Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
Blogging can be a curious experience, sometimes it makes 3 weeks feel like a life-time ago. Talking of which, only 20 days have passed since I reviewed a recent book by Ken Wark, although subjectively for me it feels like this was done back in my 2006 MySpace blog days. In his tome, Wark observed: “The newspapers are devolving, bit by bit, into shopping guides. The ‘quality’ magazines are just coded investment advice. One turns with hope to the blogosphere, only to find that it mostly just mimics the very media to which it claims to be an alternative. Alternative turns out just to mean cheaper…” I like that quote, and while there are some blogs drifting through the depths of cyber-space that groove me, many are just a waste of time. Indeed, one of my mantras is: ‘if I want to see anything worth reading, then I have to write it myself’.’
A lot of blogs would be massively improved if those running them actually rewrote and edited what they’ve banged out, rather than just sticking it straight up online. I try to write my blogs the day before I post them, so that I can sleep on what I’ve written and revise it the next day. That said, a daily blog can often surprise its producer, as well as its readers, by forcing them to come up with something they’d never have thought of writing if they hadn’t felt under pressure to do so.
Prior to installing WordPress on the back end of this website a month ago, I hadn’t been blogging since March 2008, and a daily blog for January was a good way of getting back into the swing of things – while simultaneously creating a sufficient mass of material to make this new non-MySpace Mister Trippy blog worth visiting. But from here on in I’m going to slow down in my postings, and while I’ll keep right on blogging, I’m not necessarily going to be doing so daily. So if you turn up here in the future and there’s nothing new, please do go ahead and add comments to the old posts. And then come back in a day or two when there will be something new….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: blogging, cyber-space, McKenzie Wark, Mister Trippy, MySpace, Stewart Home, time, WordPress
Posted in Web 2.0 | 34 Comments »
Friday, January 30th, 2009
I first met Laura Oldfield Ford 5 years ago when what public profile she had was as an activist rather than an artist; but even then I could see she was serious about pictures as well as politics… and she still is. Recently she’s become the most happening newcomer on the London gallery circuit, as the heaving crowd for the opening of her first solo exhibition at Hales Gallery on Bethnal Green Road last night proved. As I was walking through the door I ran into writer Janine Bullman. Once inside I got chatting with former Mute Magazine editor Anthony Isles who was standing next to Anna Harding from Space Studios, then Fabian Tompsett formerly of the infamous London Psychogeographical Association ambled over… Next I was saying ‘hi’ my long time collaborator Chris Dorley-Brown; followed by Tracey Moberly, Bill Drummond and Richard Thomas from Resonance FM. Familiar faces were flashing by faster than a speeding train… To give just one random example, Malcolm Hopkins from Housman’s Bookshop disappeared into the crowd before I could catch his attention. By the time I found Laura I’d been in the gallery close on two hours and the crowd was finally thinning as people headed on to The Owl & The Pussycat for post opening drinks. And since most of us had already had a few beers by then, we were certainly ready for a few more…
The opening was too busy for me to give the work the attention it deserved, but I’ve been looking at Laura’s pictures for a long time and they are most definitely a groove sensation. I ran into Adam Dant AKA Donald Parsnips on Bethnal Green Road a couple of days ago and when I’d asked him if he was going to the Oldfield Ford opening, he’d replied: “Of course, she’s the new Daumier.” I’ll be going back to London 2013, Drifting Through The Ruins to check it out properly, and some of you can do so too, because it opens today (30 January) at 7 Bethnal Green Road and continues until 14 March 2009. In the meantime, here’s a bit of the gallery blurb about the exhibition:
“The main focus of the show is more than one hundred ink drawings that Oldfield Ford has recently produced as part of an ongoing project chronicling the impact of regeneration on London called 2013, Drifting through the ruins. The drawings form a broken narrative, focusing on part of east London currently being cleared for the 2012 Olympic site and documents the city as palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing. Oldfield Ford has made many walks (or ‘Drifts’) through these abandoned areas and imagines them populated by the semiotic ghosts of failed utopias in the year 2013. ‘The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates’. ”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adam Dant, Anna Harding, Anthony Isles, Bethnal Green Road, Bill Drummond, Chris Dorley-Brown, Daumier, Donald Parsnips, drifts, east London, Fabian Tompsett, Hales Gallery, Housman's Bookshop, Janine Bullman, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, London 2013 Drifting Through The Ruins, London Psychogeographical Association, Malcolm Hopkins, Mute Magazine, Olympic Site, psychogeography, Resonance FM, Richard Thomas, Space Studios, The Owl & The Pussycat, Tracey Moberly
Posted in exhibitions | 21 Comments »
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
The commercially driven nature of Web 2.0 has been stressed by many commentators, for instance Tim O’Reilly in his influential essay of September 2005 “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software“. Thus when I first looked at MySpace a little before O’Reilly published that text, rock bands clearly knew how to promote themselves to a new (as well as their existing) audience via this site, but writers and artists on the whole didn’t. The later two categories of would-be culture industry ‘professionals’ tended to use the internet as a means of advertising (largely ineffectively) what they were doing, rather than integrating their activities into it. Since MySpace made streamed sound central to its platform, musicians found the site was tailor made for them, and it didn’t require much adaptation on their part to benefit from it.
