Hoodie Hugs

The riots and looting in the UK might be seen as a sign of the molecular discontent bubbling away beneath the veneer of adult capitalism (read “adult movies” IE porn IE the business model for Murdoch news incorporated).

The masses of youth are no longer merely content to have their phones hacked into and their local police interrogate and search them in the normal course of a business day.  The voluptuous commodities have been tantalising the underclass for decades.  Generations of young men playing computer games, getting HY on drugs and the virulent social network sites have eroded the moral fabric until the business shirt and tie have been torn away and burnt.

Enter the Hoodie.

The future of a social class has been decided in Britain.  Massive cuts to public spending, hikes in the cost of higher education, evictions from public housing to nominate a few concrete social causes for the riots.  Moral disintegration and ideological warfare are two opposing sides of the same abstract coin traded by the State as currency for domination.

See Klein for global comparisons.

Let’s not even call the looters a part of the underclass or the proletariat.  There is a basic primitive desire to destroy here.  They have no future in a Marxist dialectical process.  This is the Sex Pistols taken seriously, this is anarchy in the UK (linked here as if you haven’t already listened to this song a dozen times with the volume turned down on the television news reporting the riots).

The wealth of a community was cascading away for four days rather than trickling down the socio-economic pyramid.

With predictable results.

Greater centralisation of the control of the means of violence.  Increases in surveillance.  New anti-hooligan laws aimed at the Unspecified Enemy aka the Hoodie.  Its the old neo-conservative caper of squeeze the hoodies until it hurts, the hoodies rebel, then re-apply the squeeze even harder.  All under the rhetoric of “love-thy-neighbour”.

To give focus to what’s at issue here in the UK riots: a protest against the forces of law and order and a desire to seize back control of the means of consumption.  Freedom is a burden and obligation a la Cameron’s Human Rights and responsibility speech for the young men of Britain

The meaning of community is being lost in the individuation of a social network.  The people become more disenchanted and less engaged in the community, watching their plasma TVs and trawling through Facebook photos.  Even as you are reading this weblog and listening to Scott Walker’s dulcet baritone, you are becoming more disenchanted and less engaged in the community, you are getting sleepy, dreaming…

David Cameron is telling you to stop dreaming.  Get out there and hug a hoodie.  Don’t steal a smile.  Let the love for your neighbour shine through.  Go back to good old fashioned Christian values and invite your local hooligans around for a cup of Earl Grey with a twist of lemon.

Don’t forget to screw down your plasma TV though.  And stop reading weblogs.

HY Art #110703: Gesamtkunstwerk in early 20th Century Vienna

To every age its art and to art its freedom

Motto of the Viennese Secessionists (1897)

The National Gallery of Victoria are currently holding an exhibition of the works of artists and architects living in Vienna at the turn into the twentieth century. The exhibition begins with a general exposition on the social and political climate surrounding Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Industry grew on carbon, coal and steel.  Public transport was constructed.   The medieval fortifications were pulled down and replaced with boulevards. Apartment buildings began to grow as the new domicile for Viennese citizens.   There were a few photographs at the NGV exhibition  of men standing outside their workers’ cottages with brooms in hand while a fresh apartment building looms over their homes. Urbanisation came to Vienna as the city spread its wings, incorporating a spread of communities into the Gesellschaft of Vienna and setting the stage for the artists Klimt and later, his protege, Egon Schiele, and their “Secession” from the conservativism of State-building.

Beneath the exterior facade of new economic developments and infrastucture and the installation of a revived historicism, the Jugendstil was conceived.  Schiele’s Secession poster with his artist friends invokes the transmutation of bread into flesh, wine into blood, image into art.  Amidst the industrial noises of the urban state apparatus, a body without organs was miraculating the distribution of emotion and intensity created and felt by a new art movement enjoying the luxury of a new wealth and affording a time for reflection and rumination, a voluptuous revolution.

The Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) was a central concept in the Jugendstil (“youth style”).  The living rooms and the work spaces should not be exempt from the work of art.  Ornate carvings and paintings were added to furniture, lifting the chair beyond its simple facade as a function of reclining.

Architects and painters worked together to produce whole works of art, draw lines and add dimension to the everyday work life of Vienna.

