J.G. Ballard (1930 - 2009)

British writer J.G. Ballard died on Sunday 19 April 2009. Ballard, who had been diagnosed with prostrate cancer in June 2006, was 78 years old. Among his best-known novels are such as Crash, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun, and Super-Cannes.

Though usually cited as a science fiction writer (he was one of the vanguards of the "New Wave" of sci-fi coming into prominence in the 1960s with such celebrated magazines as New Worlds, which he also contributed), Ballard's main theme was the psychopathology of contemporary society. The writer inspired by French Surrealists of the early 20th century, Ballard's works usually were about the civilisation crumbling but also mutating into something else, creating its own beauty and serenity. His psycho-geographical landscapes were inhabitated by alienated but inquisitive characters obsessed by a combination of technology, celebrity cult, sex and violence; all of which they worshipped with a religious fervour and even some sort of strange dignity.

Crash (1973) is about a small cult of people sexually obsessed with becoming injured or even dying in car accidents, preferably featuring some celebrity figures such as Elizabeth Taylor. Concrete Island (1974) describes a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, who finds himself helplessly stranded on a traffic island in the abyss of a spaghetti junction, his pleas for help ignored by passing cars. As with film director Luis Buñuel, Ballard's works could often be seen as surreal satires of the "discreet charm of bourgeoisie", and High-Rise (1975) shows a group of people consisting of highly-paid professionals and inhabiting an ultra-modern tower block degenerate into a constant life of violent orgy. In The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) an aviator crashes his plane in a suburb town of the Thames Valley, becoming a sort of Messiah with supernatural powers in a tale which might be or not only a final fantasy of a dying man. Ballard's late quadrology Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) (these two being actually companion pieces, so similar they are in their themes), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) also show these same upper-middle class people instigating absurd violence to alleviate the boredom and social friction in their tightly guarded resort communities, business parks and shopping malls.

In a perfect world, the Nobel Award for Literature would have been Ballard's, but science/speculative fiction has never really fitted the appetites of that venerable election committee, not to speak about the controversial nature of his works. It would perhaps be preposterous to call Ballard's works prophetical, but I'm quite sure in the years to come more and more resonance will be found with his works and how the world around us turns out to be. No, as it already is: Ballard's dystopias took place not in some far future or a faraway country, but here and now.

In popular culture, J.G. Ballard has been for years a hip name to throw around and his works have inspired countless other writers, film-makers, artists and musicians. Empire of The Sun, an autobiographical book on Ballard's childhood years in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai, was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. The Crash film version by David Cronenberg (whose earlier works such as Videodrome had a definite Ballardian tone) stirred some controversy in 1996.

Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records, recorded in 1978 under the alias of The Normal 'Warm Leatherette', a song based on Ballard's Crash. The Normal's electronic contemporaries such as Gary Numan ('Down In The Park') and John Foxx (Metamatic) have read their Ballard, too. Joy Division's late frontman Ian Curtis took the name for one of their songs, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', from a short story collection of Ballard.


The Normal: 'Warm Leatherette' with film clips from Crash adaptation by David Cronenberg

Ballardian.com - a Website dedicated to all things J.G. Ballard

Obituaries & tributes:

BBC News

Feuilleton

Helsingin Sanomat (in Finnish)

Michael Moorcock @ Ballardian

Salon (by Simon Reynolds)

Jante'd - More on Jante Law

Amadeus trailer (1984)

(Jante Law, Part 1)

Artists (painters, writers, film-makers, musicians, ahem, DJs...), the narcissistic and self-centred creatures they are, live in constant fear. That fear is of competition, that a new hero/heroine will come up; being more talented, more creative, more innovative, more outspoken; outsmarting and making obsolete our poor narcissist, who will find out s/he is only a derivative hack feeding off other people's ideas and creating nothing essentially new in the process. Therefore, it will become necessary to eliminate the new contenders, whatever it takes, put them to their real place in the pecking order.

One of the most well-known case histories of this process of the artistic rival's elimination is featured in Milos Forman's 1984 biopic Amadeus, which depicts the intrigues and plots of composer Antonio Salieri to get rid of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose talent Salieri is fiercely envious and afraid of. (It's better not to get into any possible historical inaccuracies here, such as Tom Hulce's take of Mozart as a giggling punk rocker of his time -- the fabulist film-makers just want to tell as juicy story as possible to delight the viewers, not historians.)

Salieri's behaviour here is basically Jante Law in action, though usually its mechanisms are of more devious and invisible nature, much harder to detect. That is because there might not be found only one jealous Salieri to put spokes in the wheels but apparently a whole establishment (of rivalling artists and other cultural gatekeepers of the art world), as if designed to make our poor talent's life hard -- and this is also where conspiracy theories begin.

Is our artist only a paranoid imagining things, or is someone actually plotting to block his/her way, speaking bad things of him/her behind his/her back and generally making things difficult for him/her? Even worse than actual attacks on the artist's work and person or negative criticism might be the "conspiracy of silence", as if s/he was silenced to death by the lack of any feedback whatsoever.

Thus is born another martyr, another artist misunderstood by his/her peers, another victim of persecution syndrome. (Not to speak about other possible discriminating factors, depending on our artist's gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, political views and so on: just open any art mag or culture pages of your morning paper for any desperate outcries and extra evidence.) Our artist was "Jante'd". Of course, there is no real way to know, but "being paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you". (Though personally, more than conspiracy theories, I always put more weight to just incompetence, people's laziness, prejudices and comfort-seeking nature that prevents them looking for any new viewpoints outside their small circles of acquaintances or "good old boys", comfort zones, current trends or "the tried and true".)

