| (no subject) |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|11:38 am] |
Will this save the Italian economy ?;
"People (are) rushing to buy a Duomo souvenir like the one used to smash Berlusconi’s face."
H/t The Wu Ming Foundation Blog |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|11:04 am] |
In preparation for the coming dissolution of the Greek state they're reading Asger Jorn on Guy Debord from '64 right now:
"There is no such thing as a naturally "unrecognized genius," or an unacknowledged innovator. There are only those who refuse to be known through false appearances and in blatant contradiction to who they really are. Those who do not wish to be manipulated in order to appear in public in a totally unrecognizable and alienated form, reduced to the status of instruments hostile to their own cause, or rendered impotent in the midst of the great human comedy. We must not limit ourselves to cursing those who themselves curse, with good reason, what is proposed to them, and who are then scorned by "gentlemen" -- those same "gentlemen" who elsewhere smile at anything and everything and go so far as to cite this false stoicism as proof of their own worth. The people of taste arbitrate behind the formal pretexts; they pretend to find simply "ill-expressed" what's new, what damns them, what says they are bad. Thus in modern culture, Guy Debord is not badly known; he is known as the Bad."
So what was that about the SI being irrelevant again?
http://mogolospolemistisvalkaniosagrotis.blogspot.com/2009/12/asger-jorn-guy-debord-and-problem-of.html |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|11:18 pm] |
In the spirit of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, more anti-nazi martyrs from the nazi era itself. The Youtube poster goes; "My tribute to the Edelweiss Pirates and the Navajos who were actively resistant to national socialism in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. There is a movie available which is based on these music loving young people who rebelled against fascism called Edelweisspiraten and it is availble via Amazon on DVD. They are still an inspiration after all this time." The haunting music is by Weber & it's played by the Kronos Quartet.
H/t Slackbastard |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|09:31 am] |
"Until the Light Takes Us
Sunday, Dec 6, 2009
Beyond The Multiplex Sympathy for the devil worshipers
Inside Norway's infamous black-metal scene: Misunderstood Robin Hoods or Satanic church-burning maniacs?
By Andrew O'Hehir
Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell, from the black-metal band Darkthrone.It's taken more than a full decade for the most widely demonized and vilified music scene in rock history -- the Norwegian black metal scene of the early to mid-'90s -- to get anything close to a fair treatment in a documentary film. In truth, the job isn't finished yet. As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's "Until the Light Takes Us" is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.
Black metal burst onto the international scene like an explosion of media catnip 16 or 17 years ago with a wave of church burnings in Norway and other Scandinavian countries that destroyed numerous historical landmarks, including the legendary Fantoft stave church, originally built in 1150. A few weeks after the fires started an articulate young musician named Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh, of the one-man band Burzum) discussed them with a reporter, suggesting that he knew who was responsible and elaborating a complicated litany of motives, from neo-paganism and anti-Christianity to Nordic nationalism and anti-Americanism.
Vikernes was immediately arrested and almost as quickly released; indeed, while he was later convicted of many other crimes, it remains unclear whether he started the Fantoft fire. Nonetheless, all his erudite self-taught ideology, much of it crazy but a lot of it surprisingly insightful, got almost instantly boiled down to one concept: Vikernes was a Satanist, and he and his fellow devil-worshipers were running amok in northern Europe.
This turned Oslo's tiny black metal scene -- three or four bands, a storefront and a basement record company -- into Pop Culture Public Enemy No. 1 and, of course, made millions of teenagers around the world yearn to sign up, without the slightest idea what they were signing up for. Copycat church attacks followed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, often accompanied with spray-painted pentacles and 666's and so forth, and whatever had once been distinctive about the Norwegian scene just became, in Vikernes' words, "a bunch of brain-dead heavy-metal guys."
But as Aites and Ewell's film reveals -- the two American filmmakers moved to Norway for several years to gain the trust of their subjects -- both the music and the ideology of black metal were always more interesting than that summary suggests. With its emphasis on coldness, darkness and hardness and its Nordic, often symphonic sense of space, the music of Vikernes' Burzum and such bands as Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Darkthrone and Satyricon is surprisingly varied and weird, and often doesn't sound much like rock at all.