There were and still are very few professional artists on MySpace with notable exceptions like Martin Creed and Jane Pollard/Ian Forsyth; most of the art profiles are either for complete amateurs or run by fans of dead iconoclasts like Duchamp and Warhol. The majority of artists I encounter in London don’t seem to like the web very much (among other things it doesn’t allow them much control over the way their work is viewed and who sees it, which is why they prefer galleries), but Facebook attracts them as a networking tool. On Facebook gallery artists fit in very well alongside suit wearing culture industry professionals and corporate managers with their spreadsheets and calculators. If gallery artists have work they want to sell and that really is their bottom line, those artists working on the web (and doing more than simply publicising upcoming shows and reproducing catalogue essays) are more likely to have something to say or at least formalist concerns they wish to explore. Strangely beyond those involved in genres such as conceptual literature (Kenny Goldsmith is the most prominent figure in this field) or perhaps cyberpunk, even fewer writers than artists show much interest in the internet as a creative tool, despite the fact it is language based and offers enormous scope for ‘social sculpture’.
Moving on, the developmental model many Web 2.0 businesses work with is offering a service either cheaply or for free in order to mine data from their users. Web business ‘guru‘ Tim O’Reilly doles out advice along the lines of: ‘leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web… For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data… The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide…. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application…. Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application…. When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for “hackability” and “remixability.”… Don’t package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers…“
In recent years networking theory has made much of the notion of weak ties. The pioneer in this area was Mark Granovetter in the 1970s and by the late 1990s his work had been combined with Stanley Milgram’s research into how many links separate people from each other (the so called six degrees of separation) by mathematicians Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz. These ideas were later popularised in mass market paperbacks like Mark Buchanan’s “Small World” (known as “Nexus” in the USA). A completely ordered network (where every node is tied only to its neighbours) is inefficient in terms of its degrees of separation: but when some long distance ‘weak ties’ are thrown in these massively reduce the number of moves needed to get from any one node to any other. Thus from the perspective of networking theory MySpace is superior to both Facebook and Bebo since it encourages weak ties as well as networking among established friends (Facebook and Bebo actively discourage users from befriending people they don’t know). That said, those ‘virtual’ communities that go beyond ties to a single platform and that aren’t committed to capitalist business practices are infinitely superior to anything MySpace can offer.
Web business ‘gurus’ like Tim O’Reilly recognise the strength of collective activity, but they attempt to recuperate it for individual gain. Their world is one in which everything revolves around a bottom line; their outlook is essentially behaviourist, web surfers are enticed to click through links and to buy something (anything). Business data miners are interested in what makes someone click through links and make purchases, not why they do it. Thus what doesn’t gain clicks is either discarded or placed so far down search lists that few surfers will find it. This is a pseudo-meritocracy in which whatever is already popular has its position constantly reinforced, and what isn’t popular is buried under a mountain of celebrity trivia in a world that is currently ruled (‘ironically’ of course) by the likes of Lady GaGa. Nonetheless, social networking trends are constantly shifting and while both advertising and data mining on platforms like MySpace are now slicker than 3 or 4 years ago, that particular site is still not exactly generating a huge profit. Indeed, last year saw a small downturn in MySpace and Facebook usage in the UK (see “Is Facebook going out of fashion” – you’ll need to roll down the page on The Guardian site to see this).
