The happy accident consequence of multiple films sharing the same title.
That dead star of immense gravity and uncertain orbit
(This is a preliminary chunk of a piece I'm writing for the upcoming zer0 volume on Michael Jackson, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jakson, coming out this December. This take on Captain EO is part of a broader question about the transition from an artist of tremendous pop cultural value making "apolitical" music to an artist increasingly detached from any sense of which way the cultural wind was blowing, coupled with massive inertia and capital that allowed him to continue to "matter". It is at the extended point of this turn, the moment also of emergent neoliberalism, that the music self-declares as something political: the pseudo-universality of it from after Thriller on, the rise of the maudlin sincerity of NGO culture, the one-world-hypothesis of imposed market relations that couldn't be further from the "there can be but one world" thought of Communism. Here I tackle Captain EO, that child's primer for late capitalist imperialism and the early germ of what Michael will become after the point at which he should have died.)
Things go to glittering shit.
Can't you see?
You're just another part of me.
Woo! Another part of me.
- "We Are Here to Change the World", from Captain EO
1986
A year of surfaces and of what should not have risen to them. Unmoored, unwanted, the cargo ship Khian Sea wandered the oceans with its haul of toxic waste, angling for a trench deep enough and or island unlegislated enough to swallow it. Elsewhere, in the midst of supposed disarmament, domestic nuclear – and nuclear domesticity, finally yuppie-stretched to its breaking point – blew its lid. In Chernobyl, toxic winds blew, sicknesses started and stuck around.
Meanwhile, on other surfaces of public awareness, the hidden-in-plain-view obscenity of U.S. foreign policies of aid and condemnation, support to the lesser evil and funds to the anti-Communist, roared into sight. Ronald Reagan signs the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Early and persistent signs that the war of civilizations was no longer about American freedom versus Stalinist discipline. Rather, the capitalism claimed under lumbering American hegemony, deregulation, and supposed melting all solid national boundaries into the air of wired markets and demilitarized zones of engagement versus the new oldest enemy, unincorporable fundamentalisms, radical Islam.
Neoliberalism starts to hit its stride. The Space Shuttle Challenger goes up, and then up in smoke.
And in the world of culture, Michael Jackson buys a pet chimpanzee, becomes increasingly tabloid-known as estranged from reality, releases Captain EO, and lives on past the point of his death.
SURFACE SKATING
From this play of surfaces, deviations, and betrayals, two questions:
What does it mean for a giant to persist past his cultural death, to become a tidal behemoth detached from the ground, and circulating, dictating trends, effecting patterns of resistance and attraction? To not die correctly but to linger on?
How to understand Jackson’s trajectory? An artist of tremendous political and cultural symbolic value who made “apolitical” music. And then who became that cultural behemoth, out of touch with the times, who mattered largely as the slow articulation of a carnival wreckage, yet who increasingly functioned as a “political” artist, his themes dominated by the gloss of globalization-era universality?
Our answer, or any answer capable of grasping this tectonic shift, can only be formed along lines of materialist analysis: a situating of this not-unexpected disaster in its historical moment. That moment is precisely the coming-of-age of neoliberalism and the accompanying cultural forms that provide its illusions of resistance and care. This is the moment of 1986, of Captain EO, which is not only bound to its moment but which is a consummate, unnerving document of the era that points the nasty way forward.
In what way is 1986 a registration, after the fact of his real death 23 years later, of Jackson’s “death”, of his momentous persistence? This is neither a Thriller-esque zombie undead nor a resurrection. Just the sheer force and banal fact of the momentum of those with enough cultural capital to go on, ceaselessly. The dead star. To keep making the same damn moves, increasingly drug-hollowed and haunting, for fans to still cry out and weep for someone whose greatest cultural relevance became his uncanny insistence against innovation in favor of minor recombinations. And not to go out like an Otis Redding, snuffed out mid-burn.
As for the trajectory of the music toward “political” orientation, a chronology explains a lot. In 1988, N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton. In 1990, Public Enemy released Fear of a Black Planet. And in 1991, in the video for “Black or White,” Michael Jackson has Macaulay Culkin standing on a stoop in “hip-hop” clothes, rapping the words, “I’m not going to spend / My life being a color.”
Race blind.
That level of total and utter disconnect from the way that the cultural wind is blowing is mirrored, in dark inversion, by the deep connection between the “politicization” of his music with the metaphysics, cultural presence, and structure of the NGO (non-governmental organization). The disavowal of enemies that results in the depoliticization of those you colonize. The false universality of inclusion of those enemies who you don’t dare call as such. That massive flow of capital and technics of empire of which the appearance of an under funded bunch of humanitarians is simply the most advanced tactic in the world of the spectacle. That surface skating of the refusal to address systemic change, money and idealism thrown at problems that swallow massive swathes of the world in hunger and war.
In short, when Michael stops making music to dance to and starts making music to convince us – or perhaps himself – to “heal the world.” At the very moment when he begins to address the world at large, and no longer from his singular, uncertain position, is the point where he leaves the world behind for his own peculiar orbit.
Is there something constitutively new in this shift? Is it a great betrayal of what he was, not just in the musical form but in what he meant to people? Perhaps against some others in this volume, I see it as there from the start. A tendency waiting to emerge, for the underground grandiosity of pop music itself to overleap its own boundaries. A body of work of pure surface and shine that may have traversed the machinic march of disco and may have made it into something gorgeously inorganic, but only to welcome the cold new world of the Reagan years.
That is another question, a longer work of division and digging. Here, it is the question not of where the “betrayal” started but where it becomes impossible to ignore, where the contradictions not only of Jackson but of a historical conjuncture gained enough gravity, mass, and hurtling force of repetition to give shape to the years that followed.
COUNTLESS WORLDS OF DESPAIR, A RAGTAG BAND, AND DEMOCRATIC LASERS
To beat up Captain EO, the Francis Ford Coppola directed, George Lucas executive produced, Jackson starring "3-D musical motion picture space adventure" for Disney theme parks, for being reactionary or political problematic would be hitting a dead horse shaped punching bag. Too easy, expected, and not very productive. It is, after all, a Disney production, which pretty much guarantees its ideological fuckedness.
What is worth considering, however, is the particularity of its political awfulness. For, at the end of the day, Captain EO is a child's primer for neoliberal imperialism, anticipating the Washington Consensus era of humanitarian interventions and economic prescriptions in all its self-congratulatory anxiety.
It is also the early triumph of the mass cultural figure that acted, along with the boldness of yuppie consumerism, as capitalism's public relations life-support system: the emergence of NGO culture. The clanging discordance between the brutal consequences of forced reform packages for developing natures and the pious diversity speak of New Age tinged one-worldism. Like a time capsule with blundering aliens, power-of-love musical lasers, and choreographed group dance numbers, Captain EO is a promise to the globalization barbarisms of the near future.
The cosmos.
Of course, its near futurity is cast in the swirling milky garb of a distant galaxy, against the backdrop of the cosmos writ large. A broken glass sound of chimes, surging symphonics, and a twinkle of light (which turns out to be a small asteroid to be destroyed by our heroes). And the narration:
The cosmos. A universe of good and evil where a small group struggles to bring freedom to the countless worlds of despair.
It is no great stretch to hear the prescient echo in this of so much of the neoliberal discourse about the world order. Even the cosmological scale is not out of place, the telescoping slippage between local zones of engagement and an ongoing battle between incompatible conceptions of the universal. Even more, the fraught relation between how to relate these conceptions to the real situations they aim to capture.
