Voyou Desoeuvre » Uncategorized

Appropriately, the 1000th post is about why I don’t write so many posts

voyou — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:06:01 +0000

One of the things I built in to the current design of this blog is that the layout for posts, and most especially for the front page, only really makes sense for long-ish posts. My thought here was that Twitter would take the strain of short comments and “hey look at this link” type posts, and indeed it has largely done so. But there’s a creamy middle of cases where I’d like to say a little more than can fit in 140 characters, but don’t have quite enough to say for a post here. I’ve finally got round to creating an extra blog for that purpose, and recent posts from that blog also show up in the “snippets” section on the front page here.

I’ve periodically added various other things to the front page, like my Flickr photos and Last.fm loved tracks. If you read this blog via RSS, you won’t see these, which I imagine you’re fine with, but if not, they all have feeds of their own, and I’ve but together a Google Reader “bundle” which will let you subscribe to everything that shows up on the front page.

It’s wrong to wish on space hardware Is it? These Soviet space program matchboxes (link
“The possibility of something happening…” The English countryside was soporific. Cary didn
Bumping in the back room I loved the new Girls Aloud track when I first hea

“There’s a red star up on the Christmas tree”

voyou — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:04:50 +0000

I think I may have been living in California too long, partly because I found myself saying “thank-you so much” to somebody the other day, and also because I was surprised yesterday when, on landing in London, the pilot wished everyone on the plane “Merry Christmas,” rather than some more generic holiday greeting. But of course this was a British pilot, who thus adopted the British form of secularism, which consists in removing the Christian content from nominally religious institutions while maintaining the form. People sometimes remark that it’s paradoxical that the officially secular US is a more religious country than the officially religious UK, but it’s not a paradox at all. As Marx pointed out in On the Jewish Question, when the state defines itself as secular, it does so by presuming a religious civil society against which to contrast itself; the secular state depends on and promotes religion in the private sphere. A better approach for unbelievers is to, well, simply not believe, an approach exemplified by the Christmas of Noddy Holder, mince pies, and public holidays; the nominal origin of these events in religion is irrelevant to their actual content.

All of which is to say, I hope you all have a good communist christmas.

Merry communist christmas

A.C. Grayling: Exclusive video footage An 8 year old girl takes the Dawkins line on relig
Secular religion? John Gray in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago jo
Dawkins’s apologia The most recent of them have found the correct exp

Happy Gay Christmas

voyou — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:21:35 +0000

Via Warren Ellis, I hear of the term “Goth Christmas” for Halloween. It’s also, at least here in the Bay Area, Gay Christmas. I like that there’s an, as it were, contingently gay holiday; and anyway, the American fall holidays are the best holidays: Halloween, a holiday celebrating dressing up, and Thanksgiving, a holiday celebrating eating. Anyway, for your Halloween pleasure, here’s a happy-hardcore remix of Tubular Bells.

I don’t miss JK and Joel though, obviously I hadn’t realized until I was back in Englan
“There’s a red star up on the Christmas tree” I think I may have been living in California too l
Things to like on British TV Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on C

Our other 1950s

voyou — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:57:21 +0000

Why the new 1950s-themed threads? Recently, I’ve been finding something strangely fascinating about the 1950s. Perhaps a picture will help explain.

To me, at least, this version of commercial design as a neon-inflected industrial heroic is bizarre, but also oddly inspiring. Now, the 1930s were also a time of inspiring aesthetic and political movements: but perhaps too inspiring. The inter-war years had a level of radicalism I find difficult to imagine, and so it seems to me that any left-wing enthusiasm for the 30s runs a real risk of being nostalgic in a paralyzing way. What’s so interesting about the 1950s is that many of the things that appear so radical in the 1930s—technological progress, social democracy, modernist design—reappear in the 1950s as banal. I’m a fan of the banal in general, but especially in this case, where the imminent future of modernity appears to be in the process of making itself immanent, overlapping with the most trivial advert for swimsuits or ham.

What underlies this cultural shift, I think, or part of it, is that the 1950s had to deal with being the time in which the dreams of the 1930s came to pass, in William Morris’s sense:

But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name (A Dream of John Ball).

Whether through the construction of institutions that, if you squint, look a bit like socialism, or through consumerism’s fruition as a kind of neon simulacrum of the realm of freedom, the 1950s flickered between a genuine victory for collective social projects (the NHS, for instance), and a strangely nightmarish parody of the socialist vision (the job for life). The 1950s, then, were the end of history not as peaceful decline into senesence, but a terrifying combination of stasis and uncertainty.

