We have new product from Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, better known by her stage name M.I.A. Mathangi was released late 3 days ago on 1 November 2013 after lots of stops and starts. It is now streamed online via YouTube. In a review for Vice.com, Ayesha A. Siddiqi states; M.I.A. is "sampling all the nonwhiteness of her global south palate. She doesn’t just traffic in Otherness, she revels in it". I totally get where Ayesha is coming from, and going to. The readership of Vice.com are the ones that need introducing to the global south. But I think describing M.I.A as part of the view from the palisades of Williamsburg is missing the fact that she is the window. Maya is bringing the noize and making it better for everyone.
The world M.I.A is reporting back from for the readers of Vice.com is so further on from what Ayesha terms "writing nursery rhymes for post-colonial angst", which she covers with a simple label: "diaspora". But the sins of origin live on in the scattering of souls across a map of borders and barriers, passports and facial identification.
In the audio of M.I.A we are moving through the sound window with the true migrators. The clandestine and digital of a global movement that are throwing their bodies against the walls of Europe, Riyadh and the Rio Grande and at the same time reading newspapers on free wifi in Singapore between shifts and begging on trains with an iPhone in the pocket in Stockholm. Against this movement, race is the post-state default of identity in the fragmenting USA. Post-colonial angst comes with passport stamps and the domestic staff sleeping in the garage. What M.I.A is giving us is a celebration of possibilities not a reflection of failures. This celebration is a fountain of original content beaten out on pirated software and broken instruments, the chaos and broken chains that inspire the likes of Vice.com. But such an organization cannot become part of this culture because that would destroy the barrier that makes exchange possible. So when Ayesha writes "The packaging doesn’t undermine the message; it is the message," this applies as well to the media pyramid that delivers "worldtown" to the masses amid the meltdown of the reality they are always trying to second guess. if you doubt this reading just witness the loss-of-context by Vice in Jihadists or Boredom? The Choices Aren't Great for Syria's Kurdish Refugees where civil war just seemed to happen - sans the redrawing of the Middle East since 9/11 by the present Imperial Power.
I like to think I am part of this inevitable meltdown. I grew up a white male in a black country located in Asia (Australia). I latched on to the first global movement of transience I could find. Back in 1995 this was the Rainbow/Rave Coalition that recruited the disenchanted from all social classes and gave them a seasonal trail that stretched from Tasmania to Varanasi to Stockholm to Rio. Today this vision has been diluted in the west by the hipster herd. The voice of the anti-WTO riots of 1999-2001 was its political high water mark.
But today, if one steps ahead of the crowd, made possible by such windows as those created by M.I.A, then one can access and even participate in a growing culture of true Worldtown. Welcome to the post-state planet.
On a large screen projected onto a wall, a body assumes postures surrounded by sharp lines and hard edges, sheer right angles create the effect of broad cross-hatching or boxes. To the right and left large wall screen projections drags the viewer down abandoned corridors, by doorways that open to empty classrooms, past deserted desks and ancient specimen cases. The school is closed, but the cleaner remains. The sound of footsteps fills the space, footsteps and the grind of trolley wheels. The relentless head-height corridor and classroom scans unwind to the left and right. Straight ahead is the Butoh stillness of a body trapped by the architecture that surrounds it. The sound of footsteps sets a hypnotic rhythm, which after a time begins to be mirrored in the breathing of the viewer.
Gabriel Bohm Calles’ Run With The Heart of the Blind at Umeå School of Art is a room size, triptych video installation that explores and questions important concepts of movement and space, the body and architecture, along with the themes of discipline and control.
The School is an architecturally constructed space that performs a defining role in the lives of millions of people. In Run With The Heart Of The Blind school corridors, the long rectangular prisms that do not bend (literally and metaphorically) are blistered by dozens of glass panes that allow visual access to other rooms. These rooms are empty classrooms, closed in by low ceilings, small doors and beige flooring. In these spaces Bohm Calles performs exaggerated maneuvers in slow motion, often with cleaning utensils; mops, dusters, brooms. In each sequence the body of Bohm Calles occupies a foreground position in the inflexible extended rectangle of the corridor, time flows away into the distant background of the space. We the visitor/viewer share the same space visually with the body, as we are at equal head height with Bohm Calles, we see the intimate contrast between the soft form of the body and the building-sized box in which it and we are packed.
The tasks performed by people in architectural spaces are most often regulated by the space itself. The classroom is the perfect example of the regulated space in form and purpose, and one that we have all experienced. The classroom is utilitarian in form and function, divided by desks, chairs, and tables for working, with the relatively large teacher’s desk as a monumental point. In Run With The Heart Of The Blind the human body defies the structures of the space. This defiance is accomplished by the sense of time generated by the movement of the body, and the visual field in the side images down the corridors.
Bohm Calles' movement is a slow paced progress, not unlike what one would imagine is the final walk of the condemned prisoner. Bohm Calles caresses a mop head for minutes with a vacant stare into the middle distance, rubs his head along the frame of a window in a sensual act of body dusting, he follows the reflections in the glass of windows with a mop handle (or is his reflection following him?), then sits in the posture of a child, as he straddles a javelin-like broom, with a cocked head, seeming to listen to the thin line in the eternal corridor, waiting for some signal from far away. Finally the desk is violated, as Bohm Calles lies half-fetal upon it, a soft non-geometrical form dressed in black and collapsed upon the shiny cold surface.
The floor, the wall, and the utensil are mixed with the body in Run With The Heart Of The Blind. From the actions of Bohm Calles we can ask, What can this be other than a mop? But I think the answer to the question is more complicated than the choreography offered by the artist. The mop remains a mop even with the re-purposing by Bohm Calles. The mop does take on a broader visual range of possibilities in the manipulations of the performance. But it is not altered in itself. What is more dramatic in the performance are the visual and spatial juxtapositions between the body, the utensils and the architecture.
The results of the interaction between the audio of the heavy footsteps and trolley wheels in a loop, the two moving images of the corridor on opposite walls and the third screen of the body of Bohn Calles in contortions (often with utensils), gives an enclosed claustrophobic feeling for the viewer, accompanied by the sensation of being drawn apart in ones own body. The footstep is the point the body touches the world, the continuous monotonous rhythm of the heady thud-thud-thud of the fall is symbolic of the transfer point between the body and the world. With Run With The Heart Of The Blind the tools we are given have failed. There is no work going on, only a slow agonizing struggle with the space around the body.