What steps in here, then, to this deadlock, is the "small group," presumably on the good side of the cosmological equation. Guerilla freedom fighters, sniping from the mountains against occupying forces? A Leninist vanguard setting off the tinder of international revolution? A messianic group with the holy task conviction of the need to intervene into the course of history? Not exactly: "A ragtag band led by the infamous Captain EO."
The rag-tag bunch. And as always, that military cut of coat.
What distinguishes the fantasy of Captain EO/Michael as freedom-bringing missionary of the unity of the cosmos from these other historical figures isn't so much the soft tone of his speech or the emphasis on love and beauty. (Because as the film shows us, one can speak softly and still carry a big musical number, transforming laser stick.) It is the resolute ahistoricity of the mission he has been assigned, the fantasy of the band of misfits fighting the good fight against a time that has no place for them. Forget the normal difficulty of the small group waging war against imperial orders. They have the double task of convincing history that the era of war is over and of declaring their enemies to be allies all along, who were so clouded with rage and mistrust couldn't see their inner beauty. The aesthetic vanguard no longer burns the museum for being a graveyard. It tells those graves that they have beautiful souls waiting to be unlocked.
Tellingly, Michael's shimmering garb retains that shadow of citation: it is futuristic, technical, pure, and above all, insistent in its vaguely military look. A look that surfaces throughout his costuming, from its Napoleonic incarnations, the red armbands and fake medals, the naval coats and epaulettes and collar stripes, to its peak in the massive statues of him made for HIStory, when the continued demolition of statues of Stalin in the Eastern Bloc met its match in the erection of Michael as dictator, Michael as guarantor and inheritor of history. A bandolier-strapping revolutionary set to rewrite the books of the present to tell his story, an arc in which his fall from grace is neither degradation or misrecognition, but a necessary work of forging this history.
Here, though, nine years before HIStory, we have yet to reach the full fallout of History declared with the end of the Soviet Union and the further totalization of global markets. This burgeoning narrative is a different one. Here, it is precisely that of the ragtag band, the scrappy underfunded heterogeneous crew united by a true belief in their ability to change the world. The ones who latch onto the present with the tenacity of those who know the despair of countless worlds and the conviction of being part of a continued project to bring freedom, to circumvent the normal channels and procedures. They won't be expecting just one man... To be the non-state, non-political actor on the world stage, to be the principle of NGOs without the money and time that makes them possible (and which was the very foundation in 1992 of Jackson's own NGO/charitable organization, the Heal the World Foundation).
Part of the particularity of Jackson's vision in Captain EO is that of a world of scrambling non-expertise, of happy accidents, Inspector Clouseau-like bumbling, and the plucky spirit that will win over hearts and minds in the end.
And the part that most sums this up is the awfulness that is Hooter:
Hooter, a likely ancestor to Jar Jar Binks. Apparently Lucas has long had a fondness for alien characters so insufferable that you pray for their death.
Hooter, the oddly abject multiple trunk-orifice-farting buffoon who constantly derails their plans, exists solely as an excuse to show Captain EO's beneficence, his gentle Christ eyes at those who mean well. Everyone deserves a place in the rickety ship of freedom sharing, especially those who compensate for total incompetence with total idiocy, supposedly endearing to the children at Disney but which I can only imagine as rather terrifying.
The obvious reference through Captain EO, and the touchpoint that reveals the specificity of it as a product of both its historical moment and the trajectory of Jackson as a cultural figure, is the Star Wars trilogy. EO is explicitly a Star Wars reloaded, from its special effects to its "quirky" side characters. Yet it inflects not only the look and trope of the film, but, more than that, the not-so-buried undercurrents of it. In other words, the cultural seepage of Lucas' trilogy is taken as a given for watchers of Captain EO: Jackson's Lucas-film exists only in the minimal differences it draws out between itself and its source material.
The framing device and minor cues are all there: from the talented but not respected savior gifted with mysterious powers, to the "oh, Hooter" that may as well be "oh, R2." Yet when we approach the crew's destination, things start to go off-kilter, and the messianic imperial clarity of Star Wars warps in Jackson's anamorphic lens.
A world of trash, a world worth defending
From afar, this is Death Star, part two, with a spacefighter chase through its channels pulled directly from Star Wars. Then we get closer... and it turns out to be a world of scrap, a refashioned landfill, cobbled and salvaged into something liveable. This junk aesthetic continues to the henchmen of the Supreme Leader, rising from the piles of industrial waste, legions of filth and fury.
Whatever they are, they are definitely not the Taylorist-Fascist white gleam of Stormtroopers
As such, not the manufactured consequence of an all-powerful, financialized empire, but survivors of something like that empire, staking a claim on an inherited landscape. Not built from scratch, not installed, but wound into and through its landscape.
(This, the site and position of the enemy, may be the site of Jackson's betrayal of what he was and the we forged around his cultural presence: the one dancing on and working through, the flawless occupation of an inherited landscape, the industry bordering on "the ruins of punk and the chic regions of synthesizer pop" (from a TIME article about the music world before Thriller). Stepping into the wasteland, making it his own. Then becoming the Empire against which he was posed, at least by fans. Becoming that Death Star and dead star of immense gravity and uncertain orbit, an artificial world in all its impossible disconnection from any world we might call home.)
Giger Khomeini?
This imperial cast-off world gains its deep historical specificity with the first hissing words of the "Supreme Leader" to Jackson and his companions:
Silence! Infidel! You infect my world with your presence!
From the designation of "Supreme Leader" to the specificity of infidel as epithet, she is coded explicitly as the figure of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, albeit in H.R. Giger electric cable bondage wear. Two years before the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the supposed threat of Khomeini's Shi'a Pan-Islamism was apparently palpable enough to worm its way into the smiles-and-lasers world of Jackson's Epcot vision.
It also brings to the surface the heart of the superficial politics that would come to swallow Jackson, the universalizing one-cosmos justification of the invading saviors (EO himself states that they have come "uninvited and unannounced") versus the singularity of a world, of the "countless worlds of despair" each being someone's world.
Our protagonists in a not-very-democratic throne room to be "transformed" by high tech, smart weaponry
But in Captain EO, no one is very high up the totem pole. The Supreme Leader doesn't seem to rule supremely past her trashworld and small retinue of guards. And EO and his band? Just lowly scouts, sent to bring a gift to one more self-declared Supreme Leader. A war of minor threats and colonization. A war with an absent empire, a force somewhere propelling the whole infernal machine, an empire visible only in the do-gooders who come as the cultural tendrils of the dominant order to be.
For what they bring, after all, is the declaration of the inner beauty of the Supreme Leader, which just needs a key to unlock it. To bring a gift to someone as beautiful as you... Or as it is more commonly phrased in our times of the planned decimation of peoples and local economies: to bring market relations to someone as democratic as you...
And so begins the central set piece of the film, the song "We Are Here to Change The World," the song that sets the template for the terrible, sentimental, hollow, derivative, unhinged pseudo-political output that came to dominate his post-Bad output and cultural position. Some images give a sense:
The robots transform into instruments/prototypes for cheap tie-in toes to be sold at Disney stores.
Once defenders of the junkland, now jumpsuited backup dancers
A different sort of rainbow coalition.
From bound to the machine...
... to mass subcultural pompadour dancer
The beautifying laser power of the collective belief in the democratic good of the cosmos.
After the choreographed fight, the dance, the transformations, the film concludes the ultimate neoliberal coup de grace, the refusal to call your enemies enemies, instead folding them back into your narrative, the shaming of having to accept the cultural terms of occupation and be thankful. Here, a jubilatory Stockholm Syndrome that takes the form of the transformation/"unlocking the inner beauty" of the Supreme Leader herself.