Hence the 1950s’ particular attitude to the future. It’s not an accident, I think, that the flying cars and jetpacks that populate the future that seems to have gone missing are largely inventions of the 50s; our idea of future kitsch comes from the fact that it was in the 50s that the future became kitsch. The future as neither a grand and heroic telos, nor as an unattainable absurdity, but something else, or both at once.

But why resurrect the 50s now? Because perhaps we are still living in the 50s, in two senses. We live with an image of the future and a concept of futurity that was developed in the 50s; but we are also experiencing a sort of repetition-as-farce of the 50s. If the 50s were the period in which the dreams of the 1930s were, in their way, achieved, are the early years of the 21st century not the period in which the long neoliberal dream has finally achieved its full triumph? A rather parodic triumph, to be sure, as the market economy begins to fail even by its own curious standards. In which case, the 50s can be a useful reference point, a period of both stasis and creation dialectically dependent on one another, and a reminder that the time of the end of history is not the end times.

Here is the rose, dance here I’ve quoted William Morris from A Dream of J
The disappearing proletariat Poetic as it is, “the history of all hithert
Marx against Badiou? The young Marx criticizing the Rousseauism of the

Grayling reviews Žižek

voyou — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:20:10 +0000

And by “reviews” I mean “asserts that he’s wrong”:

You can, and should, complain vociferously about the harms and wrongs perpetrated by capitalism, but to describe them all as violence makes it impossible to distinguish between what happens when an multinational oil company raises its prices and when it pays to have people bullied off land above an oil deposit. Being paid a low wage and being shot in the head are two different things. If you use the same word for both you are muddling, weakening and misdirecting your argument.

Watch: Monty Python's Argument Sketch

Ultraleft reformists The curious thing about communism is how blandly r
Are they aware of politics? As the University of California gears up for tomor
Where do we go when there’s no more politics? You think it was politics. That particular dance,

Priorities

voyou — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:54:08 +0000

If people want to spend time grilling Obama for unfortunate turns of phrase, wouldn’t it be better to talk about Clinton’s “kitchen sink strategy”?

Obama: America’s Sarkozy? I was impressed with his willingness to look at th
Change must come through the barrel of Democratic party procedure Much as I dislike George Bush, I don’t think
Arendt in the West Wing On the way out after a talk on Arendt last week, a

It is the final conflict

voyou — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:29:12 +0000

Happy International Workers Day.

Some quotes from Marx A couple of quotes I happened to stumble across: T
“I can sit and stand / Beg and roll over” Watch: The Happy Mondays - WFL I was listening to
Support from an unexpected source Adam points to the annoying habit among people doi

A question for readers in the UK

voyou — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:55:32 +0000

Have any local news broadcasts produced flood-related montages soundtracked by Rihanna’s “Umbrella”?

What war? When I thought, while watching the new Girls Aloud
I really really really want a… A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be refor
Nice Rs Watch: Kate Nash - Foundations I’ve been lis

Ouch

voyou — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 02:37:09 +0000

Sure, Google say their results are based on an impersonal algorithm, but this looks an awful lot like an insult to me.

Appropriately, the 1000th post is about why I don’t write so many posts One of the things I built in to the current design
FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL DEFENSE OF PARIS HILTON AGAINST ANTISEMITIC WITCHHUNTS The pious outrage Thursday over heiress Paris Hilt
And you shouldn’t fucking talk about telekinesis Bush’s press conference a few days back remi

“Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it”

voyou — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:48:41 +0000

Is there a better newspaper than pravda.ru? It’s the newspaper implied by the terminological similarity between the Weekly World News and People’s Weekly Word, a combination of flagrant falsehood and Stalinist propaganda. Case in point:

Ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten

In a May that began with demonstrations for open borders and against the war… Adam asks, “what happened to Hardt and Negri
Bureaucracy and biopolitics The English people today are addicted to the rhyth
DEFEND NORTH KOREAN SOCIALISM AND THE GLORIOUS PEOPLE’S BOMB FROM BEIJING REVANCHIST OPPORTUNISM AND SEOUL-WASHINGTON-IAEA FASCIST AGGRESSION Well, not really, obviously. Nuclear bombs anywher

Voyou Desoeuvre » Uncategorized

Ap­pro­pri­ately, the 1000th post is about why I don’t write so many posts