Michel Foucault wrote famously of the school, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Discipline and Punish 1977 Alan Sheridan trans. p. 228). The controlled space of the school encases the body in a finite range of possibilities for movement, posture and visual appearance. Within this constricted space Bohm Calles extracts a limited range of movement, postures and actions, which do not make sense when framed by the structures of the school and its utensils. In achieving the range of postures and actions the structures of the space are not disturbed permanently. Elements of the space are remixed for as long as Bohm Calles occupies the space, and then the vacant classrooms and empty corridors return to silence and immobility. These structures await the next group of students they will train.
Amidst the tensions of movement within the space and how it forms behavior, are the actions of Bohn Calles as signs, or indicators of the history of formalized space designed to provide training. A specimen case of glass, filled with preserved birds, stands at the end of a corridor. The glacial-cleaner slides past the case and continues to struggle with the asphyxiating lines of corridor and ceiling around him. The stock-still birds in the glass case watch through the dusty glass. They are stacked and packed. They are arranged and disciplined in their display. The birds are totally visible, totally controlled, totally perfect and totally dead. The apparatus of the classroom is a machine that produces similar perfect specimens.
Run With The Heart Of The Blind is the anti-panopticon. But its tragedy is how small the actions are, how little space there is to move within the boxes we build to educate our children in. Between the rows of desks and sharp lines of the corridors, there are small possibilities to find new ways to stand. The heavy footsteps and trolley dragging through the center of my brain after two hours of sitting with Run With The Heart Of The Blind convince me I am in a machine of infernal intention; but on the other side of the room I see a friend, who seems to be fashioning a statue from his own body and the tools he was loaned to work with. From between the straight lines around us emerges a single shaking curve, trailing away into an uncertain distance. It is very difficult to see, but possible.
The Blues as the expression of a coherent poetics, or the
‘theory’ or how one can explain the meshing of technique with ideas and images,
is based on a limited set of principles. “Midnight Truth: Billie Jo relates the
bitterness she feels over her Ma's death, her father's indifference and the
dust”. In The Blues these principles include the reconciliation of
supposed opposites; repetition and variation, improvisation and planning, dialogue
and monologue and progression and stasis. These principles all meet in the
music of Keijo, with a perpetual memory tuned to The Blues eternally at
play.
In the music of Keijo dissonant forms
communicate with each other; a wailing guitar is surrounded and given fresh
meaning from a mass of insect-like pulses xylophone from deep in an imagined
summertime forest. Attention to low-fi recording techniques gives a blues harp
the scratchy wail of a treasured field recording, while drums and diaphragm-mic
vocals bring the listener to some lonely railway siding in the mean summer of
1935.“Out of the Dust: Billie Jo sneaks out
in the middle of the night with a little money and a little food.” It’s all the
same in the temple of sound. It is not about either/or, it is about the balance
and harmony of each part, growing and forming a single auditory space. The
shadow and the shake, repeated cycles of sounds that expand outwards into
improvised landscapes of color and light. “Gone West: Billie Jo has been on the
train for two days. She's burned up and frozen.” There you find the moment of
your own listening. It is there that time collapses and everything is true and
everything is permitted. But nothing is real.
Keijo produces here seven tracks of transportation.
We go beyond time, here there is but the sound and how it hits you. This is
tinder dry journey folk wandering out of the woods after hard seasons to take
their chances on the road or the coast. Where travel and starvation are better
than hanging on to hope and having nothing change. By learning the tempo of
your own foot fall the heart can be stilled to a relaxed pace and the air
becomes easier to breathe. The Blues becomes the rhythm of your body and you
are healed; to the earth is born a true one.
I have just finished reading Southern Theory (2007) by Professor Raewyn Connell. I found it an excellent introduction to what Connell terms 'southern theory', theories related to the social sciences that are formulated outside the metropole. The metropole is the centres of knowledge production in the hegemonic sense, Europe and North America. Connell writes:
"I use the term 'Southern Theory' for several reasons. First, the phrase calls attention to the periphery-center relations in the realm of knowledge. The editors of the Indian periodical Subaltern Studies used the term 'subaltern' not so much to name a social category as to highlight relations of power (See Chapter 8). Similarly, I use the term 'Southern' not to name a sharply bounded category of states and societies, but to emphasise relations - authority, exclusion, inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship,appropriation - between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery." (ix)
As an Australian living in Europe I understand the distance between the periphery and the metropole. While I consider this a potentially useful concept, the region I live in Europe I would consider a periphery within the metropole, so while the general sense of the center-periphery concept is clear it is more complex than it appears as well. I think Connell is aware of this, and it does not prevent what I consider the strongest point of Southern Theory being established. As a survey of academic, activist, theorist and research from outside the globally dominant nodes of knowledge production.
The chapter headings of Southern Theory are:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Part I: Northern Theory Empire and the creation of a social science Modern general theory and its hidden assumptions Imagining globalisation
Part II: Looking South The discovery of Australia
Part III: Southern Theory Indigenous knowledge and African Renaissance Islam and Western dominance Dependency, autonomy and culture Power, violence and the pain of colonialism Part IV: Antipodean Reflections The silence of the land Social science on a world scale
References Index
As a academic (approaching the end of initial training) one of the more concise and sharp paragraphs which made an impression on me in Southern Theory is
"Corporations are not the only institutions that allow the rich countries to exercise control and accumulate resources. There is also the metropolitan state, changing from its days of plump imperial pride to its scarecrow neoliberal present, thinning its commitment to citizen's well-being while growing its capacity for external destruction. There are museums and research institutions that have been key players in the centralisation of data from the colonial world. There are new sciences and technologies that, as Al-e Ahmad (1962) observed, lie behind the machine civilization that is the vehicle of Westoxification [Farsi: gharbzadegi]. Since his day computer technology has made the point even more forcibly. And there is the problem of tracing the changing locus of power in a system where now, as Garcia Canclini (1999:13) puts it the main decisions that shape everyday life 'are taken in places that are inaccessible and difficult to identify" (216)
Connell states elsewhere that Al-e Ahmad's suspicion of the machinist West was a not a resistance to technological change but rather a desire for the machines to be within the control of the fellahin.
"Only the society that makes machines, rather than always importing them, can control their power and use them in a labour-intensive, more appropriate agriculture that would reduce imports and support the population." (123)
Granted Connell is no economist. Being able to produce a good, be it a high-end manufactured one, does not guarantee an equitable society. But I believe the point regrading access to and use of technology in a global perspective is a good one. Witness the travesty that is internet access in sub-Saharan Africa today:
It is all going East-West!!!!
I would recommend Southern Theory to just about anyone who wanted to gain a broader picture of how "the global dynamics of knowledge" (the subtitle of the book) is organised today. With both integration of global economies and inequity and exploitation working in an unholy triad and many people being aware of this and acting out of desperation, it is very necessary that the issues addressed by Connell gain a broader scope of consideration. If they do not it will be bad for everyone.