The acceptable kind of Arabness: a sort of Princess Jasmine-like garden of Hellenic temple and exotic yet non-threatening delights. Undoing the industrial sexiness of the clawed Supreme Leader.
The Christian overtones of the song ("We're on a mission in the everlasting light that shines / A revelation of the truth and chapters of our minds")are not out of place with this rendering of the Islamic militant into the mere window dressing of a Garden of Allah.
The liberated thank those who freed them from their way of life.
The site of resistance into a Hellenic temple of democratic roots. Replacing the proper, yet telluric, universality of radical Islam with the pseudo-universal of globalized capital and the unquestionability of democracy. Removing the ground from which one can say you don't belong here: but there is just one world, we're just trying to heal it. Undermining even the right to the wastelands of capitalism, even the scrap heaps produced in the wake of making one smooth, globalized empire of circulation. And above all, the end of the age of enemies, the obscene non-question at the end of a gun: we're doing this to help you, this war is for your sake, don't you want to be modern and democratic? Why are you still resisting?
Our job here is done.
THOSE WHO SECEDE FROM THE WORLD
The soft-hue and multi-color death knell of other modes of living. Pockets of the universe that resist. Of the singular we of that talented young black man that many saw Jackson to be. Before he, and the apologists of neoliberalism, started to believe his own bullshit, when he should have shuffled off this earth but instead went to the cosmos. The sounds of a silent gliding moonwalk over countless worlds of despair. The non-contact of the end of difference and enemies, replaced by all being part of him. The obscene universal embrace of those who secede from the world of the living and the dead.
Things go to glittering shit.Can't you see?
You're just another part of me.
Woo! Another part of me.
- "We Are Here to Change the World", from Captain EO
1986
A year of surfaces and of what should not have risen to them. Unmoored, unwanted, the cargo ship Khian Sea wandered the oceans with its haul of toxic waste, angling for a trench deep enough and or island unlegislated enough to swallow it. Elsewhere, in the midst of supposed disarmament, domestic nuclear – and nuclear domesticity, finally yuppie-stretched to its breaking point – blew its lid. In Chernobyl, toxic winds blew, sicknesses started and stuck around.
Meanwhile, on other surfaces of public awareness, the hidden-in-plain-view obscenity of U.S. foreign policies of aid and condemnation, support to the lesser evil and funds to the anti-Communist, roared into sight. Ronald Reagan signs the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Early and persistent signs that the war of civilizations was no longer about American freedom versus Stalinist discipline. Rather, the capitalism claimed under lumbering American hegemony, deregulation, and supposed melting all solid national boundaries into the air of wired markets and demilitarized zones of engagement versus the new oldest enemy, unincorporable fundamentalisms, radical Islam.
Neoliberalism starts to hit its stride. The Space Shuttle Challenger goes up, and then up in smoke.
And in the world of culture, Michael Jackson buys a pet chimpanzee, becomes increasingly tabloid-known as estranged from reality, releases Captain EO, and lives on past the point of his death.
SURFACE SKATING
From this play of surfaces, deviations, and betrayals, two questions:
What does it mean for a giant to persist past his cultural death, to become a tidal behemoth detached from the ground, and circulating, dictating trends, effecting patterns of resistance and attraction? To not die correctly but to linger on?
How to understand Jackson’s trajectory? An artist of tremendous political and cultural symbolic value who made “apolitical” music. And then who became that cultural behemoth, out of touch with the times, who mattered largely as the slow articulation of a carnival wreckage, yet who increasingly functioned as a “political” artist, his themes dominated by the gloss of globalization-era universality?
Our answer, or any answer capable of grasping this tectonic shift, can only be formed along lines of materialist analysis: a situating of this not-unexpected disaster in its historical moment. That moment is precisely the coming-of-age of neoliberalism and the accompanying cultural forms that provide its illusions of resistance and care. This is the moment of 1986, of Captain EO, which is not only bound to its moment but which is a consummate, unnerving document of the era that points the nasty way forward.
In what way is 1986 a registration, after the fact of his real death 23 years later, of Jackson’s “death”, of his momentous persistence? This is neither a Thriller-esque zombie undead nor a resurrection. Just the sheer force and banal fact of the momentum of those with enough cultural capital to go on, ceaselessly. The dead star. To keep making the same damn moves, increasingly drug-hollowed and haunting, for fans to still cry out and weep for someone whose greatest cultural relevance became his uncanny insistence against innovation in favor of minor recombinations. And not to go out like an Otis Redding, snuffed out mid-burn.
As for the trajectory of the music toward “political” orientation, a chronology explains a lot. In 1988, N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton. In 1990, Public Enemy released Fear of a Black Planet. And in 1991, in the video for “Black or White,” Michael Jackson has Macaulay Culkin standing on a stoop in “hip-hop” clothes, rapping the words, “I’m not going to spend / My life being a color.”
Race blind.In short, when Michael stops making music to dance to and starts making music to convince us – or perhaps himself – to “heal the world.” At the very moment when he begins to address the world at large, and no longer from his singular, uncertain position, is the point where he leaves the world behind for his own peculiar orbit.
Is there something constitutively new in this shift? Is it a great betrayal of what he was, not just in the musical form but in what he meant to people? Perhaps against some others in this volume, I see it as there from the start. A tendency waiting to emerge, for the underground grandiosity of pop music itself to overleap its own boundaries. A body of work of pure surface and shine that may have traversed the machinic march of disco and may have made it into something gorgeously inorganic, but only to welcome the cold new world of the Reagan years.
That is another question, a longer work of division and digging. Here, it is the question not of where the “betrayal” started but where it becomes impossible to ignore, where the contradictions not only of Jackson but of a historical conjuncture gained enough gravity, mass, and hurtling force of repetition to give shape to the years that followed.
COUNTLESS WORLDS OF DESPAIR, A RAGTAG BAND, AND DEMOCRATIC LASERS
To beat up Captain EO, the Francis Ford Coppola directed, George Lucas executive produced, Jackson starring "3-D musical motion picture space adventure" for Disney theme parks, for being reactionary or political problematic would be hitting a dead horse shaped punching bag. Too easy, expected, and not very productive. It is, after all, a Disney production, which pretty much guarantees its ideological fuckedness.
What is worth considering, however, is the particularity of its political awfulness. For, at the end of the day, Captain EO is a child's primer for neoliberal imperialism, anticipating the Washington Consensus era of humanitarian interventions and economic prescriptions in all its self-congratulatory anxiety.
It is also the early triumph of the mass cultural figure that acted, along with the boldness of yuppie consumerism, as capitalism's public relations life-support system: the emergence of NGO culture. The clanging discordance between the brutal consequences of forced reform packages for developing natures and the pious diversity speak of New Age tinged one-worldism. Like a time capsule with blundering aliens, power-of-love musical lasers, and choreographed group dance numbers, Captain EO is a promise to the globalization barbarisms of the near future.
The cosmos.Of course, its near futurity is cast in the swirling milky garb of a distant galaxy, against the backdrop of the cosmos writ large. A broken glass sound of chimes, surging symphonics, and a twinkle of light (which turns out to be a small asteroid to be destroyed by our heroes). And the narration:
The cosmos. A universe of good and evil where a small group struggles to bring freedom to the countless worlds of despair.
It is no great stretch to hear the prescient echo in this of so much of the neoliberal discourse about the world order. Even the cosmological scale is not out of place, the telescoping slippage between local zones of engagement and an ongoing battle between incompatible conceptions of the universal. Even more, the fraught relation between how to relate these conceptions to the real situations they aim to capture.
