listening to the Breezeblock set that is linked here. It's really something.

Longtime readers will be pleased to hear that I handed in an essay the other week. Once this happens a few more times, I'll be able to dedicate myself to my other callings. But until then, I won't have much for your eyes. Bis später dann, aber nicht zu spät!

[***Addendum: that sentence was supposed to say, 'will it be my downfall or my saviour'. I've left that rather telling typographical slip there, as I think it gestures at what the answer will ultimately be...]

2006-04-22T04:47:00.000+10:00

“Feel my heartbeat now… somehow”

The best pop songs: express this contained amazement at total loss of control.

2006-03-04T00:35:00.000+11:00

You want filler material?

... here's filler material: a review from Amazon.com of Ciara's Goodies. There is no need to say anything much about it: it is its own parody. Hilarity itself.

THERE AINT ANY GOODIES HERE, February 9, 2006

Reviewer: SOUTHERN ROCK 4 EVER - See all my reviews

I WAS SO SURPRISED THAT A HORRIBLE SINGER LIKE CIARA WAS NOMINATED FOR A GRAMMY.SHE IS ONE OF THE WORST SINGERS OF ALL TIME AFTER J LO,BRITNEY,ASHLEE AND CHRISTINA.THIS ALBUM IS PURE DRIVEL AND FULL OF FILLER MATERIAL.overrated with a capital O.AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE.GET ANY PINK FLOYD ALBUM INSTEAD.

You can't help but feel that they kind of missed the point.

2006-02-14T22:09:00.000+11:00

The Province of Faceless Bureaucrats

Those MPs in opposition to the legalisation of the drug RU486 (Mifepristone) are increasingly desperate. Perhaps they sensed that arguing against the removal of the Health Minister's control of the drug by focusing on the immorality/unacceptibility of abortion was bound to fail. After all, abortion is already legal in this country (ignoring some technicalities in state legislation that convention usually overrides); and besides - this bill isn't about abortion anyway, it's about which body is best-placed to judge the merits and safety of RU486: the Health Minister, or the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).

So, they have shifted the focus of their arguments.

It seems that the new argument to make against the bill is something along the lines of 'we don't want shady, unaccountable bureaucrats making decisions like these'. John Howard, for instance, has stated that what is important here is "the principle that important decisions affecting the community should be made by people who are directly accountable to the community"; Tony Abbott has stated that the bill is effectively a "no confidence vote" in ministers; and similarly, the Nationals' De-Anne Kelly believes that it is better for politicians to have control over the drug than "bureaucrats in a back alley". From yesterday's Age:

"The Australian people want to hold governments and ministers accountable," Mrs Kelly said.

"It comes down to do you support ministerial accountability or do you want to relinquish decision-making to faceless public servants."

[....]

"This is not a vote in favour of RU486, this is a vote of confidence in a minister — of any political colour in any government."

What these people forget is that decision making in this country is already the province of faceless ministers - or so the Howard government would have us believe. How many times have the Prime Minister, Amanda Vanstone or Mark Vaile - to mention but a few examples - escaped censure for their mistakes, laziness or straight out deceptions by claiming that 'they weren't told by their department'? If we were to take the actions of the government as our guide, then we would have to conclude that it is acceptable for unaccountable bureaucrats to:

take us to war on a set of fabrications;
to kick people out of the country or incarcerate them indefinitely with no real justification;
to tell nasty lies to the Prime Minister about asylum seekers throwing their children into the sea when their boat was sinking (kind of convenient, hey, given that this story won the Liberals the 2001 election and all - but still the PM maintains that he never knew this claim was false);
to pay almost $300 million in kickbacks to a regime that is considered so brutal and dangerous that we were warranted to invade it only months later...

but that it is not acceptable for public servants to freely use their expertise to judge whether or not Mifepristone, a drug which is in use in most European countries and the U.S., should be made available to Australian women.

Faceless bureaucrats! Watch out for them. They lurk in the back alleys and offices of the public service, always looking out to make robotic, automatic decisions that devalue the sanctity of human life.

But if you do spot one, oh politicians, then there is no need to panic. In fact, you may be in luck: these critters, though sinister and faceless, are invaluable if you need someone to take a fall for you.

Lest the public realise that you, too, are unacccountable!

Bureacrats making decisions: don't have a face.

Tony Abbott, Health Minister: "I've got one".

John Howard, Prime Minister: could he too be under their sway?

---------------

Addendum

From a post by Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett on the Webdiary, I include this rather interesting breakdown of the vote on the RU486 bill, which was passed in the Senate a few days ago. Of particular note is the section on gender.

Breakdown of vote by Party: Liberal: in favour, 17 against.
Labor: in favour, 7 against.
National/CLP: 2 in favour, 3 against.
Democrat: 4 in favour, 0 against. Green 4 in favour, 0 against. Family First: 1 against.

Breakdown of vote by Gender: Male: 21 in favour, 25 against.
Female: 24 in favour, 3 against.

Breakdown of vote by State/Territory: ACT: 1 for, 1 against.
NSW: 6 for, 6 against.
NT: 2 for, 0 against.
Qld: 6 for, 6 against.
SA: 9 for, 3 against.
Tas: 7 for, 5 against.
Vic: 7 for, 4 against.
WA: 7 for, 3 against.

2006-02-14T16:19:00.000+11:00

When stupid people say stupid things, part one:

As reported in The Age:

LIBERAL MP Danna Vale has raised the prospect of Australia becoming a Muslim nation, warning "we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence".

As five conservative Coalition women promoted a compromise amendment to keep the fate of abortion drug RU486 in politicians' hands, Mrs Vale said she had read that the Imam at Sydney's Lakemba mosque had predicted Australia would be Muslim in half a century.

"I didn't believe him at the time. But … when you actually look at the birthrate, when you look at the fact that we are … aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 a year — a guesstimate," Mrs Vale said.

"You multiply that by 50 years — that's 5 million potential Australians we won't have here."

Truly, the moronic hoard of MPs that sit in the Federal Houses of Parliament is the greatest blight on the hope that anything worthwhile might come of public politics in this country. I know of nothing more depressing than listening to the proceedings of Parliament. It is dominated by boors. Here is the slather from the mouth of but one of them.