A lesson in netlabel arts, web design, and the politics of post industrial P2P culture is provided free of charge by the web label Phantom Channel on their website. According to the UK startup's intro:
You don’t have to be an economist, nor Thom Yorke or even Guy Hands to spot it. Open a newspaper, turn on the radio, read a blog: there it is in front of you in numbers and in quotes and in column inches. The music industry is in ‘crisis’, the music industry is in ‘freefall’, the music industry is in ‘turmoil’. Sales are down and piracy is up. These are troubled times.
The 'troubled times' we read of is the steady fare of mainstream print newspapers (also experiencing a fall in revenues, mainly from loss of advertising but also from sales) and is the flag hoisted by IFPI, MPAA, BSA, CAAST, FACT, FAST, IDSA (and all the others) when issues of music distribution in the digital age are discussed in the public arena. But what it the real issue here. It seems Phantom Channel have their eye on the prize when it comes to how to do business in the Internet age:
Perhaps the most wonderful discovery that’s come about from the birth of Phantom Channel, is just how many breathtaking, exciting and creatively dextrous artists there are out there, operating under the music press radar in studios and bedrooms across the world. It’s thrilling to be able to present these artists under the Phantom Channel banner and we know you’ll be just as thrilled to hear them.
One can read these words as streamed content from the Phantom Channel label massages your ears (for free!!). Pluse there are links to the Phantom Channel Slast.fm site, with downloads and streams embedded as a widget on the site. There is also a link to their MySpace page (only 144 friends but I am sure it will rise) where one review extract states:
'Came across this netlabel (Phantom Channel) on my journey's today and was very impressed by the quality of the music, super deep and considered drones, digital detritus and dense atmospherics. They have one album at the moment, a compilation made up of nine tracks by different artists. You can download the album from their release page' (Thor @ Lowlife Recordings)
The one album done by the label so far Phantom Channel presents - part 1 is available as a full legal download from the website. This is tones of sound in slow waves that wash over the listener in a sort of slowed down La Monte Young warm treacle black crescendo with gongs, tonal blips and bells. Very nice on a Sunday Morning.
My advice is if you are currently involved with a music/sound label or are a puveryor of such music yourself, take a look/listen/feel at Phantom Channel and even if the music is not your cup of chai, see how it can be done in these 'troubled times'.
Note: This is the 1000th entry for the Soulsphincter blog!!! Happy Happy Happy. Great days ahead.
Today I attended a lecture by Natalja Tolstaja, Associate Professor in Nordic Languages at the University of St. Petersburg in Russia (I suppose most people know where St. Petersburg is....either Minneapolis or Russia and with a name like Tolstaja it seems obvious I suppose.) The topic of the lecture was Living and Writing in Russia Today, and it was a fascinating if somewhat formal two hours. Tolstaja is a story teller in the old tradition, the scene is set and the characters painted before we are skilfully led through a history that defies fiction in extremity and pathos. The main focus for Tolstaja's story world is her homeland, mainly St Petersburg and Moscow and she describes the vast tracts of rural Russia as "dead". Those that have talent and youth escape the tedium of the provinces to take their chances for "a place under the sun" in the two biggest cities. Those young people that stay in the provinces share their communities with the old that populate the farms, living at a subsistence level. Often alcohol is a trap for young people in the provinces and they often die young. The situation in St. Petersburg is somewhat different. It is hyper expensive to rent a flat, anything can be brought in one of the many new supermarkets that have sprung up in the last 8 years, cars are relatively cheap. Tolstaja said that many of her students drive to university. Housing is another matter however, to buy a small room in the outskirts of St Petersburg coast at least $75 000. Meanwhile the "largest ice skating rink in Europe" has been built in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. This bought a reaction from the director of the Hermitage, but he did not get much attention in his pleas to keep the St. Petersburg’s Palace Square a historical site. Now a high-rise is planned for the area and UNESCO has threatened to withdraw St. Petersburg's heritage status if it goes ahead. Nobody in St Petersburg seems to be overly concerned with the idea of losing the UNESCO stamp of approval. However St Petersburg is "another planet" when compared to Moscow. The example given by Tolstaja of the difference is that if an academic article is published in a St Petersburg journal the author is paid about 18 Euros. If the same article is published in a Moscow journal the author will receive the equivalent of 250 American dollars. St Petersburg residents see themselves as educated, cosmopolitan, poor and the heirs to the culture of the old Russia (the many Russians: the imperial and the soviet). The popular image of the Moscow resident held by those in St Petersburg is of lower education, crass, rich and elitist. The future as painted by Tolstaja is a bit scary and a bit exciting. Money seems to be what matters in Russia today, and considering the history of deprivation that the nation has lived through (illustrated in a story by Tolstaja of her 92 year old former English teacher recounting how it was to be living in St. Petersburg in 1941 when starvation was a reality) it is not surprising that Russians have embraced conspicuous consumption with the fever they have. I asked a question about bohemianism in St Petersburg, if there were artists who were not interested so much in making money, but rather made art for art's sake. Tolstaja replied there were but they received little attention outside their own circle of associates. She went on to say that television under Yeltsin was very free with lots of direct sending of debate programs. Today there is nothing like this, rather stand up comedy of a very low state is popular as well as other low grade programs (sounds familiar). I think Tolstaja was moving in the direction of media critique taken up by so many in the west, but perhaps best encapsulated by Noam Chomsky around the Manufacturing Consent period. Although Tolstoya points out the dangerous and failings in the new Russia of Putin and Gazprom etc, she seems to keep her critique on a fairly broad social plain. I got the impression that being culturally unsophisticated (like preferring ice skating to heritage monuments or the shops to the Hermitage) is a greater failing in Russia today than the murder of journalists or the abandonment of large demographic groups of the population. Despite the preference for critical caution and a fascination with traditional bourgeois cultural values Tolstaja really does tell a great story. She is a skilled speaker and brings her characters to life with an attention to detail and a love of irony. Natalja Tolstaja is the author of Ensam ("Alone") which is about to published in Swedish, she is a Knight of the Order of the North Star , is a lecturer and translator and a very gifted story teller.
As GTxA points out, The current issue of the Iowa Web Review (TIR-W Volume 9 no. 1)is devoted to the work and ideas of Jason Nelson and Donna Lieshman, guest-edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink. Titled “MultiModal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman and Electronic Writing,”
Nelson and Luesbrink are "electronic authors" whose work forms part of my thesis corpus. A particular area of interest for my research is taken up in the interviews with Nelson and Leishman, that of reception and the role of the reader (the three Rs). Nelson voices a somewhat Romantic conceptualisation of text reception:
"Perhaps one of the strongest draws many find for e-lit is its relative lack of rules, existing forms, or established meanings and methods. It is quite freeing as an artist to simply explore one's imagination and texts with only technical constraints limiting the possible creatures birthed."