Interweaving grainy home videos of early Oslo live shows and interviews with survivors of the scene (at least two of whom appear anonymously), Aites and Ewell depict a vibrant, adventurous and often ghoulishly self-destructive world, where conversations about the negative effects of Christianity, American-style democracy, NATO and commercial globalization sometimes blended into outright nihilism. Even before the church burnings began, Mayhem vocalist Pelle Ohlin (aka "Dead") lived up to his nickname by literally blowing his brains out with a shotgun. Before calling the police, one bandmate snapped a notorious photo of Ohlin's mutilated corpse, which later appeared on the cover of the Mayhem live album "Dawn of the Black Hearts."
If you believe the testimony of Vikernes, Darkthrone drummer Gylve Nagell (aka Fenriz) and Satyricon drummer Kjetil Haraldstad (aka Frost), no one in black metal ever wanted to get famous or reach a mass audience, let alone spark an international trend of kids in corpse paint and black overcoats. Against the changed landscape of multicultural 21st-century Europe, musicians like Fenriz and Frost -- who were never directly involved with Vikernes' quasi-terrorist campaign -- seem semi-reconciled to their fate as professional entertainers, scraping out a living deep into middle age from the stylized remnants of adolescent pain and anger.
Neither of those guys, likable and wounded characters that they are, has the star power or philosophical depth of Vikernes, whom the filmmakers interviewed extensively in the relatively posh surroundings of his Norwegian prison cell. (Vikernes was released last May, after "Until the Light Takes Us" was completed.) With a tidy little goatee and a short jailhouse haircut, he looks like an unusually gym-toned specimen of late-30s academic. Loquacious and funny, he discourses at length, and in excellent idiomatic English, on the many crimes of Christianity and American-style commercial capitalism, which he blames for uprooting indigenous religious cultures not just in the Nordic countries but all over the world. He makes the church fires sound almost innocuous, a slightly overzealous effort to make the public "wake up" to the evils of mainstream religion.
That's all fascinating as far as it goes, but to some degree Vikernes is playing his liberal American guests, coming off as a Robin Hood combination of anti-globalization activist, Situationist intellectual and neo-Norse acolyte of Odin and Thor. In fairness, Aites and Ewell pull back the curtain on Vikernes little by little, revealing first why he spent so long in prison (for a gruesome crime whose details he recounts without emotion) and then the precise nature of his objections to Christianity. Its repression of women and gay people? Um, not exactly. Its crushing of open dissent and heresy? Its toadying to despots of all stripes? No and no. But the fact that Christianity is a historical offshoot of Judaism -- now that's a problem.
Do Aites and Ewell owe the viewership a clearer explication of Vikernes' ties to white nationalist groups, his long record of troubling racial, sexual and religious rhetoric and his public flirtation with Nazi ideology? You won't learn this in the film, for instance, but Vikernes is viewed as the philosophical father of the musical-political subgenre called "National Socialist black metal," or NSBM. Or is it fairer to this disturbing and complicated figure to present him on his own terms, without recourse to prejudicial buzzwords? (For the record, Vikernes has not called himself a Nazi since the late '90s, preferring the invented term "Odalism," said to signify "paganism, traditional nationalism, racialism and environmentalism," along with an opposition to modern civilization in all its forms.)
I can see both sides of the argument, and I've long been interested in the "Ezra Pound problem," meaning the tendency of underground aesthetic rebels to become enmeshed in noxious political ideologies. Maybe it doesn't invalidate Vikernes' music in particular (his forthcoming post-prison album was originally to be called "The White God") or the entire anti-modernist, atavistic spirit of black metal to observe that it comes with some heavy and evil-smelling baggage. But I suspect it's worth, you know, actually noticing and talking about."
H/t Salon via The Konformist |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|01:16 am] |
"A couple of months ago, the government passed a law allowing private prisons in New Zealand. When they passed it, they told us that these would be new prisons. Now it turns out they're planning to turn existing prisons over to the private sector.
This is privatisation, pure and simple. A state asset will be given to the private sector, who will be paid to run it. John Key promised that there would be no privatisations on his watch. He lied."
H/t No Right Turn who've also got info on who's behind the five industrial dairy farms in the Mackenzie basin. It's not pretty (or even the slightest bit green .)
Had another book & record fair at Als Bar today at which I sold just under $100 worth of stuff. Have 5 pix up there till Xmas tho the only way you'll be able to see them now is if u go to a gig, which is a bit of a bummer I know. Otherwise u can always come around here or wait till sometime in the new year when I expect to get my next REAL show together.