The landscape of the countryside was also acted upon by the modernisation of Vienna and Schiele paid witness to the event in his landscape paintings, a remarkable departure from the twisted, writing and catatonic figures of his portraits, the romantic aesthete looking back in to a rural community that would drive him out, for a subject of art

The interiority of being-human in Vienna circa 1900 produced the new works of art in collaboration, a community of painters and philosophers.  Beethoven – the old Romantic – was the composer Klimt honoured in his frieze at the Vienna secession building.  In the offices of Herr Sigmund Freud, the seething underbelly of a perverse family life of sexual abuse and misaligned passions (the minotaur of Klimt’s first Secessionist painting) were given voice and embedded into neurosis.

The unconscious as a working body without organs was being discovered and created for a fate worse than death: a living prison on a couch and a ready-made straightjacket of delirium that Freud’s work would become until Lacan returns Freud to the surface level of metaphor and metonym (a similar service Nietzsche did for Jesus and his gospel in The Anti-Christ).  The anti-establishment has it place and freedom in the catharsis of modernity and the artists of the Jugendstil live on a hundred years later as their canvases and architecture come to Melbourne for exhibition in this the twenty-first century, a brand new modern age of silicon to succeed carbon.

Angry Young Men

Birthday celebarations in Darwin, the croc capital of Australia this weekend past.  Scott McCall turned forty today.  Last night a family feast of mub crabs and wild caught barramundi was served up at the McCall residence resulting in

a shameless exhibition of brotherly love by these four angry young men caught on camera by the indefatigable fb poster, e-funk.

The birthday boy is third from the left.

He’s hardly aged a day since I met him thirteen years ago.  We attended a unit together on ethics – Human Identity and Changes – back in 1998 at the Queensland University of Technology.  Scott came into uni with all the skepticism of a man who had seen hard years working in outback Indigineous communities, now facing the prospect of three years of listening to academics ponitificate and theorise about social issues affecting everyday people in the here and now.   Scott was the angry young man of the class – shaved head, big black boots and paradoxically enough, a tie-dye T-shirt.  A militant hippy regular.

One of the major themes of this unit was a crisis of masculine identity, often snowballing into tales of testicular cancer amongst other complex challenges facing the male psyche.  Scott was juggling custody and child payments for his three daughters, two of which were part of a marraige that had shortly ended and the fallout from that relationship was still in full effect as he berated our unit’s lecturer, the mild-mannerred and demure David Massey, about the volume of his speech.

Straight after the lecture, me all scared as hell of this crazy guy in the tie-dyed t-shirt and combat boots, we went down to the pub and over several cold lagers in a conversation ranging from personal histories to the state of the world in social justice today, we discovered a kindred spirit in each other.

Thirteen years later Scott has five kids including two strapping boys with his beautiful wife, Annie.  His second eldest daughter is about to have his first grandchild. All of his kids were there at the party except his eldest currently travelling in Europe after working for Dad for 12 months, teaching reading and writing skills to Aboriginal communities.

Scott runs a successful company for himself where he doesn’t have to be told by government agencies or gray academics what is ethical and what is not. He wields his own burning brand of social justice, delivering services to Aboriginal communities and helping other young angry men come to terms with their loves and hatreds to build a better life.

Still the angry young man, he has not finished his university degree(s).

This one’s for the angry young men

Relentless

No other word quite describes the gruelling two hour vision of Justin Kurzel, painting small town Australia with shadowy colours of the Australian flag.

Spoiler alert for Snowtown, Kurzel’s new film.

The Snowtown story is well-crafted.  A young man abused by his half-brother and photographed naked by a queer neighbour, develops a relationship with a man who comes to town on a motorcycle, brandishing justice in one hand and a tomahawk in the other.

Note this is not an actual scene from the film but you get the picture.

John Bunting (the irony of the name) becomes a part of the family, standing in for a missing father figure for the mother and her boys.  She loves her boys.  Bunting and his friends come to her boys’ rescue when the paedophilic activities become revealed.

The film leads the viewer to believe Bunting and his gang are vigilantes, handing out justice to the queer and paedophilic population of small town Australia.

The eugenical quest of Bunting and his compatriots becomes apparent in conversations around the dinner table (eating forms a large part of the action in this film – mashed potatoes and sausages, bacon and eggs – snow peas are a delicacy).

The insights into a serial killer’s mind comparing himself with ANZAC war heroes are a god-awful statement of condemnation upon the lower SES of Australian culture.  The Wikipedia article on Snowtown mentions most of the victims or perpetrators were from Snowtown several times as if the reputation of small town Australia depended upon it.