The emphasis on "technical constraints" is an interesting point, leading into contemplation of the materiality of digital texts´and the associated large body of scholarship. I would debate the "lack of rules" hypothesis, with technical innovation (or fetishization) not necessarily removing the contexts for these works. The social and cultural understandings and definitions (and "rules") for digital text reception is something I explore in my thesis research.
It seems Leishman approaches digital text authorship from the perceptive of the ideal reader, even down to the gender:
"I hope it is simultaneously visually alluring and difficult in terms of reaching clear understandings of the narrative. I have both a sense of making for someone else (a notional female) and needing to compel an encounter that is emotional."
In the language of both authors reception is, as one would expect, about the work being understood as an experience. The Iowa Review has done an excellent job of presenting both authors, with comments from the editors , examples of their work and them commenting on each others work.
"Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that would haul that tanker. You want to get out of here? You talk to me." (Gibson only had 17 lines of dialogue in Mad Max 2, for many the epitome of Australian Gothic)
This became a longer post than I intended but that's the way it is with me and Australian Gothic film. I fell in love with what is termed Australian Gothic films in the late 1980's when I was a teenager. Australia does not have a strong tradition of making genre films but we do have a strong sense of the land and environment (for better or worse) which is also a major theme in our creative arts.
"Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gothic as a mode has been a consistent presence in Australia since European settlement. Certainly the fact that settlement began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the rise of the Gothic as a sensationalist and resonantly influential form, contributes to its impact on the literature of Australia. There may be other reasons for its appeal. It is certainly possible to argue that the generic qualities of the Gothic mode lend themselves to articulating the colonial experience inasmuch as each emerges out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty, of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. It is this very quality which Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home is unhomely — where the heimlich becomes unheimlich — and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower. All migrations represent a dislocation of sorts, but Australia posed particularly vexing questions for its European immigrants. Nature, it seemed to many, was out of kilter. To cite the familiar cliches: its trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed. And while these features represented a physical perversion, it was widely considered to be metonymic of an attendant spiritual dis/ease." Turcotte, G, Australian Gothic, in Mulvey Roberts, M (ed), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998, 10-19.
The heart of the Gothic in Australia is 'the outback', terrifying expanses of seeming wilderness (to the fragile European eye) populated by fear and disappointment. An article on the recent spate of Australian horror films in the Sydney Morning Herald today describe Australia as "a scary place. The size of the United States, but with only the population of greater Los Angeles, its outback means you can get about as far away from civilisation as it's possible to get." Getting lost, disappearing, being trapped or escaping from the outback are three staple themes in Australian Gothic.
"We call what we do 'Australian Gothic'," says Everett DeRoche, a key figure in Australian horror who wrote the scripts for classics such as Patrick (1978), The Long Weekend (1978) and Razorback (1984). The term was coined to describe Razorback, and anyone who has seen this smoky, heavily backlit tale of a giant pig terrorising the outback will understand why. "Australia doesn't have that iconic 'haunted house' that we are familiar with from American movies. But it does have the outback, and people's fear of that, that agoraphobia."
The Herald article mentioned a few classic works of Australian Gothic on film, I thought I would expand on it:
"Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There's nothing else out here."
John Grant, a young teacher, looks forward to a holiday in the outback but instead finds himself trapped in a nightmarish small mining town where everyone seems to have some sort of mental instability. Succumbing to alcoholism and male rape, the teacher starts to lose his grip as his city ways are stripped away and a new, more brutal, self emerges.
Peter Weir's first full-length feature length film, this film has something of a punk aesthetic to it.
A small town in rural Australia (Paris) makes its living by causing car accidents and salvaging any valuables from the wrecks. Into this town come brothers Arthur and George. George is killed when the Parisians cause their car to crash, but Arthur survives and is brought into the community as an orderly at the hospital. But Paris is not problem free. Not only do the Parisians have to be careful of outsiders (such as insurance investigators), but they also have to cope with the young people of the town who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Written by Mark Thompson {mrt@oasis.icl.co.uk}
A man's car breaks down in a country town, somewhere in New South Wales. His brother has been killed, and his fear of cars has returned full-blown, yet accidents around here are more common than strict coincidence would allow, and just leaving the town becomes a problem all of its own. Especially when the various factions in town start a feud that has been brewing for a long time... Written by David Carroll {davidc@atom.ansto.gov.au}
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Three female students and a school teacher disappear on an excursion to Hanging Rock, in Victoria, on Valentine's Day, 1900. Peter Weir's break though film is simple but beautiful and disturbing tale. Underlying subtexts of sexual longing and innocence are played out among the ancient basalt of the Australian bush. Despite a David Hamilton style to some of the photography this film really works on a symbolic level with just enough mystery to involve the viewer in the horror of it all.
Inn of the Damned (1975) The tale revolves around the mysterious vanishing of guests from a hostel deep in the Australian rain forests of Gippsland, Victoria in 1896, run by the Straulles, an Austrian couple. Unfortunately the owners of this wayside inn are simply not as sinisterly menacing as Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Hitchcock's classic, `Psycho'. Originally an outstanding stage actress, Dame Judith Anderson (Caroline Straulle, who is obviously fussy about the social standing of her guests/victims, bemusingly objecting to a whore) gave a more convincing performance as the chillingly malicious housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's 1940 version of Daphne Du Maurier's `Rebecca', for which she was deservedly nominated an Oscar. Her co-star (Joseph Furst) prior to this, seems to have made a career out of playing caricature mad Austrians, as in the Bond movie `Diamonds Are Forever'. There is an attempt at an ominous moodiness in the guesthouse but it is hardly developed to any great level and the various murders are weakly staged, accompanied by Bob Young's strangely clonkingly unsuspenseful music, which at other times can be jauntily, and even eerily, melodic. One wonders why the victims didn't just simply get out of bed rather than screaming hysterically whilst waiting to be crushed by the slowly descending canopy?
Patrick (1978) We open in classic exploitation style as a mature couple have sex, to the hostility of her adult son (Robert Thompson), whom we later find out to be the Patrick of the title. He throws an electric heater into the post-coital bath, and then we flash to the future. Whether by the "accident" that killed his mother or sheer mental shutdown, Patrick has been in a coma for three years. His new nurse, Kathy (Susan Penhaligon), is sympathetic to a being everyone else, from Doctor Roget (a bizarre Robert Helpmann) to the other nurses, call a pathetic piece of dead flesh. Kathy senses something is amiss when Patrick displays a seemingly deliberate spitting behaviour. As the story unfolds we find Kathy's separated husband Ed and new lover Brian, both who have her in their sights, being victimized by a telekinetic Patrick, who strikes out from behind his coma in many different ways. He tries to drown Brian, and Ed is stuck in a lift for what seems like days. Then things really get rough, when Doctor Roget starts giving ol' Patrick shock therapy in his experimentations to rouse Patrick. To protect himself, Patrick electrocutes the Matron down at the generator plant, and begins flinging furniture around as Roget mounts an all-out attack with an axe. Patrick is too strong though, and locking Roget outside his hospital room, confronts the woman he loves with a terrible choice.