Talked to Al about the War Of The Bands thing with particular emphasis on Mynor Star & got the impression that he liked the band but felt theyed peaked too soon for their own good (ie in their heat rather than their semi-final) . I DID gather that he'd be happy to see them back in regular gig(s) tho.
Lata. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|01:58 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Ambient Two - Imaginary Landscapes | ] |
Caught a little Bloomberg early this morning; It doesn’t appear to have shown up in any NZ media, or at least any that I monitor, but apparently Greece, damaged more than most other big non-island countries by climate change catastrophes including repeated drought and wildfire damage is looking more likely than not to do a Dubai and default on paying interest payments on their national debt, with Portugal, Italy and Spain not looking in too much better shape.Evidently we’re entering the second dip in this double dip recession thing (so I’d start unloading all those gold chip stocks quickly you picked up while the market was so peskily bearish –not).
Watched the first episode of the rejigged V & was so disappointed that I won’t be bothering with the rest. It’s no Battlestar Galactica. In fact its’ not even BSGs’ bumhole. Still dead keen to catch Dollhouse which hasn’t yet seen the light of day despite 3’s having bought it something like 6 months ago. Hope its cancellation in the states won’t stop them screening it here. Really glad to see season 2 of Breaking Bad’s replacing the silly/scary Harpers’ Island.
Have just been asked again to submit some pix for Linwood Highs’ Art Auction. Am also having a lowkey show over the next few weeks at Als’ Bar starting 2pm Saturday.
Me #1 bud Richard has just had his second operation for a virulent skin cancer (not melanoma) & has been declared cancer free. I’m so relieved. I’ve had so many friends & acquaintances die over the last few years it was getting to the point I couldn’t stand another one. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|10:19 am] |
"In opposition to detournement is recuperation, in which mainstream media takes oppositional forms (for example, punk music — or the decentralized multicentric communication style of today’s youth) and repackages it in such a way that it retains or generates mass appeal while being stripped of its oppositional or subversive content. "
H/t The Hypermodern |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|09:19 am] |
From a style & tips type blog called No Good For Me;
"t's always an awesome day when I re-discover Can Dialectics Break Bricks? on YouTube. You have to watch it, it's awesome -- the filmmakers hijacked an old kung-fu movie and redubbed its sound with basically a manifesto dismantling state capitalism and critiquing cultural hegemony. It's great, and SO FUNNY. Situationist film, huzzah!"
The Swear Police; http://swearpolice.blogspot.com/ |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 3rd, 2009|06:44 pm] |
Gordon Campbell on Brashs' 2025 report:
"Don Brash and his 2025 Task Force have been given the job of enabling the New Zealand economy to catch up with Australia in 15 years or so – which is only fair, since it was the policy mix during Brash’s reign at the Reserve Bank in the 1990s that helped turn New Zealand into a low wage country rapidly sliding towards Third World status. Unsurprisingly, the task seems beyond him."
H/t Werewolf/Scoop
Actually this is like some of the classic stuff Campbell used to write for the Listener back when it was still good. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|09:57 pm] |
Thinking of a slogan "Beyond Resistance - Turning Rebellion Into Money" & I'm perfectly well aware it's from the Clash. White Boy In The Hammersmith Palais I believe.
Big Ups to Jo who's just had a nail go right through her foot. In the immortal words of Bill Clinton - " I feel your pain."
In the light of Obamas' decision to send 30000 more troops into afghanistan might I recommmend another look at the story I showed on the 22nd of Nov , "How LBJ Was Sucked Into Escalation In Vietnam And Why Its Happening Again by Danny Schechter" |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|08:35 am] |
"René Viénet: Enragés and Situationists in the Ocupation Movement, France, May '68
Reportedly written by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Rene Riesel and Mustapha Khayati and published under their comrade’s name, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement recounts the events of May ’68 from the Situationists’ perspective. Besides being one of the most vivid and gripping narratives of those revolutionary days, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement is especially relevant to our contemporary conjuncture because it carefully traces the evolution of the student occupation movement.
