The English countryside was soporific. Cary didn’t agree with those who said it was boring. Certainly, it lacked the variety of a mountain vista, or even the romantic touch of a coast over the sea, but if you made an effort there was a certain fascination in the succession of identical ploughed fields, cottages and rows of trees. There was the possibility of something happening, especially when the fog came down like the dry ice that conjurors use to make their performances more spectacular. Any kind of situation could come out of the top hat (Wu Ming, 54).
I don’t usually read the Guardian‘s music coverage, so I’d forgotten how incompetent a music writer Alexis Petridis is. I was reminded more forcefully than I would have liked by today’s review of Lady GaGa’s album, a six paragraph review that contains, generously, four sentences that mention music. Even those don’t rise above the level of “the tune of Paparazzi takes up residence in your brain and refuses to budge.” OK, fine, but why? What is it about that track that’s catchy? It isn’t, anyway, the tune which sticks in your head so much as the way the little catch in her voice plays against the cocooning buzz of the bass, and how that ambiguously anaesthetized melancholy fits with the bizarre fantasy of glamor that Lady GaGa attaches to the word “fashion.” But to get in to that would require describing music in some other way than through vague references to other artists, which appears to be the limit of Petridis’s skill.
Seriously, who is Petridis and where did he come from? Back when I lived in the UK and read the Guardian‘s music coverage regularly, I remember him appearing out of nowhere as their music editor; but I don’t remember him ever writing anything even minimally interesting.
In other “terrible things in the graun” news, Simon Jenkins appears to have written the apotheoisis of broadsheet opinion journalism: a smug, anti-intellectual column about why people should be smug and anti-intellectual.
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.
I like to imagine that Britney’s new video came about when Britney, in a room high up in Spears Towers, complained to her team: “Christina had an elephant in her video! I want an elephant. No, I want two elephants!” And so, they wheeled out the rather tired celebrity/circus analogy, in an attempt to justify the elephants (which, really, ought to be their own justification). The tired conceptual architecture is an example of the general blahness of the album identified by Steven Shaviro; Read more↴
When Žižek wants to support mainstream leftish politicians, he argues that they make clearer the essential indistinguishability of mainstream candidates; when the right is in power, the superficial differences make arguments for the necessity of radical change appear false (we certainly saw this with Bush). But when Žižek wants to oppose these politicians, he argues that they, precisely because of their left-wing appearance, are better placed to implement right-wing policies than right-wing politicians. How might this look in the case of Obama? Read more↴
I’ve been meaning to scan and upload The Weather Underground’s Prairie Fire for some time. It’s a fascinating book, written in 1974, just as the transition from the crisis of Keynesianism to the ascent of neoliberalism was taking place, and it’s a fine attempt to understand this change and how economic change, alongside the dissolution of the movements of the sixties, would effect forthcoming political activity. Not that they got everything right; their prediction of a revolutionary upsurge was sadly inaccurate and, given that, it turns out that they overestimated the role that would be played by armed struggle in the rest of the decade. On a more theoretical, rather than strategic, level, they did much better, however; it’s particularly interesting to read their materialist sketch of the intersections between capitalism, race, and gender, although it is a little depressing to realize how little influence this kind of analysis has had since then, with so many accounts of intersectionality tending towards the idealist and post-Marxist.