The Long Weekend (1978) When a suburban couple go camping for the weekend at a remote beach, they discover that nature isn't in an accommodating mood.
Razorback (1984) A wild, vicious pig terrorizes the Australian outback. The first victim is a small child who is killed. The child's granddad is brought to trial for killing the child but acquitted. The next victim is an American TV-journalist. Her husband Carl gets there and starts to search for the truth. The local inhabitants won't really help him, but he is joined by a hunter and a female farmer to find the beast. The pig is played by a Volkswagen Beetle in leather. It was directed by Russell Mulcahy who made videos for Duran Duran and other early MTV stars. A full sized, fully animatronic model razorback cost $250 thousand to build and is seen for a single second in the movie.
"There's a party every day, a movie every night, and all the junk food you can eat. What more can a kid want... except to get out."
Dead En Drive In is a personal favorite of mine. Adapted from a Peter Carey short story (Crabs, 1972). A review from IMDb:
After the world's economy collapsed, Australia was turned into a wasteland where the unemployed youth uses the street as a battlefield and the law is forgotten. To fight this, the Government uses a Drive-In to lock them and keep them controlled using fast food and movies. A young man named Crabs (Ned Manning) is trapped in this way, but instead of becoming a conformist member of the nihilistic youth, he decides to fight back and escape no matter the cost.
Hidden under this sci-fi/horror tale of an apocalyptic society is a very well-written plot with social commentary included. "Dead-End Drive In" is a great story against the conformism. Crabs is trapped in an apparent paradise where he can get all the fast food he wants and do nothing but live each day, but instead he chooses to fight back and try to escape from the Drive-In and to return to his family. He knows this "paradise" is false, and that the only thing worth fighting for is real freedom.
Stretching the budget to the max, Trenchard-Smith manages to create very well done scenes with the very few resources he has. He makes a great use of his locations and the film is packed with high-octane action and a healthy dose of humor. Still, the film remains focused on its message and Carey makes a portrait of present-day society, as racist, conformist and violent as the youth depicted in the film. It is not a horror movie in the sense of being scary, but it is haunting in the sense that even when it is a fictitious scenery, it is not hard to believe that humanity will behave the way the conformist teenager do in the film. Author: José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) from Mexico
Smoke Em If You Got Em (1988) Atomic war has destroyed human society. The survivors wander in the ruins slowly dying of radiation sickness. Two men stumble upon a bomb shelter with music coming from it. They have found the last party on earth. Admission to the party depends upon being able to donate some form of intoxicant. Our two wanderers find a bottle of wine in the wreckage. once inside the 80's Australian Blue Ruin are the house band to a anarchist autonomous zone of freaks and the dying. The film is a brilliant essay in black humor.
Ghosts....of the Civil Dead (1988) I heard that it took inspiration from In the Belly of the Beast: The Prison Letters of Jack Henry Abbott. Also that it is based on the testimony of David Hale, a warder at USP Marion, Illinois, USA. This is an intense film. Nick cave was once of the scriptwriters and he stars in it with an amazing performance as the deranged child murderer Maynard ("Officer, come here. I wanna spit in your fucking eye!"). A high tech top security prison in the desert of central Australia is in lockdown, with the hardcore inmates confined to their cells. The film unfolds slowly on how the lockdown came about and the culture of the prison with sex, drugs and violence all for sale. It culminates in a scene of extreme and graphic violence. The music is done by Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey and Nick Cave with great singing by Anita Lane.
Body Melt (1993) Starring Ian Smith who played Harold Bishop in Neighbours as the evil Dr. Carrera this is B grade horror at its best. Residents of peaceful Pebbles Court, Homesville, are being used unknowingly as test experiments for a new 'Body Drug' that causes rapid body decomposition (melting skin etc.) and painful death. The suburbs have never been so horrible.
Bad Boy Bubby (1993) Fantastic film. The first thirty minutes of "Bad Boy Bubby" are great horror. Bubby (Nicholas Hope), a strange, retarded man-child, has been imprisoned by his mom (Claire Benito) for thirty years. He hasn't left the house, can't leave the house, because mom's been busy having sex with him and perverting his sponge-like mind. She tells him the world outside is filled with poison gas and because they only have one gas mask he can never leave the room they are in. Early on, the film alienates viewers by throwing in a scene involving the killing of a cat. After an act of violence which frees him Bubby ventures into the outside world and has a series of amazing, hilarious adventures in which his outsider status is often misinterpreted. He dresses as a pastor. He fronts a rock band, gets intimate with a real disabled woman (Heater Slattery), and discovers life beyond the walls of his prison. The film is extremely original and daring, and Hope's performance as Bubby is totally believable. It was shot over a long period by a number of cinematographers.
The Proposition (2005) Again written by Nick Cave. A brilliant piece of work that I would describe as a coming of age for Australian film. The Proposition is our interpretation of Heart of Darkness, with lines from John Hurt as Jellon Lamb echoing Charles Marlow ("But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad." p. 66) ;
"We are white men, Sir, not beasts. Oh, he sits up there in those melancholy hills; some say he sleeps in caves like a beast, slumbers deep like the Kraken. The Blacks say that he is a spirit. The Troopers will never catch him. Common force is meaningless, Mr. Murphy, as he squats up there on his impregnable perch. So I wait, Mr. Murphy. I wait."
Rural Australia in the late nineteenth century: Capt. Stanley and his men capture two of the four Burns brothers, Charlie and Mike. Their gang is held responsible for attacking the Hopkins farm, raping pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and murdering the whole family. Arthur Burns, the eldest brother and the gang's mastermind, remains at large has and has retreated to a mountain hideout. Capt. Stanley's proposition to Charlie is to gain pardon and - more importantly - save his beloved younger brother Mike from the gallows by finding and killing Arthur within nine days. Almost unbearable violence is used like a paint brush, spraying us with the cruel colonial process as it destroys the oppressed (Aboriginal, Irish, Women) and uses those who believe in it to achieve ends they don't understand. The soundtrack is also a masterpeice. The trailer is HERE.