What steps in here, then, to this deadlock, is the "small group," presumably on the good side of the cosmological equation. Guerilla freedom fighters, sniping from the mountains against occupying forces? A Leninist vanguard setting off the tinder of international revolution? A messianic group with the holy task conviction of the need to intervene into the course of history? Not exactly: "A ragtag band led by the infamous Captain EO."
The rag-tag bunch. And as always, that military cut of coat.What distinguishes the fantasy of Captain EO/Michael as freedom-bringing missionary of the unity of the cosmos from these other historical figures isn't so much the soft tone of his speech or the emphasis on love and beauty. (Because as the film shows us, one can speak softly and still carry a big musical number, transforming laser stick.) It is the resolute ahistoricity of the mission he has been assigned, the fantasy of the band of misfits fighting the good fight against a time that has no place for them. Forget the normal difficulty of the small group waging war against imperial orders. They have the double task of convincing history that the era of war is over and of declaring their enemies to be allies all along, who were so clouded with rage and mistrust couldn't see their inner beauty. The aesthetic vanguard no longer burns the museum for being a graveyard. It tells those graves that they have beautiful souls waiting to be unlocked.
Tellingly, Michael's shimmering garb retains that shadow of citation: it is futuristic, technical, pure, and above all, insistent in its vaguely military look. A look that surfaces throughout his costuming, from its Napoleonic incarnations, the red armbands and fake medals, the naval coats and epaulettes and collar stripes, to its peak in the massive statues of him made for HIStory, when the continued demolition of statues of Stalin in the Eastern Bloc met its match in the erection of Michael as dictator, Michael as guarantor and inheritor of history. A bandolier-strapping revolutionary set to rewrite the books of the present to tell his story, an arc in which his fall from grace is neither degradation or misrecognition, but a necessary work of forging this history.
Here, though, nine years before HIStory, we have yet to reach the full fallout of History declared with the end of the Soviet Union and the further totalization of global markets. This burgeoning narrative is a different one. Here, it is precisely that of the ragtag band, the scrappy underfunded heterogeneous crew united by a true belief in their ability to change the world. The ones who latch onto the present with the tenacity of those who know the despair of countless worlds and the conviction of being part of a continued project to bring freedom, to circumvent the normal channels and procedures. They won't be expecting just one man... To be the non-state, non-political actor on the world stage, to be the principle of NGOs without the money and time that makes them possible (and which was the very foundation in 1992 of Jackson's own NGO/charitable organization, the Heal the World Foundation).
Part of the particularity of Jackson's vision in Captain EO is that of a world of scrambling non-expertise, of happy accidents, Inspector Clouseau-like bumbling, and the plucky spirit that will win over hearts and minds in the end.
And the part that most sums this up is the awfulness that is Hooter:
Hooter, a likely ancestor to Jar Jar Binks. Apparently Lucas has long had a fondness for alien characters so insufferable that you pray for their death.Hooter, the oddly abject multiple trunk-orifice-farting buffoon who constantly derails their plans, exists solely as an excuse to show Captain EO's beneficence, his gentle Christ eyes at those who mean well. Everyone deserves a place in the rickety ship of freedom sharing, especially those who compensate for total incompetence with total idiocy, supposedly endearing to the children at Disney but which I can only imagine as rather terrifying.
The obvious reference through Captain EO, and the touchpoint that reveals the specificity of it as a product of both its historical moment and the trajectory of Jackson as a cultural figure, is the Star Wars trilogy. EO is explicitly a Star Wars reloaded, from its special effects to its "quirky" side characters. Yet it inflects not only the look and trope of the film, but, more than that, the not-so-buried undercurrents of it. In other words, the cultural seepage of Lucas' trilogy is taken as a given for watchers of Captain EO: Jackson's Lucas-film exists only in the minimal differences it draws out between itself and its source material.
The framing device and minor cues are all there: from the talented but not respected savior gifted with mysterious powers, to the "oh, Hooter" that may as well be "oh, R2." Yet when we approach the crew's destination, things start to go off-kilter, and the messianic imperial clarity of Star Wars warps in Jackson's anamorphic lens.
A world of trash, a world worth defendingFrom afar, this is Death Star, part two, with a spacefighter chase through its channels pulled directly from Star Wars. Then we get closer... and it turns out to be a world of scrap, a refashioned landfill, cobbled and salvaged into something liveable. This junk aesthetic continues to the henchmen of the Supreme Leader, rising from the piles of industrial waste, legions of filth and fury.
Whatever they are, they are definitely not the Taylorist-Fascist white gleam of StormtroopersAs such, not the manufactured consequence of an all-powerful, financialized empire, but survivors of something like that empire, staking a claim on an inherited landscape. Not built from scratch, not installed, but wound into and through its landscape.
(This, the site and position of the enemy, may be the site of Jackson's betrayal of what he was and the we forged around his cultural presence: the one dancing on and working through, the flawless occupation of an inherited landscape, the industry bordering on "the ruins of punk and the chic regions of synthesizer pop" (from a TIME article about the music world before Thriller). Stepping into the wasteland, making it his own. Then becoming the Empire against which he was posed, at least by fans. Becoming that Death Star and dead star of immense gravity and uncertain orbit, an artificial world in all its impossible disconnection from any world we might call home.)
Giger Khomeini?This imperial cast-off world gains its deep historical specificity with the first hissing words of the "Supreme Leader" to Jackson and his companions:
Silence! Infidel! You infect my world with your presence!
From the designation of "Supreme Leader" to the specificity of infidel as epithet, she is coded explicitly as the figure of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, albeit in H.R. Giger electric cable bondage wear. Two years before the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the supposed threat of Khomeini's Shi'a Pan-Islamism was apparently palpable enough to worm its way into the smiles-and-lasers world of Jackson's Epcot vision.
It also brings to the surface the heart of the superficial politics that would come to swallow Jackson, the universalizing one-cosmos justification of the invading saviors (EO himself states that they have come "uninvited and unannounced") versus the singularity of a world, of the "countless worlds of despair" each being someone's world.
Uninvited and unannounced.
The arrival of the NGO shock-troops is indeed an infection of the whole world. For what they bring with them is that global vision, that perversion of communist universality and its having the key to unlock it: no longer class analysis, but market relations, smart bombs, and puppet democracies. (Or, in this case, music to unlock the beauty hidden inside this world of rage and trash.)
Our protagonists in a not-very-democratic throne room to be "transformed" by high tech, smart weaponryBut in Captain EO, no one is very high up the totem pole. The Supreme Leader doesn't seem to rule supremely past her trashworld and small retinue of guards. And EO and his band? Just lowly scouts, sent to bring a gift to one more self-declared Supreme Leader. A war of minor threats and colonization. A war with an absent empire, a force somewhere propelling the whole infernal machine, an empire visible only in the do-gooders who come as the cultural tendrils of the dominant order to be.
For what they bring, after all, is the declaration of the inner beauty of the Supreme Leader, which just needs a key to unlock it. To bring a gift to someone as beautiful as you... Or as it is more commonly phrased in our times of the planned decimation of peoples and local economies: to bring market relations to someone as democratic as you...
And so begins the central set piece of the film, the song "We Are Here to Change The World," the song that sets the template for the terrible, sentimental, hollow, derivative, unhinged pseudo-political output that came to dominate his post-Bad output and cultural position. Some images give a sense:
The robots transform into instruments/prototypes for cheap tie-in toes to be sold at Disney stores.
Once defenders of the junkland, now jumpsuited backup dancers
A different sort of rainbow coalition.
From bound to the machine...