So trendsetters, perhaps this really can be the year in which millions more groovers and bloggers break with the digital establishment by embracing a WordPress freakout. The easiest way to do this is to set up a blog on the WordPress site, but I’d prefer you all to be more dispersed and for as many of you as possible to use your own domains…. And let’s start using our sites to really play with the web, to spread myths and confusion, create false identities, disorientate the authorities, and inauguarate communal situations that overflow all the barriers between the so called ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds! Oh and a few backward glances at how we got here wouldn’t go astray either… so if you’re not already familiar with them, look up the Luther Blissett Project, neoism and mail art (the ‘original’ pre-web paper net). “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 6 degrees of separation, advertising, Andy Warhol, Bebo, conceptual literature, corporate managers, culture industry professionals, cyberpunk, Duncan Watts, Facebook, formalism, gallery artists, Guardian, Ian Forsyth, Jane Pollard, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lady GaGa, Luther Blissett Project, mail art, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Buchanan, Mark Granovetter, Martin Creed, MySpace, neoism, Nexus, Small World, Stanley Milgram, Steve Strogatz, Tim O'Reilly, weak ties, Web 2.0, What Is Web 2.0
Posted in Web 2.0 | 27 Comments »
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I want to look briefly at a specific aspect of one of the web’s greatest commercial success stories, Google. AdWords is the name for the pay per click service offered by Google to advertisers for the sponsored links that appear beside the queries entered into their search engine. Google explain their advertising system this way: “Concerned about costs? Don’t worry – AdWords puts you in complete control of your spending. Set your budget. There’s no minimum spending requirement – the amount you pay for AdWords is up to you. You can, for instance, set a daily budget of five dollars and a maximum cost of ten cents for each click on your ad. Avoid guesswork. We provide keyword traffic and cost estimates so you can make informed decisions about choosing keywords and maximizing your budget. (Estimate keyword costs) Pay only for results. You’re charged only if someone clicks your ad, not when your ad is displayed.”
So what Google does is match searches with relevant advertising. Now it is the advertiser who initially decides what keywords are relevant to their product, but Google helps them with this since they offer a search for effective AdWords function. While the advertisers determine how much they are prepared to pay both per click and in total, the more people click on an ad the less Google charges per click (their search engine dominance is based on ‘ relevance’ AKA ‘popularity’ and they are obsessed with preserving this). A simple mathematical formula is used to work out a Google AdWords rating but I won’t bore you by actually going through it here; suffice to say that the most effective ads are charged at lower rates and shown the most often. So to use AdWords successfully an advertiser has to write good copy and bid high enough on click payments to be displayed.
Where Google led others have followed, and a similar but less effective system operates on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Until last spring I had a number of profiles on MySpace most of which mentioned my passion for communism (anti-Bolshevik of course!), but the data miners didn’t seem to know the difference between real communism and fake communist tendencies that are now historically discredited – therefore when I was on MySpace I was often subjected to adverts with the following headlines: “School trips to Russia”, “All types of Russian Visas”, “Trotsky T-Shirts & Books” and even “Russian Beauties Seek Dating And Marriage”. Since like Bordiga and many others I view what happened in Russia under the Bolsheviks as a capitalist and not a communist revolution, these ads were of little interest to me and had been poorly targeted. Naturally the data miners are constantly attempting to refine their ad placement but since they never got me to click on anything, they were unable to learn much about what pushed my buttons, and I’d say the same is true for many readers of my blogs – a number of those from outside the UK wondered why after visiting my old MySpace pages they had been bombarded with ads for products associated with people they’ve never heard of; these were invariably British micro-celebrities such as Abi Titmuss who’d been lampooned – often just in passing – in my blogs or the accompanying comments.
That said, the data miners expect a certain failure rate, so the fact that they’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful at targeting ads at me and my blog readers isn’t statistically significant to them, but it does demonstrate that despite the hype their techniques are often too crude to work. What I haven’t worked out, but maybe someone else has, is when it would be more damaging to the click thru advertising industry for me to click on an ad that doesn’t interest me rather than ignoring it. Is there a way of driving up costs for advertisers by clicking thru to their product but not buying it that will discourage them from using click thru? Since this must vary from web service to web service, we clearly need specific equations to work out how to do click thru ad busting on specific sites such as Google and Bebo.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Abi Timuss, ad busting, advertising, AdWords, Amadeo Bordiga, Bebo, capitalism, click thru, click thru ad busting, communism, dating and marriage, Google, micro-celebrities, MySpace, pay per click, Russian beauties, Trotsky
Posted in advertising, Web 2.0 | 23 Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
Uli Edel’s film about the Red Army Faction AKA The Baader Meinhof gang takes us from the late-sixties through to the late-seventies; from student demonstrations to bank robberies and kidnappings. The early part of the movie shows police brutality which no doubt led to the radicalisation of some of its victims. However, Edel chooses to follow the political degeneration of a clique of middle-class reactionaries whose minds have been warped by vanguardist Bolshevik fallacies. The dialogue makes it clear that Leninist cretin-in-chief Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) considers his tiny cell of urban guerrillas to be in advance of ‘the masses’. One can only conclude that in Baader’s deluded idealist fantasies the role of the RAF was to prevent the working class from acting as a class in itself and for itself, and to single-handedly preserve capitalist (dis)order by injecting false-consciousness into the minds of ‘the masses’.