Wolf Creek (2006) In 1999, Ben Mitchell (Nathan Phillips) and his two British girlfriends Liz Hunter (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy Earl (Kestie Morassi) buy an old car to travel through the outback of Australia with little money. Their first stop is to visit a meteor crater in the isolated Wolf Creek National Park. When they go to their car, they find that it does not start and without option, they decide to spend the night in the car. Later, a local friendly man, the hillbilly Mick Taylor (John Jarrat), stops his truck, offers to help the trio, finds that they need to replace the coil and proposes to tow them to his camp, where he could fix the car. When they accept the proposal, their dreamy vacation turns into a scary nightmare. the website for the film is HERE.
The Father, State, King and God are each subject for extensive narrative reworking or remix in Will Self’s epic The Book of Dave from 2006, published by Viking. Metalepsis is the key to The Book of Dave, where words take the reader down long tunnels of associations and in affect stitch the several parallel stories of the novel together. At the beginnings of The Book of Dave it is somewhat difficult to hang with narrative, due to the use of dialect and the invented language of Mokni; a phonetically spelt derivative of hip hop slang, text chat, cockney rhyming and the terminology of London taxi drivers (cabbies). The last of these is The Knowledge, a complex wrote leaned system of ‘runs’ that each London cab driver learns if they are obtain a licence to drive in the chaos overseen by the Public Carriage Office (PCO). In a way that reminded me of Irving Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), the language of The Book of Dave colonizes your head and after a while u can c it in ze “mirra. Uz iz lookin awl ve tym wit dem – Dave iz lookin in ve mirra á uz, an lookin froo ve screen 4 ve Loss Boy. An uppabuv im, mi luv, uppabuv im vairs ve Flyin I, an ee sees all ve wirl.” (22). Patience that’s all it takes to get into the style, but is it worth it? It goes like this:
“It tells the story of an angry and mentally-ill Cockney London taxi driver named Dave Rudman, who writes and has printed on metal a book of his rantings against women and thoughts on custody rights for fathers. These stem from his anger with his ex-wife, Michelle, who he believes is unfairly keeping him from his son. Equally influential in Dave's book is The Knowledge -- the intimate familiarity with the city of London required of its cabbies. Dave buries the book he has made of metal plates at great expense. The text is discovered centuries later and used as the sacred text for a misogynistic religion that takes hold in the remnants of southern England and London following catastrophic flooding. The future portions of The Book of Dave are set over 500 years after the metal text is discovered.”
That’s the basic story from the Wikipedia. The ‘Hamsters’ Those living on the isolated Isle of Ham (all that remains of Hampstead Heath centuries into the future from Dave’s London of the decade split either side of the year 2000) worship Dave, as does most of the population of Ing, all that remains of England. They follow his book; the changeover, child support, the PCO, calling out the runs, fear and hate the evil ‘Chelle’ and the Drivers (priests) dominates an agrarian society of violence, surveillance and inequality (especially for women who are treated as animals). Crimes are punished by spectacular acts of ritual violence and heresy is such a crime. Basically the alternating chapters of The Book of Dave that are set in the dystopian future reminded me a lot of what I have read about life in Elizabethan London (1533-1603); spy networks, poverty (disfigured, diseased and often drunk) and enormous wealth (also disfigured and often diseased) pass each other on the crowded streets (the sewers of which were open channels of putrid waste) as well as secret societies and forbidden knowledge. The majority of the population work until they drop, often in rural labour, while the rich impose a faith based system of control upon them. Two great texts on the time are Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (Vintage, 2002). Those chapters set in the recent present are a narrative study in male anger and the role of ‘The Father’ in society. Imagine The Handmaid’s Tale meets Waterworld. The review in The Guardian made comparisons with The Book of Dave to the worlds of Jonathan Swift, presumably due to the humor of the passages where Dave the man is still on earth ("Self's satire is Swiftian in its casually sneering manner and fondness for misanthropy.") I found them extremely shameful but poignant, although without the depth of Swift, as Dave attempts to work out who the hell he is underneath a thick strata of anger, hate, feelings of betrayal (that seem to begin with his own Father, a cab driver who Dave worshipped but really had little contact with) and his own perceived inadequacies. The final aspect of the character is epitomized in his struggle with baldness; he travels to France to undergo radical hair transplants with donor hair taken from his own scrotum. For weeks he lives life with a thick thatch of fuzzy pubic hair crowning his blistered dome before he admits defeat and pays a large sum to have the pubes removed, wearing a baseball cap from then on. It is about the same time that Dave starts bashing his wife. We never do really learn who is Dave......... Alone the Dave story would be another depressing account of a contemporary man not able to accept his ‘mummyself’ to quote the heretics of Ing. But without this very contemporary lens through which to look at the misogynistic orgy of the future land of Ing the present social relevance of The Book of Dave would fall away. Like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985), The Book of Dave has many dark truths below its surfaces that are not so difficult to recognize in our own cultures of ‘The Father’.
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made [both in heaven and on earth]; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man.” Nicene Creed 325 A.D.
If you only read one book on intellectual property (a huge area that includes copyright, patents, authorship, commons, trademarks, and trade secrets) it should be Debora J Halbert's Resisting Intellectual Property Law (Routledge; 2005) (links to the Introduction). Halbert's text is clearly written, extremely well researched and provides clear examples of the mess into which unbridled property rights has delivered us in the early 21st century. Resisting Intellectual Property Law attempts to build a theoretical base for the commons. In doing this Halbert develops a strong critique of Habermasian public spheres. I have long been suspicious of Habermas' modernist and bourgeois obsessions and Halbert articulates these "anti-democratic tendencies" (24) far better than I can. The text goes on to look at End User Licence Agreements versus Open Source. The realities of digital music distribution, and the morality of patents and medicine. Interestingly, the illegal distribution of media is so often portrayed in moral terms by those parties attempting to enforce copyright to texts. Finally the patenting of genetic materials (i.e. the human body) and the ownership of traditional or indigenous knowledge is discussed. I am only a 1/4 of the way into the text, but not since my first encounter with the works of Lawrence Lessig have I read such an accessible and compellingly argued book on intellectual property. The contents are:
-- Theorizing the public domain: copyright and the development of a cultural Commons -- Licensing and the politics of ownership: end user licensing agreements versus open source -- I want my MP3’s: the changing face of music in an electronic age -- Moralized discourses: South Africa’s fight for access to AIDS drugs -- Ownership of the body: resisting the commodification of the human -- Traditional knowledge and intellectual property: seeking alternatives.
While it got a negative review at Mashable, I have found SearchtheBeat to actually be a good online music and video search engine. By good I mean that it returns results for the lesser known artists. I like the interface design were videos appear in one embedded column that allows for previews and Mp3s in another. I found videos of very small bands that friends of mine are in performing at very small festivals. The Mp3 search is not so detailed (it can't find files that I know are on the internet archive) but this has probably got something to do with the Google presence in the project. All in all a fun tool and one that will hopefully develop.