... to mass subcultural pompadour dancer
The beautifying laser power of the collective belief in the democratic good of the cosmos.After the choreographed fight, the dance, the transformations, the film concludes the ultimate neoliberal coup de grace, the refusal to call your enemies enemies, instead folding them back into your narrative, the shaming of having to accept the cultural terms of occupation and be thankful. Here, a jubilatory Stockholm Syndrome that takes the form of the transformation/"unlocking the inner beauty" of the Supreme Leader herself.
The acceptable kind of Arabness: a sort of Princess Jasmine-like garden of Hellenic temple and exotic yet non-threatening delights. Undoing the industrial sexiness of the clawed Supreme Leader. The Christian overtones of the song ("We're on a mission in the everlasting light that shines / A revelation of the truth and chapters of our minds")are not out of place with this rendering of the Islamic militant into the mere window dressing of a Garden of Allah.
The liberated thank those who freed them from their way of life.The site of resistance into a Hellenic temple of democratic roots. Replacing the proper, yet telluric, universality of radical Islam with the pseudo-universal of globalized capital and the unquestionability of democracy. Removing the ground from which one can say you don't belong here: but there is just one world, we're just trying to heal it. Undermining even the right to the wastelands of capitalism, even the scrap heaps produced in the wake of making one smooth, globalized empire of circulation. And above all, the end of the age of enemies, the obscene non-question at the end of a gun: we're doing this to help you, this war is for your sake, don't you want to be modern and democratic? Why are you still resisting?
Our job here is done.THOSE WHO SECEDE FROM THE WORLD
The soft-hue and multi-color death knell of other modes of living. Pockets of the universe that resist. Of the singular we of that talented young black man that many saw Jackson to be. Before he, and the apologists of neoliberalism, started to believe his own bullshit, when he should have shuffled off this earth but instead went to the cosmos. The sounds of a silent gliding moonwalk over countless worlds of despair. The non-contact of the end of difference and enemies, replaced by all being part of him. The obscene universal embrace of those who secede from the world of the living and the dead.
Clear and frozen danger (Why we need to reclaim our stone-making names before the state better learns to turn them outwards like Perseus)
The old bourgeoisie was at least consistent. It was glad of its privileges, it wanted to expand them and looked to the future. The present one looks down; it sees the multitude approaching behind its back, in the same way as it had done. It does not want that and withdraws and solidarises with power... The majority of governments have speculated on this sad progression of fear that, in the long run, becomes moral death. They have thought that the dead can be better manipulated than the living. They have shown two medusa heads to the terrified bourgeoisie, in order to fill them with fear of the people: in the long run, these two heads, terrorism and communism, have turned them into stone.
- Michelet, 1846
Different now, of course, is the utter decoupling of that pairing, terrorism and communism, and the fact that the raising of communism by the mainstream media now, the occasional shrieking calls about the "socialization of wealth" under Obama, serves not to frighten the bourgeoisie but only to convince them that true communism is dead and gone: sure, we may pseudo-nationalize a bit and green our infrastructure, but don't worry, you can still make a killing. Against this, we need to make Communism as deadly serious, impossible to imagine, and unincorporable into this economic order as it once was. Only then does it gain the chance of being a medusa head shared collectively, halting this long trainwreck of the new century, an idea that moves differently, bound to everyday practices of want and discontent and moving from them to an air heavy with the threat of no more deferral of what is all of ours. An older idea we need again: perhaps how we speak is not our choice, just the coming into air the underground logic of history.
The tides shifting pull beneath the stone raft.
"it’s got that perfect space Odyssey 2001 vibe, kinda like the long version of the intro to Celtic Frost’s “Into the Crypts of Rays”. It’s cold."
Actual Pain put up this mixtape from Fenriz of Darkthrone. It's a pretty safe bet that nowhere else will you be allowed to move from French disco house to Rudimentary Peni in such a short span of time. Wow.
Some dogs rekindle their hunting instincts
Been meaning to link to, and write about, this (the History Channel show Life After People: The Series) for a while. I haven't yet, in part because I have been waiting for something substantive to say. I'll return to it later this summer when I come back to the question of the apocalyptic city. For now, all I want to say is a few disconnected things:
Washington Monument, in the lush verdant tropicalia of future WashingtonIt is the ultimate wet dream of an Earth First activist, now transitioned from flickering no-future fantasies to big budget, CGI excessive, drawn out over an entire series: the strange union of primitivist ground-clearing deep time wishing and a station known for its borderline bellicose fetishization of all things World War.
Tarkovsky and those other merchants of apocalyptic melancholy could barely envision pulling off something on this scale, this pornographic in its lingering gaze on the evacuated landscape, this heavy-breathing, false restraint at the lustful gaze toward monuments and networks without upkeep tumbling and fizzling out, this slick drizzle, dust, scavenging claim-stakers and clamoring kudzu unmaking of the built world.
Not terrorism, just gravity, weather, and time(For a good time, read the episode descriptions. A sample:
Episode Nine: The Road to Nowhere
The post-apocalyptic fate of our cars, planes and roads. Oil refineries turn into time bombs. In the Motor City, harsh northern winters dismantles auto headquarters. While in Texas, the Alamo succumbs to a new invader. Also, animals adapt: armadillos spread, some dogs rekindle their hunting instincts, and long-horn cattle flourish once again.
Their use of the "Also" is quite funny. As in the description for episode 6: Also, Philiadelphia's Liberty Bell cracks for good and San Francisco's cable cars and bridges snap.)
Arguably the greatest and weirdest segment of the series: the survival of the Queen's corgis as they become dirty, scrappy little street-fighting bastards
Last, this series initially seems a genuine betrayal of what the apocalyptic can allow us to think, the processes of construction and becoming collective brought out in the always-hovering move to the post-apocalyptic. In other words, there are no humans left over to work toward becoming a people again. There are the assorted talking heads here to give a bit of master knowledge to validate the money shots of our national icons falling apart, and there is the carnival barker of a narrator. However, if we think of apocalypse in the proper sense, as a lifting of the veil, of the revelation of that which has been hidden, the series and all its indulgent melancholy gains traction. For what emerges is the eccentricity and idiosyncrasy of the leftover objects of capitalism, without their attendants and veilers, no one smoothing the cracks or moving the debris to other shores. No more circulation, no more abandonment, no more accumulation, subtle or primitive.
The caption provided by the show's website - "ONE HOUR AFTER PEOPLE: Built up vapors, normally regulated by workers, linger. Runaway temperatures in the reactor create sparks, and everything ignites. The fuel that once propelled mankind around the world now fuels a seemingly endless inferno."
And in this way, the series in all its drooling gloom and aesthetics of digital decay - you don't need computers to find these sorts of teeming messes and vacant mini-worlds, you just need to know where to look - nails the distinction between the end of the world and the end of days. It is the latter which is properly apocalyptic, in all its dialectical chances to speak the banality and wanting of our epoch, this sequences of days. (Indeed, as Don reminded me, the sense of the end of days as a unit of time measure: the work day, the end of our history and cycles consisting of interlocking 8-hour blocks.) All that remains is the world, not miraculously without humans anymore, but perhaps a lifting fog, not enlightenment but a slow feeling out for the first time in a long time of just what all this is before and behind us. The question, as always, is how to make this kind of groundclearing possible without waiting for us to be gone. Tactics born from dogs, fissured cracks bred from the unfathomable weight of this whole enterprise.