Andreas and his trophy blonde girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) want to lead the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll neo-capitalist ‘revolution’; unlike the original Bolsheviks, the RAF reactionaries could not instigate a genuine revolution, albeit a capitalist one, because the transformation from the formal to the real domination of capital had already been accomplished. Instead the actors, following the lead of those they portray, take their clothes off quite a lot to demonstrate how ‘liberated’ they are in comparison to their God-fearing parents. Unfortunately, Baader and Ensslin recruit hand-wringing liberal journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) to their Leninist gang, and even after being further cretinised she remains a killjoy who is never as willing to get her kit off as the other RAF ravers. Gedeck’s failure to act in a suitably nude and disorderly fashion, regardless of historical accuracy, is nearly as bad as some of the soundtrack music; this includes “Child In Time” by Deep Purple, yuk!
While I found The Baader Meinhof Complex superior to the Hollywood dreck that currently dominates cinema screens, I still couldn’t take it seriously. I’ve seen plenty of historical photographs of the Baader Meinhof gang and in them these killer clowns are considerably skinnier than the actors who portray them for Edel. In particular Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader is just too much of a porker for his role, and would have been more suited to playing the tubby 1970s terrorist Carlos Martinez. Even the title of this movie (taken from a non-fiction book by Stefan Aust) reminded me of a tome I’d read in the seventies about the rotund Latino with the white trench coat called The Carlos Complex. As long as you like comedy, and I do, this movie will keep you entertained for a couple of hours. Laughing at the bourgeois idiocies of a creep like Andreas Baader might be low comedy, but it can still raise a good belly laugh. To conclude, The Baader Meinhof Complex might be mind rot, but at least it is a better class of mind rot than you’d get from Hollywood.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andreas Baader, Baader Meinhof gang, Carlos Martinez, Child In Time, Deep Purple, Gudrun Ensslin, Johanna Wokalek, Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Red Army Faction, Stefan Aust, The Carlos Complex, Uli Edel, Ulrike Meinhof
Posted in film | 26 Comments »
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Harvey Milk was a gay rights activist and pro-small business populist politician who was murdered alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone at their local City Hall in 1978. He is now also the subject of a Gus Van Sant movie starring Sean Penn called Milk. Despite the usual slew of rave reviews and award nominations that are a part and parcel of productions with the financial clout to hire celebrity leads, the film is a turkey. With a running time of around two hours it is way too long and left me bored shitless. The movie is full of clunky devices, such Milk recording his life story on tape just in case he is assassinated, something he apparently did but that nonetheless comes across as completely contrived in its celluloid anti-realisation. Milk’s assassin, former cop Dan White, is painted as latently gay but this psychologising gloss proves pointless since it isn’t properly worked into a narrative that ultimately depicts the murders as rage killings. White, like Milk, had been a San Francisco city supervisor, and he appears to have blamed his failure as a local politician on the two men he murdered. Both this film and the historical record show White to be an early example of someone ‘going postal’; and while conservative bigotry seems to have played a role in this, at the end of the day Van Sant’s wild speculation about the killer’s ultimate sexual orientation is completely pointless. Milk is equally unsuccessful in its attempts to gloss over the fact that its subject was a small time but still cynical capitalist politician. Gay liberation is necessarily part of a larger struggle for human emancipation, and the single issue politics of businessmen like Milk invariably derail this process. To me films like Milk are just worthless Hollywood schlock, and you’d have to be deluded to think such crapola could even start to compete with a recent independent movie like Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: cynical capitalist politicians, Dan White, gay rights, George Moscone, going postal, Gus Van Sant, Harvey Milk, Milk, rage killings, San Francisco, Sean Penn, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
Posted in film | 31 Comments »
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
1. Listen to all your mp3s, cds, records and tapes one after the other without a break and without sleeping. This won’t work unless you have enough music to keep you up for days on end. You may eat as you listen.