Kurzell’s depiction fell between the two.  On the one hand, Bunting is used to reflect some awful bigoted features of the Australian society (to similar effect of the dirty crack’d mirror of Joyce’s Dubliners).  On the other, the classic serial killer egomania covers his homicidal motives and sociopathy with delusions of grandeur.  The murders are courageous, Bunting is only doing what everyone else is talking about around the table.  And there is no room for the people who do not have a violent and extreme prejudice against the strata of society he condemns.  The seething underbelly of a disenchanted and undereducated SES with a low S-O.

This is pretty cynical.  I’m not sure if the filmmaker intends this but the relentless soundtrack accompanying hollow echoes of my own childhood (Test cricket, the voice of Richie Benaud, old-school video games,  the trampoline) is the world that produces Bunting in the film.  All those people sitting around the dinner table comdemning and hanging without trial and with a pleb sense of justice, run a razor line between the actions of Australia’s worst serial killer and the voices of Australia’s worst media.

The association seems incontestable but nothing is as black and white as all that.  In any event, Snowtown the cinematic experience, is a draining piece of intensity that will suck two hours from your life.

QM at the Movies

As soon as I hear characters mention “quantum mechanics” in a film, I have to stifle a yawn.  The laws and properties governing sub-atomic particles is often deployed in a humanistic attack of “alternate universes”, “multiple selves”, etc to often little effect with the exception of assuring the audience that this wonderful and astounding hidden universe is real and science says so, so – believe.

Be warned: there are spoilers below for the film, Source Code.

A modern tale of terrorism and solipsism,  Source Code plays on the stereotypes of people of middle Eastern origin (there is that PC enough for you?), to reveal the enemy within – the icy Derek Frost, a prime example of the sick and twisted Americans who take too much pride in building bombs and have no social empathy whatsoever apart from a secret desire for being recognised as the cause of the next revolution (I like fake rubble).

This film has all the awful binary cariciatures with a slight awful twist upon the master-slave dialectic-toc: the evil controlling African-American corporate scientist, Dr Rutledge, the mature and divorced, girl-next-door-been-round-the-track, communications officer, Good(-)win (?) – the only link our hero has with the world outside his capsule – the nerdy assistant sidekick secretly in love with her (and dobs her in to the evil scientist and for that shall remain nameless) the patriotic soldier, Captain Colter Stevens, who’s only (half-)human and only wants to call his father to tell him that he loves him and save the girl.

Despite his status, Captain Stevens manages to redeem himself in time and prove there is more to quantum mechanics than just a cat in a box, more to people than an EMG field and a halo left around the lightbulb after the switch is turned off.  We live on in alternate universes, our souls soar, we are exactly where we ought to be, this feels right, responsibility devolves upon us, yakkity yak, yakkity yak..

What really makes me weary is when the moral code traces a psychoanalytical Oedipal drama.  Guilty about ‘murdering’ or alienating his father, Captain Stevens lies in an impossible situation to bring him back to life.  The way to the father-figure is through the mother-figure, Miss Goodwin, while Stevens is trapped in the womb, half the man he used to be, helpless as a child… That QM is giving substance to this phantasy of an afterlife in the symbolic register, only makes the whole film even more tired.

Source Code is no more than you imagine in your dreams…  There is nothing to spoil.  Unless you dream with your eyes open

Homeless in Hoi An

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I was only going down the street to purchase a “man-bag”.

Two polo shirts, two T-shirts, two tailored shirts, a suit and half a bottle of sauvignon blanc later, I will also have to purchase a suitcase and an extra ten kilograms of airline baggage.  I still have to buy shoes and get some gifts for the folks.

Twice I took my keycard to the front desk of the hotel for safe keeping and twice have I taken my keycard from the front desk.

I now own a man bag.  Its a proud day.

My backpack was already filled to the brim with the clothes I brought with me.  I always overpack and underprepare when I travel.

To be sure, I needed four polo shirts to play golf last week at Phan Thiet.  I did not need jeans, a hoody and a jumper.  I have utilised the laptop every day and averted a disastrous booking at the Cu Dai Beach Hotel (the Overlook of Hoi An) thanks to the amazing Interweb.  I listen to Charles Mingus and Biber on the balcony by the pool, adjacent to my room, and email the folks and funksters back in Oz, subject to the censors (thank God for communism and One Party States).