Ashton's text is a carefully argued but at the same time very broad account of the currents which flow between modernism and postmodernism in American poetry during the 1900s. It is verse written by Americans, not really by those Americans living in America that concerns the text. Of course it is Gertrude Stein that is the pivot in the whole affair. Her The Making of Americans is the text Ashton returns to again and again. The dual concepts existing between the modernist and postmodernist 'missions' could you say in poetry are summarized by Ashton as entity/identity, logic/phenomenology, intention/attention, meaning /affect being the transformation "that has defined the movement from modernism to postmodernism and in the process redefined modernism itself." (222) If you want to come to a deeper understanding of the exchanges and interdependency between modernism and postmodernism, Ashton's text is excellent. As well I found it to be a learning tool in how to write; clear and simple ideas flow through well constructed paragraphs. It is not only Stein who is dissected in the pages, a fascinating account of the poetry and thought of Laura (Riding) Jackson is juxtaposed against much of what we take for granted in language today. I mean by this the indeterminacy of language; the idea that words mean different things to different people. In fact that is why I first picked up Ashton's text, because it is in many ways a reply and update to one of my favorite critical works on poetry; Marjorie Perloff's The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Rimbaud to Cage (1981). Ashton pays homage to Perloff but at the same time demolishes several of the assumptions that ground her text. Ashton bases much of her critique of Perloff on the mistaking of experience for meaning. This is achieved by examining the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets and the ideas Stein expressed in the lectures she gave in the States in the 1930s. The split really starts to become obvious in the 1940s when (Riding) Jackson abandons poetry, seeing language as "the essential moral meeting-ground." From meaning (morality) to effect: experience- was a long way for (Riding) Jackson. But by this time Wallace Stevens was gaining a place in the landscape of American verse and things were changing. Incidentally one of my favorite poems is The Idea of Order at Key West by Stevens. I feel the space of The Idea of Order at Key West, but what it is about that is up to you. Reason or logic had fallen as (Riding) Jackson spent the next 30 years working on a huge polemic on the morality of words. Steven's instead stated that “the truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them." Stevens' modernism sits close to William Carlos Williams and his wheelbarrow-
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
The image overtakes the logic of the scene and it is the experience that arises out of the reading and not a concrete reality that can be placed in a single moral context. As Ashton reminds us:
"the identity that arises out of the relation between what a thing is at one moment and what it is at another is inevitably a function of what it is to or for someone....it is just this interdependance between subjects and objects that makes nature look continuous with consciousness and vice versa." (171)
Stevens breaks into this consiousness and 'slows it down' so to speak, as the points in a scene (he's looking out the window I seem to remember someome speculating) collide in the 8 rhythmic lines. The phenomenon holds our attention and although it means bugger all, we have a meaning to take away from the reading. Its distillation bringing affect. Ashton does not ask for the sanctity of the postmodern to observed, as if the phenomenon of consiousness is going to take us out of it. She is critical of the neurobiology, cognitive science, and neuropsychology direction a certain stream of linguistic research has been taking in recent years (see Lakoff, Fauconnier, Turner et. al.)
I could go on but it is getting late. Anyway, I recomend From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century..that's enough. Well, one more thing actually. I woke up at 4am this morning due to my son deciding it was time to get up (he's 18 months old) so during out time together in the early hours we put a poem together. Here it is: Alchemy Goodnight.
Last night I saw Jack Rose play an hour long set here in Umeå. I have been a fan of Pelt since I heard the double CD from 2001 Ayahuasca (a beautiful piece of work). I was not sure if I would be able to make it the concert but while playing chess with my son I watched a documentary about the freak folk music scene in San Francisco. The show featured interviews and tunes from Six Organ of Admittance, Bright Black Morning Light, Tom Carter, Howlin Rain, Comets on Fire and more. It inspired me to get out and go see Jack. When I met Jack Rose and shook his hand I noticed how big and chunky they were. Great paws attached to a bearish man with curly locks and a shaggy beard. Then when he started playing his hands became nimble creatures that plucked and strutted over the frets. In the music of Jack Rose Varanasi meets the Appalachians in the back seat of John Fahey's beat up automobile. I must admit in some places the music seemed to stagger and stall (giving the feeling of being imprisoned in a giant wind up clock that was running too fast), becoming repetitive, but overall it was a great performance. One perhaps 10 or 15 minute piece (time disappeared for most of the gig) in particular was an amazing raga-esque journey with Rose tapping on the sound board, playing a bass line and a high end all at the same time. Rose is continuing his European tour so if he is near you, give him your ears!
I have been playing with the now famous Joost a bit. More out of curiosity than a desire to have more television in my life. It is interesting. If you want to become a beta tester send me a message. Here are my early impression of Joost.
1. It reminds me of the sort of TV you watch on long haul airline flights. A closed in sort of feeling but very slick. Limited content and knowing that there are only so many thousand others sharing in it. This limited but difficult to define audience results in a generalised sort of content that is very fragmented. I suppose this is a difficult thing. How is truly global TV going to look, not like cable or satellite which has defined points in the sender network. Joost,as I understand it, works along BitTorrent lines where content is sent via what computers are in the network at the time.
2. Really limited content at the moment. Several shows I saw on the program where United States only. The copyright and broadcasting rights for material will be a complicated affair I imagine. Plus which segment of the world's online population is Joost going to cater for? Will it manage in the arena of content when Youtube and hundreds of its clones are dominating at the moment? Getting Youtube content with Joost interface and scheduling would be nice but the structures of ownership and broadcasting (legal, geographic, advertising) would not allow it.
3. Joost should identify 5 or 10 areas that can be applied to programming on a global scale; arts, education, diaspora, travel, food, music, and family could be some. Each of these themes should be presented in as diverse a way as possible. At the moment content seems to be very western hemisphere and very commercial. Not that different from television as it is at the moment.
I don't think I will become a huge fan of Joost at the moment. There is clearly potential. Something like the Australian broadcaster SBS would be a good inspiration. As well community television would be another possible source of ideas. Because it would be different. Just being on the net is not enough. Joost has to bring us radical content and film clips of Linkin Park are not radical. Nor is a documentary about dogs, one about cats and another about horses.
Let's see where is goes as it is only early days. But I have a feeling the economics of Joost will mean they have to start getting a decent public quick and this will mean the lowest common denominator for programming. If they can afford to put in 3 to 5 years in development things may look different.