2. Sit on a toilet for 24 hours without moving and with a pillow case over your head; don’t sleep and while you’re on the john shout the word “Ling” at least 10 times a minute. You may urinate and defecate as you do this.
3. Stand in front of a mirror, blow a raspberry. Repeat until you attain enlightenment.
4. Take a tube train from Morden to Camden Town, and never return.
5. Place all your shoes in a backpack and then walk twenty miles in every pair you own, with the pack containing your other shoes on your back. You may sleep for up to six hours between each twenty mile hike and spend up to an hour eating and preparing food.
Having completed this 5 point programme you will enter the mystic state of “Meg” and you will find your orgasms massively enhanced….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Camden, enlightenment, Ling, Meg, mirror, Morden, raspberry, shoes, toilet
Posted in humour | 20 Comments »
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
I’ve known Paul Buck for years and the other day I went to see him do a talk in which he covered his entire career as a writer, from a recent true crime book to his involvement with heavy weight French theorists back in the day. While Paul has endless tales about the innumerable highbrow chancers he has known, when we spoke after his presentation I asked him about The E… List: Notorious Prison Escapes, and specifically whether my relative Ray “The Cat” Jones had featured in it. Paul said he had covered Raymond Jones. I’ve never met Ray but he is one of my mum’s many cousins and my uncles like to talk about him. Indeed, my mother was named Julia after Ray’s mother. This is what Paul has to say about Ray in his book:
“Frankie Fraser gives cat burglar Ray Jones his vote for the best single-handed escape, when he went over the wall at Pentonville Prison, breaking both his legs in the process and yet still getting away. Fraser gives scant details, but somehow, in 1958, Jones managed to climb onto the prison roof and, in scaling down the sheer face of the outside wall, smashed one kneecap, then fell and broke his ankle. Nevertheless, he continued, scaled another wall, and broke the other leg when he jumped.
“Still he persisted, crawling into a block of flats and making his way onto a roof, where he fell headlong through a skylight as he tried to prise it open. When he regained consciousness he made his way out of the building, pulled himself along using the railings on the Caledonian Road, crawled across the road to King’s Cross station, over the railway lines and into someone’s garden. Eventually he decided to seek help and attracted the attention of some young men, asking them to give him a lift “because I had had a bad fall.” They guessed who he was, but didn’t betray him. After they left him at his relative’s flat, his wife arrived and arranged for him to stay elsewhere, where he remained for five months while recovering from his injuries. He was not recaptured for two years.”
I’d seen the Frankie Fraser book Paul picked this up from, and I’ve come across stories about Ray in various other tomes. Peter Scott who was trained up in the art of cat burglary by Jones includes poison pen portraits of my relative in his autobiography Gentleman Thief, and there are other criminal memoirs that include tales of Ray losing large sums of money in illegal gambling dens. Typical too that a pathetic middle-class fantasist like Scott would have his account of the post-war burglary scene published; whereas Ray Jones and his long time partner-in-crime George ‘Taters’ Chatham, who between them taught Scott this trade but came from working class families, weren’t given that kind of break – and unlike their apprentice they haven’t been handsomely rewarded for appearing on ‘reality’ TV shows like Channel Four’s The Heist either.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Caledonian Road, Channel Four, Dalston, Frankie Fraser, French theory, Gentleman Thief, George 'Taters' Chatham, George Chatham, Julia Callan-Thompson, King's Cross station, London, Paul Buck, Pentonville Prison, Peter Scott, prison escapes, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, south Wales, The E... List: Notorious Prison Escapes, The Heist
Posted in books, Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 28 Comments »
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Oh why do I get myself into these situations…. the gorgeous Jane Lewty asked if I’d contribute to a book on porn. Since Jane moved to the USA to take up an academic post there I haven’t seen much of her, and I figured if I said yes to the sex assignment it would mean we’d have to meet for a drink or three when she was back in the UK for vacations – to discuss the progress of my paper of course! However, having failed to write a word so far, I was forced to blow Jane off when she was in London for the winter solstice…. Now the 1 February deadline is looming and I still haven’t done a stroke of work on this. I find it a lot easier to produce pornography than write about it. I don’t even have a title yet, which is why I need your help. And if anyone has an unpublished academic paper on porn they could let me use, that would be even better! Underneath this is the original call for papers…. so you can bounce ideas into the comments, or if you have a usable unpublished paper on the subject it might be better to private message me via the webmail form on the main part of this site. All help appreciated!
Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire
eds. Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchell
Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2008
Bodily existence is an existence lived in constant fascination with a world beyond one’s reach. Embodiment, desire, metaphor. To exist on the verge of nonexistence. In the headlong pursuit of the real, of the other. Of the base materiality of the world, of religious hypothesis, of absolute relativity. Every utopia is a pornography, a recrudescence and pathological disillusionment, a lure into the vortex—paradoxical annulment of pure reason, compulsion, repetition, consumption.
A fact of bodily existence is to know that the body is our most complex and multi-faceted machine in a world of incessant technological progress. The body is a marvel of engineering; it is the outward face of primal nature; it is a disgusting vessel in which to house the soul; it is a primitive device, fragile and disposable. Bodies are re-produced, experimented upon to the limits of their tolerance, dissected and debated to every last cell, mended, prosthetically enhanced, moralised, abused and adored. The interface with the world we live in means that the body is always laid open to scrutiny without ever simply constituting some thing within our grasp: it is the site where violence and metaphysics interchange, technicity and catatonia, the sublime and the grotesque.
The body cannot be neutral or indifferent. Its design is such that it must respond to both exterior challenge and interior impulse. Our means of survival, the sex act, galvanizes the body into a unique state of existence, which, though transient, becomes the essence of being; the concentration of an idea, the heightening of sense, the ultimate dissolution.
How to write this purposeful transformation? How to write this instantaneous, ephemeral shattering of perception? This is the task of pornography. Our project will present the body in its most extreme of forms and behaviour, all of which demonstrate the human attempt to satisfy, and solve, the oft-inchoate needs of our psychology and physicality. We seek papers which deal with pornography as condition, symptom, addiction, spectacle, product, simulacrum. Above all as a fundamentalism embedded in the very structures of representation, knowledge, non-knowledge and the unpresentable.
Contributions of up to 6000 words, including images (jpeg 300dpi), should be sent to the editors. Final deadline for contributions: 1 February 2009. So we have a week!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: academic papers, Andrew Mitchell, Jane Lewty, Litteraria Pragensia, Louis Armand, porn, pornotopias
Posted in porn | 25 Comments »
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
A dream with some commentary.
“I travel to Berlin at the behest of my friend Mario who is something of a cultural impresario. Mario fails to meet me at the airport and I can’t get him on the phone. I call Stiletto and Kirstein and hang out with them instead. The next day I manage to meet up with Mario. He’s been on a bender and doesn’t feel like making the TV interview he’d flown me over to do happen. He says it can be postponed for a day or two. I tell him I have to return to London that night. He suggests I change my flight. I tell him I can’t prolong my stay in Berlin. He organises the TV interview. After the interview I go to the Tricky Tunes record shop because I want to catch up with Christoph who is at work there.”
My dreams are always like this, very prosaic. They are one of a number of reasons I think psychology and related practices like psychoanalysis suck. My first two trips to Berlin were made in the 1980s and I stayed with Stiletto and Kirstein on the first trip, and Graf Haufen on the second (I knew them all through the International Neoist Network). Mario Mentrup put on the first public event I ever did in Berlin in the mid-1990s. I tried to meet Mario when I was in Berlin a few months ago doing an event for Christoph Fringeli, but he was tired and busy and we failed to connect.
Since I also have a lot of dreams in which I have pleasurable consensual sex, there is no essential difference between my waking life and my so called ‘subconscious’. Indeed, just before going to post this blog (which I’d prepared yesterday) I checked my email and Mario Mentrup had sent me the transcript of an interview I’d done with him in 2004. I’d not seen this interview before because it had been spiked, and had forgotten I’d ever done it. There is so little difference between my waking life and my dreams that applying fraudulent notions such as sublimation, repression, displacement, denial, reaction formation, intellectualisation or projection to both them and to me is completely ridiculous!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Berlin, Christoph Fringeli, denial, displacement, Graf Haufen, intellectualisation, Mario Mentrup, neoism, projection, psychoanalysis, psychology, reaction formation, repression, Stiletto, sublimation, Tricky Tunes, TV
Posted in dreams | 29 Comments »