(And yet, at this moment when we see the creaks and groans in the calls for economic state of emergency, unemployment rising still, the extreme difficulty of imagining a way out that isn't ... at this moment, not to hold up the wrong figures, or hold them up wrongly, not to just think of ourselves as wolves and pigs, tactical bestiaries of those ready to rummage and run through the chaos of an order-ending time, or as the prescient witnesses to the slow car crash of this moment. Not to linger too long in the dusky prettiness and stale ferocity of collapse. Recalling instead some other aspects of whatever lineage we align toward, thinking about clean, open spaces, about careful construction, not junk piles but thoughtful, durable piles of concrete and glass to house more than just rich couples. Planning and care, welfare and distribution. Without this bedrock and commitment, our scavenging, hunting, and constructing capacities sniff around pointlessly, finding nothing but the scent of their own trail.)
Horrors: Wolfen
One of those rare films in which its terror-threatening taglines apply both to the monsters in the film and the developers who instantiate the logic of late industrial urban decay and the evacuation of communities. South Bronx as the ghost-town primal rage restaging of a lost battle against gentrification. There is no defense.
Come watch tomorrow night (Thursday), 8:30 PM, my house.
And of course he's drinking his own blood
On the note of my continuing search for intersections between these lines of thinking tracked out here, all that negativity and fidelity to the eccentric and dialectical reversal, and the kind of brilliant direct pedagogy and affective force of political hip hop, here is the intro track to Dead Prez's Let's Get Free (2000), "Wolves," sampling a speech by Chairman Omali Yeshitela. So haunting, so vicious, the recoil and horrible familiarity. Between my yearning wolves of noise and thought and the wolves that we all are forced to be, salivating toward our own death, knowing better than but unable to stop.
This is a model of analogy, of how to turn the idiosyncratic into the deeply felt of the commons. "That's the thing we have to understand today..."
This is a model of analogy, of how to turn the idiosyncratic into the deeply felt of the commons. "That's the thing we have to understand today..."
Construction in the age of wreckage
Avant-garde armorThat which can only be new, which calls itself a fissure in the trendline, a needle skipping from the record to the floor, whatever calls itself thus necessarily calls for a ground clearing, shoving to the gutter the clutter of accreted junk so as to gain visibility and the room to build up momentum.
Or this is how it supposedly goes. And this is been the rallying and outpacing cry of prescriptive radical cultural movements, from the manifestos of Dada and the SI, Constructivist design and Brutalist slabs, dialectical film and anarcho-punk.
This - this mode of emptying the graveyard to make room for new dead - is nothing new, nothing if not the dominant minor logic of the 20th century, the blood-and-noise conviction running alongside its modern twin: the promise of global liberal democracy making capitalism itself a "basic human right." And there is little left in our periodizing mourning which dwells in the basement of the museum of avant-gardes, fingering our collectible remnants of when times were different and when people believed.
So, like the very movements in question, we wind up backs to the wall of that non-choice: either we mark and mock, tell ourselves that it was always just aesthetic play from the start, postmodern equivalences from the start, and that real politics always lay elsewhere, or we maintain a conviction in the thought of the avant-garde, unmoor from our radical past in order to break the baleful spell of melancholic inaction, thereby discounting both the struggle that is our very history and the forces beyond which these days are unknowable.
In other words, we are one of two Jokers:
Cheering up a Hopper, bringing a little life into the mausoleum of culture
"I kinda like this one..."Jack Nicholson's Joker in 1989, having a band of merry pranksters defacing party in the Museum, saving from alteration only Francis Bacon's "Figure With Meat", entirely missing the point that for them to truly respect the Bacon would not be to reify it as dark art but to basically become what the Joker would become in the American filmic imagination.
Or...
Or...
"I'll just burn my half..."That very figure, a remarkable hearkening back to the 19th century vision of anarchist as terrorist, the Joker as some slavering, negative-thought wielding combination of Sergei Nechayev, Lucky Luciano, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Protesters at the kettled G20 London protest in Ledgerite Joker makeup, proving that us radicals are not immune to and can benefit from the slips and shocks of what mass culture still remains capable of producingEither defacing or destruction, the positive mark of negation left as a mocking sneer trace or the immolatory fantasy of groundclearing.
Either:
this town needs an enema (it is polluted, I have a conscious program of action, an invigorating solution, via the rather uncomfortable procedure of art-as-life and death-as-art it so as to make it better)
or
this town is itself already an enema (the hollowed out core of what could be, the administered false freedoms of the liberal order, and hence we might as well light the fuse and see what happens, let the world show its barbaric colors pulsing beneath the scrubbed-clean surface: "I'm just introducing a little chaos to this dull rule filled world").
(Or course, what is never spoken but implicitly suggested insofar as it is Batman's own solution, not to use his wealth - his only actual superpower - for any sort of collective social programs but simply to fight the Joker, is that this clown needs an enema. Hence the maddening, Bruce-doth-protest-too-much insistence that "I'm not like you, I won't kill you" - I'll just let your grip slip so you falling to your death is the consequence of your inability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps into the proper role for a maverick committed to preserving the status quo.)
Not this, not thatThere are distinct corollaries here with the kind of schematic Badiou (and others, albeit in different terminology) have been proposing in recent years, that of the different inflections of a "passion for the Real": read "Real" here not in a strict Lacanian sense, but rather as the insistence on praxis founded on the ground of what the world could be, neither Utopian nor hemmed in by the reigning symbolic order, but a sense of what lies below, of the bedrock of a social relations and thought to be rediscovered by revolutionary theory and action, particularly insofar as it indicates a relation to how one thinks antagonism and historical projects. Without delving into the specificity of that project (I have extended analyses of this elsewhere if interested), what is to be drawn forth here is, first, its direct relation to political-aesthetic projects and, second, here is the symptomatic blindspot of the model.
The century, as it tracks the supposed heroic arc of avant-garde art and vanguard political thought, is indeed marked by the relation between the ghosts and goals of unity and division, synthesis and contradiction, coalition and antagonism. And as such, the basic question is needed: are we to locate our way out of this mess via the unification of the opposed Two into a new One, or do we need to keep ceaselessly negating, dividing, resplitting, to shove a wedge into the false unity of the globe and show who's on what sight, plainly, harshly? The reformist and/or apologist overtones of the "unifier" position are unmistakable, and I give force, with Badiou, to the latter, to the drawing out of the Two. In this latter position, he recognizes the possibility that was the dominant historical tendency: our well-known annihilative, purgative, partisan conviction that just might destroy the world - or at least the possibility of its own position having coherence - in trying to burn it clean. Yet the work of revolutionary consciousness, political or cultural, cannot be the antithesis to the world that this annihilative passion forges itself as (the destructive embodiment of the antagonism itself), but something else, a horizon toward a third that escapes either the unary phantasm of the One or the terroristic deadlock of the Two. Regarding the image from earlier of the burning pile of cash, the Joker's joke is, fundamentally, that you can't just burn one part of a totality. It's all or nothing...
Against this, as a third of sorts, Badiou offers a "subtractive path: the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it in its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term which constitutes it. What barely takes place differs from the place wherein it takes place. It is in the ‘barely’ that all the affect rests, in this immanent exception" (from "One Divides Into Two", in Lenin Reloaded, on which I've written a long review possibly forthcoming in HM).
Concretized as cultural strategy, what does this look like?
Carl Andre, the minimal form of buildingMinimalism, that particular (historical) form of abstraction. Robert Ryman, Carl Andre, Agnes Heller. Morton Feldman. Mies. Malevich at his starkest best. Late Beckett, minus the scatological humor. Warhol's films, not his paintings. Late conceptual names, all.