I have not sent the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (I love a short title) but this morning following a link on video piracy on the internet (Google Powering Some Pirate Sites) I caught an episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character in action on YouTVPC (taken it appears from a British Channel 4 series). The man is a gifted performer but what struck me was the material depth he is prepared to go to in order to deliver the comedy, parody and satire. Grainy washed out film stock rolls behind 1970’s animated text in (presumably Russian script), a whole village gathers around Cohen and falls in behind his bizarre English monologue delivered in a stilted accent. The visual pace of the narrative is impressive with gags relying entirely on cut shots as Cohen continues in his monotone delivery. Then we are transported to England, which is dismantled in seconds by Cohen’s stereotypical still shots of him engaging with the ‘Englishness’ of tourism (The guards at the palace, bowler hats and The Times, red payphone booth, fish and chips, ‘naughty’ video shop in Soho, double decker busses and tepid beer etc. etc. etc.), all in over exposed yellowing film with dodgy text overs. Then the adventure starts as Cohen stumbles in a badly fitted suit through the TV lifestyle chat genre. The empty space of Borat’s ignorance is filled with the bigotry, cultural xenophobia and oddness of those who are willing to speak to him (often treating him like a child, the unaware foreigner). Attending the Henley Royal Regatta, Borat is the blank slate for a form of reverse anthropology (see Jean Rouch) where the decrepit traditions of the Empire (regatta, the hunt) reveal themselves through European subjects made Other.
Cohen/Borat delivers the message in the long shadows of McLuhan and Surrealism with a huge debt to the remix cultures powered so much by digital technologies and the Psycho-geography of the Situationists. The materials of media is how Cohen invites the viewer into the premise of the text (the opening scenes in the ridiculous village or the grainy tourists shots of Borat stumbling around London) and the next shot is filled with Borat straight to camera (viewers gaze). We take up the media stance projected by one of the most common sequences on TV, the piece to camera where a witness as reporter informs us of the event (it is interesting that we see so little of this format in relation to the carnage in Iraq, the field abandoned by the witness and – here in Sweden at least – the graphics are most often crowd scenes after bomb attacks and soldiers ‘in place’).
When we laugh at Cohen we are laughing at ourselves. As he has said himself, the joke is that many of those who came into contact with the character actually believed that the Kazakhstan of Borat has some basis in reality . Presumably the same goes for the millions of viewers of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan who understand enough of the premises behind the film to find it funny. The joke is on the West and the brilliance is how carefully constructed the pseudo-documentary genre of Cohen’s comedy is.
This is a mashup video I made on Jumpcut, a new online video editing site. It is in beta (isn't everything) and is pretty shaky at times. It took 4 attempts to get this video together. But it is a good start, has lots of remix and networking features on the website. I recomend Jumpcut (the remix button on every video is cool) but be gentle with it. Perfect for a day stuck at home looking after one sick child with another child who is at home due to me looking after the first one......
I just did a quick comparison of Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's campaign websites along side the defending champion George W Bush's web presence. What a difference:
First Obama's whole index page fits on a singe screen, no scrolling needed. Then we have the dynamic network stuff; Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube all linked (no MySpace....is it a Murdoch bias??). There is also log in at MyBarackObama.com where profile, network, forums and blog server are available. There is also barackTV, packed with vids of Barack, his family and supporters. The code for videos is copyable so streams can be embedded in blogs and so forth. There is also the Obama blog linked from the campaign website, which is a group blog run by the "New Media team at Obama for America". The blog has links to much of the online content for media coverage the Obama campaign is getting.
Its an odd shape isn't it. The gold swirls, braid and stars mark it as very official (which I suppose it is), plus a third of it falls under the width of my browser window (bad design). Then there is a lot of links on the history of the White House, government policy and actions, 'A Video Tour of the White House by President Bush' ("The first thing I see in the morning is the sun shinning through these big windows. These windows are magnificent. They let in the sun light...") which is not possible to link to from outside of the web page, and links to media reports on Bush provide us with our content. The "Interact" possibilities are only two; Ask the White House: "online interactive forum, the first of its kind in politics, allows you to interact with Bush administration officials and friends of the White House." Well it seems like only selected people can ask the White House with nothing more controversial than; "I believe many Americans are still paying a lot of income tax". The other choice to "Interact" is "White House Interactive" which links to the same page as "Ask the White House". there is an RSS feed on the page, which is kinda progressive. Bush's website is the only site that is bilingual, with a Spanish version linked. I suspect this is more to do with government policy than anything else.
It is the middle of the road style of the three I would say. It does fit on the screen in its entirety. It has some of the monologue staid functionality of the Bush site but it also leans towards some of the interactivity and social networking of the Obama site. This is typified by the Hillary Blog First Post Competition:
Soon we'll launch the official blog of HillaryClinton.com, a crucial part of our exciting national conversation about the direction of our country and the place to go to learn more about Hillary.
We know our readers are going to have a lot to say, so we want to give you the first word.
We're looking for your ideas on how we can work together for change. If you'd like to write the very first guest post on the HillaryClinton.com blog, submit your entry in the form below.
This is sort of halfway between what blogs are supposed to be and the rough realities of public opinion and politics. Clinton's site has no YouTube, Facebook or Flickr links. The blue frame is powdered, whereas it was solid and darker on the Obama site. Here we can "Join Team Hillary", become a "Hillraiser" by resgistering for an account and joining the community of supporters. Clinton's videos are mostly public speaking events with no code or blog embedding posssiblities.
It is interesting to look at the privacy policy from both Obama and Clinton as they are quite different. Clinton's states that:
On occasion, we may also use the information that you provide online to contact you for other purposes or to solicit you for contributions. When you register or sign-up online, we may share your contact information with successor organizations and other like-minded Democratic candidates and organizations, and they may contact you. When you make a contribution to us, we may also exchange your contributor information with successor organizations and other like-minded Democratic candidates and organizations, and they may solicit you (see below for additional information regarding your contributor information). However, we will not sell or exchange your credit card information to any other third party under any circumstances.
Obama's states:
It is our general policy not to make Personal Information available to anyone other than our employees, staff, and agents. We may also make personal information available to organizations with similar political viewpoints and objectives, in furtherance of our own political objectives.
While on first reading I got a more negative feeling from the Clinton site, the Obama statement seems to leave it all wide open to what may be done with any personal information. The Bush Privacy and Security Statement is not surprising; they gather information and if it is necessary they will disclose it.
I am reading Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (a review by Ravi Purushotma) which I think is an excellent book. In it Jenkins describes the 2004 presidential elections in the USA as a break through for media convergence in the contexts of politics and popular culture. I wonder how the lessons learnt from 2004 will be adapted in 2008. With each website already so different just between these three candidates, how public opinion comes to be built around each will be interesting indeed.