The book makes evident how the Situationists have been incompletely understood, especially by their detached and contemplative academic interpreters. Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement does feature all the well-known Situationist preoccupations, such as their critiques of “the pseudo-abundance of commodities,” “the reduction of life to a spectacle,” and “repressive urbanism.” Yet rather than concluding with such critiques, the book demonstrates how the theoretical work the Situationists are most famous for was merely the starting point for practical experimentation with non-hierarchical, autonomous forms of organization. In the book, the authors are far less concerned with the functioning of the spectacle than with the reformist nature of both trade unions and Marxist-Leninist parties, the practical difficulties (impossibilities?) of general assemblies, and the need for direct democracy through councils.
Student agitation in Berkeley in 1964 and the Situationist scandal in Strasbourg in 1966 were important predecessors of May ’68, but student unrest in Nanterre in 1967 and early 1968 marked the real beginning of the movement. “The agitation launched at Nanterre by four or five revolutionaries, who would later constitute the Enragés, was to lead in less than five months to the near liquidation of the state. . . . Never did an agitation by so few individuals lead in so short a time to such consequence.” Within the alienating walls of Nanterre’s modern buildings, the Enragés, a small group of unassimilated “campus bums,” “began a systematic assault on the unbearable order of things, beginning with the university.” The Enragés interrupted sociology courses and began publishing posters and tracts.
On March 22nd, various leftist groups, ranging from liberals to anarchists to Maoists to Troskyists , “invaded the administration building and held a meeting in the university council room.” Although the Enragés left the meeting in protest against the Stalinists, covering the walls with slogans as they exited, the gathering became known as the March 22nd Movement, which the authors consider one of the first (though failed) attempts at direct democracy (the text compares the “leftist amalgam” to the American SDS). Excessive responses by the administration caused the student unrest that had been building to explode and spread to other campuses; as was the case across the globe, official repression directly contributed to the radicalization of the left. The dean closed the Nanterre campus initially for two days and then for an extended period, and he announced that a group of the student agitators would be brought before a disciplinary committee on May 6th.
When the administration attempted to break up a student meeting in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on May 3rd, it “unleashed the accumulated strength of the movement and provoked it to cross the decisive threshold.” Police surrounded the few hundred students gathered in the courtyard and offered to let them disperse. Some students managed to leave, but as more students gathered outside the police began to arrest hundreds and carry them off to police vans. Direct clashes erupted between police and several thousand students, and over six hundred were arrested. During the demonstration that was called for May 6th, protests quickly turned into riots, and for the first time barricades were thrown up and cars turned over and burned. That conflict lasted only a few hours, partially because of recuperation by reformist pseudo-leaders that were singled out by the mass media. But the demonstration on May 10th fully unleashed student anger and exceeded the control of all would-be leaders. The barricading of an entire section of the Latin Quarter was a direct negation of the state and created an autonomous zone that lasted throughout the night.
Until the next morning, police battled with protestors, the latter using Molotov cocktails and paving stones from the street in defense, while the radio broadcasted regular updates to the rest of the country. The next day, trade unions called for a strike on May 13th in solidarity “against the repression,” and the government reversed its tactics and promised to free convicted students and clear the police from the Sorbonne. The march of over a million on May 13th went peacefully, but a group of students took advantage of the “atmosphere of total freedom that reigned at the Sorbonne” and began an occupation of the campus, which was followed by a wave of other student occupations. “On May 14th, the Committee of the Enragés and the Situationist International was founded,” and the group immediately began to plaster the walls of the Sorbonne with posters. On the same day, the occupiers formed their first general assembly and elected an “Occupation Committee” as an “executive organ.”
Also on the same day, workers at the Sud-Aviation plant occupied their factory and catalyzed a series of wildcat strikes in the country. The Sorbonne’s Occupation Committee managed to send a telegram of support to the Sud-Aviation workers, but managed little else at first because various leftist groups, many with reformist or careerist intentions, set up their own committees and by usurping space and supplies acted to undermine the power of the Occupation Committee. The authors conclude that this attempt at direct democracy “collapsed” because the most powerful groups on the left remained committed to hierarchical forms of organization and therefore opposed true “working-class autonomy.”