(Yet... this is a longer gesture to track, too far for here, but there is another set of objects that perhaps crystallizes and deploys this barely far better than those productions that self-declare as minimal shifts of difference. Namely, the anti-minimal production of serial genre production, the relentless rehashing of a form that cashed in once, the repetition that tries its damnedest to escape difference. Think here of my great horror film loves, giallo and Hammer, Euro exploitation and minor studio 30's production, then beyond horror, to directors who can't get it quite right, the full-blooded, bawdy, surrealist ceaseless iterations, reading the tradition wrong through too much fidelity, too much studio pressure, a tectonic weight on what should be just another low-level production. Not diamonds but symptomatic coal, doubled back on itself and the very processes of production pressing down on it. Beyond film: psychotic pulp, Weird fiction, the insane linguistic frottage of Harlequin romance, all those books that know it has been done yet are commanded to do it all again, reaching out past themselves, raiding the tombs of other traditions. The feeling before the screen, knowing full well the director was told to play it straight, to make this just like that because that ruled the box office. And in front of you, the feathers drop, a boiling shadow, the words that should never go together, and we all think, how did this happen...)
We have three jokers now, three grains of sand, three ways of working within, through, and against a world order that does not satisfy you.
1. Annihilative passion for the Real, the one who stands before the burning millions of dollars and says, you just don't get it...
2. Subtractive passion for the Real: a Malevitchian Joker? Can we fathom it beyond its invisibility, the Joker somewhere convincing himself that his nearly unseen actions have brought forth, in the impossible difference of the barely different, a contact with the Real? (The non-maniacal Joker who may be a threat to the city, but the city will never know.) Or perhaps: this enema needs a town, a site from which it can barely withdraw.
3. Two unite into One: the Joker who will give the city a cunning enema, cajoling its consciousness via small calculated shocks, cultural sabotage, and lots of gaudy purple clothing.
But the blindspot, and not the sudden productive blindspot of anamorphic vision?
Dead labor caught in the stormThis approach to thinking radical political culture/ culturally radical politics is utterly accurate, particularly for a certain dominant moment in capitalist aesthetics. Yet something rests behind, a lack unacceptable for this conjuncture, at this economic flashpoint, this crisis that may not become a crisis unless we make it so. A lingering dissatisfaction, that there need be something else. The sense that these may be, for our moment, merely modes of petty nihilism, self-subtracting unwillingness to play the game that be the wrong game, and light defacement, just ways of apologetic participation.
More, though, we might say, that each of these have been more than that. But they are no longer.
More, though, is the other possibility not followed through, that the passion for the Real should not only be allowed to count when the dialectical model is that of One divides into Two. For
simply making as Two is not dialectics, at least not the dialectics of my project, from the rust knowledge of salvagepunk to the uncanny existence of our world with its copresent apocalyptic collapse. Capitalism is the bringing into existence of a world of the non-dialectical Two (there is that which is capital and that which might be, and underpinning it all is the unresolvable antagonism of workers and capitalists). All this under the shifting veil that tells us the world is global now, a tremendous heterogeneous One. Our thought must be dialectical exactly because capitalism itself is not.
Anselm Kiefer and the lead-frozen weight of past thoughtAnd as such, we need not just the division that creates the Two but the insistence to not rest in it, either as annihilation or subtraction. Rather, construction, the other possibility so anathema to contemporary dialectical thought so resolute in its following of the vitally important line of thinking that was negative dialectics that it considers anything other than annihilation or subtraction to be the silly promise of unification, of synthesis, of the magical joining together.
What it can't think is the work of salvage and montage, of the work of construction in the age of wreckage.
In other words, to divide up the One not for the sake of purgative annihilation - or for the substractive insertion of a void - but to see what's worth saving in the One that was never there other than in our militant assertion of the world that will be made. That we begin indeed with the racheting up and cracking apart of the pseudo-totality of late capitalism. And then starts the harder task of knowing when to call something a wreck and to dig through that wreckage.
Life among the non-ruins
Like the avant-garde move that we can't afford to leave behind, but here doubled. To clear the wreckage - the wreckage at once material, the crap and scraps of our production processes, and formal, past gestures, manifesto fragments and strategies for repurposing - to make a space for what can be made from it. Then the making, the remaking, not the smoothing synthesis, but welding, stitching, rewiring. All with the chances that were there from the start, too polished to see, too immense to grasp, too broken to have ever been whole.
For a history of salvagepunk
Three moments.
One.
The scattered corpsescape of WWI. The night of the world is Europe looking at the death's face looking back at it, the progeny of nationalist pride and a gleaming weaponry forged from the guts of the Industrial Revolution. Only the Bolsheviks say no and carve a trench into history. And Kurt Schwitters draws forth Merz from Commerz.
Two.
The 60's go kaputt. Then the long 70's, in all their gritty urgency and Satanic deformations of hippie non-thought, Moro's body in the trunk of the Renault, Bretton Woods undoes the filaments of currency as certainty and shape. In England, 1969, The Bed-Sitting Room and Monty Python think the end of it all as little more than the relentless repurposing of the same. Ten years later, Mad Max heads toward the Outback.
Three.
Neoliberalism's febrile tremors and hysterical overcompensations. Small cracks and shimmers, old reptilian brain stirring of something that smells like a revolutionary past. Cyberpunk already came and went: how could it not, given that it coldly sang along with what it felt like on the ground? Steampunk, the wet dream of Obama-time, acts old fashioned as it sails smug over the oceans of dead labor that got us here, tidying up. Salvagepunk, not yet here except as the unbidden tightening of hands learning new tricks. Of the trash heap, only its romance of frozen decay should be discarded. The new building was other architectures in the pre-built wasteland of this life.
“I know that not a single Honduran citizen supports this military coup.”
If you aren't already doing so, read my friend and comrade Don's coverage and translations on the Honduran coup. More will be forthcoming from him in the coming days. Necessary.
If you're a janitor, get a street sweeper
And now, following for anyone who read the post below, to restore a bit of pep and vigor to our musical possibilities that are insistently here...
This is the sonic equivalent of a miracle tonic for revolutionaries. Should be taken at least once a week, if not more.
For a chaser, meet one of the most alarmingly catchy hooks, to be matched only by T.I. switching to tender half-sung pre-prison anthems. (That and the unshakable glee of Hurricane Chris as he performs "Halle Berry (She's Fine)" in front of the Louisiana State Legislature.) The fact that "My Favorite Mutiny" has not graced every mixtape does not compute.
This is the sonic equivalent of a miracle tonic for revolutionaries. Should be taken at least once a week, if not more.
For a chaser, meet one of the most alarmingly catchy hooks, to be matched only by T.I. switching to tender half-sung pre-prison anthems. (That and the unshakable glee of Hurricane Chris as he performs "Halle Berry (She's Fine)" in front of the Louisiana State Legislature.) The fact that "My Favorite Mutiny" has not graced every mixtape does not compute.
Did the music and the crumbling mind ever meet
Go read: k-punk's blisteringly sad, oddly gorgeous piece on Michael Jackson and the lost chance, the preceding posts on Grey Vampires, and all that falls and rises between the two.
(Once I finish this section on salvagepunk, I will enter, and respond to, the monstrous bestiary of late capitalist banality he raises, when I come back to cut the phantom already-gone acephalic head from mass zombie reification.)
Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want (Cinema, adult diapers, shocks)
This truly may be a new pinnacle of film criticism: what seems like a giant joke turns out to be the realization that the walking joke who is Michael Bay may be, against all odds and with a horrible sense of inevitability, the culmination of a lineage of sense-driven cinema from Buñuel through Brakage, Vigo to Svankmajer. The joke is not on us but through us, onto the emergence of sincere, drooling, anarchic - not anarchist - aesthetics at the very greased heart of shit film production.