Homeless at the Cu Dai Hotel (no beach), halfway between the beaches and Old Town, I’m well-situated to sun in the morning and shop in the afternoon, armed with my keycard and my man-bag, powered by bicycle, coffee and condensed milk.

Just as soon as the rain stops.

Me and Ulysses

Ulysses has a bad reputation.

Pretentious, verbose, Joyce takes 20 words to desribe a scene that could use 2.

That’s shit.

Me, I like Ulysses.  I’ve read this book cover to cover twice and whenever I take a hot bath, I like to flick through the book and re-read some of my favourite scenes like:

• the scene at the sailor’s bar-restaurant
• Leopold and Polly at breakfast
• the Cyclops episode down at the pub with the citizen
• the funeral

The economy of meaning in his prose is not a liberal one.  This is poetry and drama.  Metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls.

Perfect bathtime reading, drifting along like soap bubbles over the perambulating thoughts from Bloom’s and Dedalus’ streams of consciousness.

Matter of fact, I’m going to indulge myself right now.

115

We headed down to Brighton golf course last Saturday morning at an unsociable hour for 18 holes with G’s cousin’s husband.  We were the only people there under the age of 55 at 9 in the morning.

I had my best game ever, consistently hitting (for most holes) no worse than double bogies though I had a massive fallout on the ninth hole where I hit an 11 on a par 4.  I still can’t believe that hole is a par 4 at over 400 metres in length and a hind dog to boot.  I nearly hit it over the trees three times.

The back nine is supposed to be easier.  Those damn trees again, the dark woods of Dante’s Inferno.

Perfect soundtrack for the tree shots.

I was horrified to see these crazy buggies getting around the course:

The height of yuppification, right up there with black luxury cars.

62

Letme just say this score does not reflect what was a superb evening game at Royal Park yesterday after a long day at work. It was a real pleasure to get out on the links and swing a few clubs. The last three holes were an absolute disaster (9, 11 and an 8).
For only the second time at Royal Park, I managed to keep the ball out of the trees on the all-important first drive, landing the ball about thirty metres from the pin with a five iron. A firm left hand grip and the club lined up with the breastbone, turn the head as you swing instead of focusing upon the ball.

Thanks Ron.
The first hole set the pace for the remainder of the course, let down by some sloppy putting and an awkward short game. One of my playing partners put me onto a nice chipping style (its all in the wrists) that I have since attempted to evolve in an effort to use my whole body to chip.
Just keep it shit simple.

62

I went golfing alone on Saturday and met another single down at the Royal Park.  He was there with his wife but she did not play.  She didn’t enjoy the game but she liked walking about the links on a bright spring day.   We teamed up as the course was busy.

He hit his first ball straight onto the green.  I managed to hit it straight even if the ball went along the ground.  It took me a few strokes to hit up onto the green.  I kept underestimating my shots out of nervousness – this guy was good.  I didn’t want to slice any balls into the carpark like last week.  He scored par on the first hole.  I hit a five – a personal best, double bogie on the first hole.

Brad and his wife are from China.  They tell me a game of gold costs a hundred dollars on a public course and its compulsory to hire a caddy (gainful employment program by the State) with a compulsory tipp of twenty dollars.

Furthermore the nearest golf courses were two hours drive from the city.  One would have to drive on a day trip for at least 18 holes to make it worth your while and probably go around the course twice.

My restraint paid off, driving off the tee on the perilous second hole.  I drove it straight and long up the fairway only to lose a ball over the edge of the cliff on the third stroke.  Amazingly I still pulled off a seven on this par 4 – another personal best for the second hole.

My playing partner again hit par.  Two years of golfing, never had a lesson, just some coaching tips from a semi-professional friend of his.  And he wasn’t having a good day.

The rest of the game proceeded in a similar manner.  I hit four sevens – an average game.  He started losing his game about halfway through the course, citing hunger pangs – he couldn’t concentrate.

My game improved towards the end (sliced the drive into the trees despite taking the precaution of facing my feet to the left).  On the its-not-hard-just-long eighth hole, I struck par.  Another personal best.  Despite the average hitting between, there were a few high points to shine.

I’m not sure I  would have paid 120 dollars and driven 2 hours for them but nonetheless, a satisfying afternoon at Royal Park, Melbourne.