Go "read" the snarkiest, most eating-its-own-tail Wikipedia "entry" ever.
The Chrysler Blob (automated production of formlessness)
One of the reasons that Chrysler has run into such financial trouble is that there have been some problems with the relay devices between the computers and the robot welders. When a problem develops further up the line, it takes a long time for the computers to tell the robot welders to stop. So the robot welders continue to make these welding motions, dropping molten steel directly onto the conveyor belt, even though there are no cars on the line, building up a series of equidistant blobs. It takes several hours for the computers to tell the robot welders to stop. At the rate of eighty cars per hour, a typical plant is capable of manufacturing approximately 100 of these blobs before the plant can be totally shut down.
[Laurie Anderson]
What happens when you re-order the verbs in Arthur Conan Doyle's sentences
A ventilator dies, a cord is made, and a lady who sleeps in the bed is hung.
Orgasmic entropy
A general depletion of simultaneous or spatially contiguous orgasm in capitalist nations.
Given that:
a) the near-total drop-off of visits to porn theaters, where strangers came together to come together, even if sometimes looking very straight ahead and not acknowledging their fellow watchers, or even to shops with viewing booths separated by walls but right next to one another, in favor of the atomized viewing of internet porn as a solitary activity and the cold light of the computer in a sleeping house, and
b) the non-take off of an orgiastic future - with all its relaxed codes of partnership, "fluid" sexuality, general upsurge in non-domestic sex as political and casual act - promised by parts of the sexual revolution, or even a general dilation of family values and all that comes with it,
it follows that now, 40 years after the start of the '70s, fewer people orgasm in reach, sight, or hearing range of one another. As for what, how, and who comes next, that's up for grabs.
Enthusiasm in the dark
Sex, which many enthusiasts thought they had invented in the sixties, here makes its appearance in the science-fiction film. The relationship between sex and science fiction, or, more to the point, its virtual absence from the genre, has always been a puzzle - explained, I would guess, by the fact that science-fiction writers constitute an authentic community of naifs, generally nervous of change, politically ultraconservative, eager not to think about what adults do after dark.
- Ballard, on Barbarella
Cos I'm never going to change a thing
G got me hooked on this Robert Wyatt track. And these hooks run deep. Join the ranks of those humming this in every empty hallway. Fidelity and acceptance have never been so catchy, sad, and sexy.
Inhuman strike
On the note of the mutant proletariat, my contribution to the world of obtuse propaganda for the spring.
A splatter, if you like
Anish Kapoor's neo-Eiffel, red Tatlin tower design for Olympic public art money dump was chosen. Apparently, it would have boggled the Romans. All well and good, as large things on which to climb up and look around remain one of the more useful public space constructions, one of the things still capable of a bit of wow factor and the chance to make different, temporary avian sense of where you live. (Even if it was birthed from a furtive, ultra-rich strangers in the World Economic Forum night: "The structure will officially be called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, after steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Europe, who is funding it. Johnson said that if he and Mittal had not bumped into each other in a Davos cloakroom "we would not be where we are today".)
But it certainly makes one think: what would it look like to scale up another one of Kapoor's projects? May I suggest "Shooting into the Corner"? Imagine the Olympic Park dominated by frozen blood-looking melted wax, scattered and spattered everywhere, raining softly from the cannon as it softly thwumps! its load toward heaven and down onto the city...
Bugger the conjuncture
J Smith has finally quit putting off the inevitable and has started a blog: My First Big-Character Poster. Which, in his case, is sure to feature - as it's already started to - a near infinite series of détourned versions of the prendiamoci la citta! (take over the city!) formulations, and a barely contained excitement at hordes and swarms. Which is always a good thing.
From the glass house to the empty car
Over at Mute, my piece on the "occupation movement": finance, communisation, exceeding the categories of success and failure, experiments in opacity, and ghost-riding the whip as homegrown critique.
Hausu...
Devoted reader and sender of all things good my way Jannon brought this to my attention: 1977's Hausu, from Nobuhiko Obayashi. Thanks to the art house folks at Janus, this will be making the limited theatrical rounds. Including SF in April... from what I've seen of it, it looks rather like a Japanese Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Albeit with more human-swallowing pianos. Wowza.
Whack-a-libertarian
(mini-hiatus over, coming out from the spell of grading and of wandering around the woods for a couple days...)
Once again, the resilient, nervous, and loopy Right proves more convinced than us of our capacity to break the stale present, here on the "dropout economy," and its Hackers meets urban garderning-Warriors meets Twin Oaks futures. This is from Time magazine, no less. More practically, a plausible further indication not that things will "go this way" in the least, but that that the looming shadow of "libertarian" will perhaps develop a louder voice. (And Salam actually does a decent job painting the middle ground: somewhere between more compoundish gated communities and families trading cage-free eggs for pilates lessons. Mutual aid coupled with mutual hostility and distancing.) All the more reason to insist that secession is not, and never has been, enough, insofar as it remains an expression of "individual" choice.
That said, enjoy the feverish phantasmagoria of Salam:
The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists."
The twine unwinds (150 years on, perhaps)
Imagined last lines to The Communisation Manifesto:
Workers of the world, self-abolish!
(Or, for the Gordian knot of now: workers of the world, untie! The rope doesn't wait for the King's sword, instead unravels its own solution...)
Painting the glass house black (Part Two)
[This is a placeholder for an extended set of reflections on the "occupation movement" here in California. It is the second part of an longer piece, the first part of which will be appearing on Mute. Check back here in the near future for the Mute link and the promised ramblings.]
Salvagepunk, running hard, thumping ahead...
Hahahahaha. Salvagepunk spreads its creaky wings and starts to make a mess in the house of pop criticism: Roger Ebert latches onto our bastard progeny, apparently.
(thanks very much to the handiwork of my favorite cultural terrorist for putting the hint in the gears)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