Perhaps we have here the opening-out of Eisenstein's vision of a cinema of calculated physical shocks, the direct manipulation of the body's affective order by means of ways of seeing, cutting, framing, undoing. The difference here is that cinema's apex comes not in the hands of one who knows what he is doing or who grasps the political sense of this. Instead we get a noise bomb of sight, a pure explosion of effects dismantling reason. It is not full of stars. It is the sound of stars turning back on themselves, the immense gravitational consequence of great heaps money and sloppy jagged tears of meaninglessness...
The glittering digital wreckage, the shattered wake tracing the course of what cinema could have been and insisted it would be.
"If I get elected... they will be terrified. I myself will be terrified."
(thanks to the Institute for sending me down this rabbit hole.)
Koichi Toyama. Somewhere between Bakunin and Badiou, the ceaseless work of negativity speaking the obvious, our constant complicity and non-anxiety in the face and façade of participatory democracy, the "festival of the majority."
A later speech, running for U.S. presidency. If Japan, under the carrot-stick of U.S. hegemony, is little more than a economically elevated 51st state of the union, why can't Koichi run? I now deeply regret my leaving the "President" part of my ballot blank. I thought it was a null decision between the non-choice of majoritarian politics in a state where the decision toward Obamamania was a given. I have here found, retroactively, my write-in candidate.
And, as is the fate with all things that sparkle and stick sand-like a bit in our Internet memory, the mash-up is inevitable.
Although this tempts a dour response that this is analogous to the hamstringing of compelling, idiosyncratic, iconoclastic figures and moments of thought (the kind of campy defanging I've mentioned previously regarding zombies, trash, all things dirty, undead, and "low"), this works quite well, in relief to the Daily Show mode of Darth Vader-ing Dick Cheney, etc. The perhaps unbidden joke here? The imperial theme given stridency to this contemporary Mishima of anti-imperialism. There is no aesthetic experience that is fundementally imperialist. There is stirring, and there is banal. We just need to get our heads clear, wear our minority on our chests as more than joke t-shirts of virtuoso consumption, and dust off our symphonic solidarities. Minority festivals as more than a catchphrase for institutionally sanctioned diversity days... Hypocrite voter, mon semblable, mon frère! Apparently, shaving your head and admitting terror at the prospect of what you yourself advocate is a first halting, unsettling march step.
Koichi Toyama. Somewhere between Bakunin and Badiou, the ceaseless work of negativity speaking the obvious, our constant complicity and non-anxiety in the face and façade of participatory democracy, the "festival of the majority."
A later speech, running for U.S. presidency. If Japan, under the carrot-stick of U.S. hegemony, is little more than a economically elevated 51st state of the union, why can't Koichi run? I now deeply regret my leaving the "President" part of my ballot blank. I thought it was a null decision between the non-choice of majoritarian politics in a state where the decision toward Obamamania was a given. I have here found, retroactively, my write-in candidate.
And, as is the fate with all things that sparkle and stick sand-like a bit in our Internet memory, the mash-up is inevitable.
Although this tempts a dour response that this is analogous to the hamstringing of compelling, idiosyncratic, iconoclastic figures and moments of thought (the kind of campy defanging I've mentioned previously regarding zombies, trash, all things dirty, undead, and "low"), this works quite well, in relief to the Daily Show mode of Darth Vader-ing Dick Cheney, etc. The perhaps unbidden joke here? The imperial theme given stridency to this contemporary Mishima of anti-imperialism. There is no aesthetic experience that is fundementally imperialist. There is stirring, and there is banal. We just need to get our heads clear, wear our minority on our chests as more than joke t-shirts of virtuoso consumption, and dust off our symphonic solidarities. Minority festivals as more than a catchphrase for institutionally sanctioned diversity days... Hypocrite voter, mon semblable, mon frère! Apparently, shaving your head and admitting terror at the prospect of what you yourself advocate is a first halting, unsettling march step.
Year Zero
I turn 27 today. I am spending the day in a split between reading Kurt Schwitters and riding my bike into the hills: between Merz and condor-circling. Come a few months from now, this blog will turn 1. I have a sneaking hope it will be far sneakier, more foul-thought-polemic-mouthed, and hungrier than I was then. But over the next few months, I will be giving it, so as to give myself, some sort of compulsory education, via a telescope in reverse and a shorter tether. Reason being that my book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, coming out from zer0 Books next year...
(provisional cover my sister designed for me)
... needs to be written this summer. As such, expect a series of overinsistent working-throughs and reformulations on the apocalyptic question, starting from the initial Apocalyptic notes series written a while back.
First up on the fleshing out program/Lautréamontian dissecting table: salvagepunk, my coinage that seems to be taking on a life of its own (and going on to do more interesting things than my initial capture of a cultural tectonic).
To become of it here: a search for debris and montage beginnings, a sense of why Monty Python (in its Gilliam-inflection) returned to Dada/Surrealist collage aesthetics (and why those "originary" aesthetics were so concerned with a repurposing of the Victorian), the fake vintage t-shirt as the pseudo-apocalyptic freeze frame of the 90's, and how to dwell in thought in the junkyard without raising its filth to a futility of melancholic contemplation and era-naming.
To try to make out of the trashheap something utterly without value but that is, at the end of days, worth a damn.
(provisional cover my sister designed for me)
First up on the fleshing out program/Lautréamontian dissecting table: salvagepunk, my coinage that seems to be taking on a life of its own (and going on to do more interesting things than my initial capture of a cultural tectonic).
To become of it here: a search for debris and montage beginnings, a sense of why Monty Python (in its Gilliam-inflection) returned to Dada/Surrealist collage aesthetics (and why those "originary" aesthetics were so concerned with a repurposing of the Victorian), the fake vintage t-shirt as the pseudo-apocalyptic freeze frame of the 90's, and how to dwell in thought in the junkyard without raising its filth to a futility of melancholic contemplation and era-naming.
To try to make out of the trashheap something utterly without value but that is, at the end of days, worth a damn.
To envelopment and protection (as long as what we are protecting is the noird birdling of a crumbleworld)
China Miéville on literary/artistic movements to come. Of note here, aside from my pleasure in being designated as the "bard" of salvagepunk, is the manifesto quality of his post: not manifesto in the sense of stridency of certainty, but of the kind of saying that makes the said the case. Naming movements in advance, laying a glass-and-steam pocket for their incubation, out in the open.
This sense of open protection, of the envelope that doesn't hide itself away to wait until it grows important and fierce - for rarely does that work out as intended, is crucially marked in China's post on the inflection of the dystopian/end of days/apocalyptic/cold morning after feel, an inflection that winds through each of the future movements described: each is a navigation through and negotiation of the dominant modes of culturally figuring the end of it all.
The dominant modes to be rejected, that is, from the kitschy reduction of the zombie to the level of a Keyboard Cat meme to the "well, now it's over" misprision of how literary production - or, for that matter, the oil-clanked motors of production and slippery circulation - might come to a grinding halt. All in all, against the grave-diggers of our world, the ones who consign unfinished trajectories to the knacker's or who endlessly repeat, in a pitiable sadness of not quite jouissance, the cultural figure or gesture that really had something there, ceaselessly recombine it to leave it hollow-eyed and twee.
In place of that, let's make sure to keep making tears and pockets for our hard boiled Cthulhus and our hot-wiring wreckage angels.
Noise will be noise
Making my day: my friend Joseph lent me the first 4 volumes of Sub Rosa's "An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music." This collection is remarkable and a serious listening project. Anyone out there who wishes to track these down and listen/process like so many buried wire circuits with me across a digital divide, let me know...
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