By “May 20th, the strike and occupations became general,” with more than “six million strikers.” According to the authors, this strike was spontaneously brought about; workers acted autonomously and beyond the control of both the trade unions and Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties, all of whom were reformist and counterrevolutionary and desired to steer the strike toward their particular ends. In the days that followed, both students and workers violently fought with police, even burning police cars and sacking police stations. The book glowingly describes the atmosphere of this period: “[I]n the space of a week millions of people had cast off the weight of alienating conditions, the routine of survival, ideological falsifications, and the inverted world of the spectacle. For the first time since the Commune of 1871, and with a far more promising future, the real individual was absorbing the abstract citizen into his life, his work, and his individual relationships, becoming a ‘species-being’ and thereby recognizing his own powers as social powers. The festival finally gave true holidays to people who had known only work days and leaves of absence. The hierarchical pyramid had melted like a lump of sugar in the May sun. People conversed and were understood in half a word. There were no more intellectuals or workers, but simply revolutionaries engaged in dialogue. . . . In this context the word ‘comrade’ regained its authentic meaning, truly marking the end of separations.”
By retaking spaces such as schools and factories, the revolutionaries had also re-conquered time: “Capitalized time stopped. Without any trains, metro, cars, or work the strikers recaptured the time so sadly lost in factories, on motorways, in front of the TV. People strolled, dreamed, learned how to live.” But by the end of May, de Gaulle and the bourgeoisie began to take back power and were greatly assisted by all of the reformist elements in the left. The authors claims that “The workers entered the struggle spontaneously, armed only with their subjectivity in revolt. The depth and violence of the revolt was their immediate reply to the unbearable dominant order. But in the last analysis the revolutionary mass did not have the time for an exact and real consciousness of what it was doing. And it is this inadequate relation between theory and practice which remains the fundamental trait of proletarian revolutions which fail.” Although the workers had temporarily broken the shackles of trade-unionism, they lacked the “autonomous form” of organization that would have allowed them to begin to restart production and distribution for communal purposes. “The accession of the working class to historical consciousness will be the task of the workers themselves, and that will be possible only through an autonomous organization. The form of the council remains the means and goal of total emancipation.”
Not surprisingly, the Situationists and Enragés are praised for their relative success in achieving autonomy and creating a functioning council. The Situationists “had always made such an autonomy the prerequisite of any working relationship,” and their vitriolic attacks on Maoists and Troskyites were, in part, aimed at the corrosive effects of these groups’ lack of autonomy. The Council for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO) was formed on May 17th with the goal of the continuation and expansion of the occupation movement. The CMDO was composed of about 40 members, including around 10 Enragés and Situationists (including Debord, Reisel, and Vaneigem). The CMDO published comic strips, posters, and theoretical texts (examples of all three are reproduced in Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement) until it was dissolved on June 15th. It would not be a stretch to claim that, for the authors, the organizational accomplishments of the CMDO were among the most important products of May ’68: “Throughout its existence the CMDO was a successful experiment in direct democracy, guaranteed by an equal participation of everyone in debates, and the decisions and their execution. It was essentially an uninterrupted general assembly, deliberating day and night. No faction or private meetings ever existed outside the common debate.”
H/t The Voice Imitator |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|09:16 pm] |
This is from Democratic Underground , a site I don't regard as bulletproof credibility wise, but I think it's hard to deny there's a strong likelihood they're right.
"Dubai Crash Marks Start of Phase Two of Global Credit Crunch" |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|04:51 pm] |
This little snippet from The Sideshow touches on a few issues , but it was the private prisons mention that caught my eye, especially with Judith Collins floating that idea with the sort of misty eyed longing that authoritarian arseholes inevitably seem to get whenever they see an opportunity of turning their country/society/family/mileau into an ever closer approximation to Cambodia as "engineered ' by Pol Pot & crew. BTW anyone who thinks there is any sense or credibility in this suggestion - go take a look at the film Ghosts Of The Civil Dead sometime. Bet you won't be crowing about Cost savings or ...... whatever benefits they're supposed to make happen after that.:
"Right now, we spend billions of dollars a year allegedly trying to "save" people from marijuana use by destroying their lives with imprisonment. Of course, the private prison industry doesn't want this changed, and neither does the GOP, who prefer to have as many ways as they can find to turn America into a police state. " |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|09:17 am] |
Laurie Anderson - Life On A String
Have started accumulating materials & ideas for the next Ultrazine despite there being another 2-3 months work on Grace Notes Draft #7 b4 I get onto U/z exclusively ( & y'know SERIOUSLY). Am looking at Industrial Musics' seeming fascination with Fascist imagery & what it means. There'll also be a review of Moishe Postone' Anti-semitism & National Socialism (at least) ......... Wot else? Wait & see. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ultra_151's journal