Naturally, it's possible our artist, that poor and sensitive spring daisy, may have only him/herself to blame, having just rubbed too many people the wrong way. Being a creative one doesn't always fit together with having a wholesome personality, being a nice, jovial bloke or lass, and many of them/us are -- let's face it -- just irritating twats with overblown egos.

We don't like obnoxious or boastful personalities, because it is as if they pose a threat to our own existence. Any self-hype makes us wary. We don't like forked tongues, slimy showbiz types, obvious fly-by-nights but most of all, we don't like people who blow their own horn too avidly: especially if they are potential rivals.

Or then, maybe our artist actually is talentless, despite his/her delusions to the contrary, so the Jante process of elimination only does a great service to the rest of the world.

The Jante Law

Aksel Sandemose, the inventor of Jante Law

Jante Law was developed by Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose (1899 - 1965) in his novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor ("A fugitive crosses his tracks", 1933). There Sandemose describes life in an imaginary village called Jante, which is loosely based on his own home village.

Jante Law is basically an unwritten and strict code of conduct regulating all fields of life and guaranteeing not one individual will rise above the rest, under the threat of all sorts of social sanctions, common disapproval and so on. These hierarchies and "pecking orders" will take care that only those members who will agree to play along the rules will subsist, and those diverting from the path will be cast aside. Jante Law is considered especially a Scandinavian phenomenon, distinctive of relatively tiny, close-knit societies of "small village mentality", but also Australia, New Zealand and Canada are said to have something similar, called "Tall Poppy Syndrome".

Lately Jante Law came up in Finnish domestic discussion when it was claimed Panu Rajala, the author of Unio Mystica, a biography of the legendary Finnish writer Mika Waltari, lost the acclaimed Finlandia Prize only because the Prize Board members thought Mr. Rajala's "celebrity status" -- the author often featured on the pages of ladies' magazines and so on -- prevented the book in question having any real "literary merit" in the eyes of the Board and thus from receiving the Prize many thought Rajala's book deserved.

Other examples in Finnish cultural life are countless; just every time when it's a question of the artists' job opportunities, grants and common recognition, being the source of endless bitterness for those hapless individuals who consider themselves being discriminated by "the System" or even by "the Mafia" (i.e. the cultural gatekeepers such as critics, curators, publishers and so on).

The late Finnish artist Kalervo Palsa, known for his morbid and grotesque paintings and comics depicting sex and death, kept Jante Law as his motto sign on the wall.

Jante Law:

1. Don't think you are anything.
2. Don't think you are as good as us.
3. Don't think you are smarter than us.
4. Don't fancy yourself better than us.
5. Don't think you know more than us.
6. Don't think you are greater than us.
7. Don't think you are good for anything.
8. Don't laugh at us.
9. Don't think that anyone cares about you.
10. Don't think you can teach us anything.

Jante'd - More on Jante Law

We Are All Prost... Marketing Personalities

Erich Fromm interviewed by Mike Wallace, part 1 [2] [3]

Indie pop intellectual Momus on Erich Fromm's concept of "Marketing Personality" in his latest blog entry: "Notes on the Marketing Personality".

The Pop Group put it more bluntly: "We Are All Prostitutes".

Ira Levin R.I.P.

The American suspense novelist Ira Levin (1929-2007) has passed away. Levin was best known for such works as Rosemary's Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972) and The Boys From Brazil (1976), all of them also turned into film adaptations: the most successful of them Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), which is very faithful to the original book.

One of Levin's strengths was to take what were some current trends in society and turn them into masterful works of suspense and paranoia that did not took place in any traditional Gothic settings such as haunted castles with their mad scientists and horror film monsters, but in (superficially) familiar and mundane everyday settings of urban/suburban life, where the uneasiness of main characters gradually grows as the events unfold.

Such mentioned trends of the time were in Rosemary's Baby the interest in occultism and re-assessing of the religious issues in the 60s (arguably, there might not have been such "Satanic" book and film hits of the 70s as The Exorcist or The Omen had Levin not paved the way with his work); or the same era's rise of female emancipation, as reflected in The Stepford Wives, a horror/sci-fi/satire on some robot-like and very un-emancipated suburban housewives.

["Stepford wife" has now even become a catchprase in everyday usage -- according to Wikipedia it is: "usually applied to a woman who seems to conform blindly to an old-fashioned subservient role in relationship to her husband, compared to other, presumably more independent and vivacious women. It can also be used to criticise any person, male or female, who submits meekly to authority and/or abuse; or even to describe someone who lives in a robotic, conformist manner without giving offense to anyone. The word 'Stepford' can also be used as an adjective denoting servility or blind conformity (e.g. 'He's a real Stepford employee') or a noun ('My home town is so Stepford')."]

Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford's Wives also make use of a very similar premise in both of them: an ordinary housewife finding herself in a new life situation -- young Rosemary Woodhouse getting pregnant with her first child and all subsequent hopes and fears arising there; a modern and feminism-orientated Joanna Eberhart with her husband and children moving from city to a suburban small town with some very conservative and old-fashioned values as to the place of woman in family and society -- and her slowly growing suspicious, even paranoid, towards the people in her nearest environment, where everything is obviously not as it seems.

Ira Levin @ Intercourse With The Dead


Trailer for Rosemary's Baby (1968)


Trailer for The Stepford Wives (1975) -- Levin himself was not particularly excited with this adaptation, though it has now become a cult film (which was also remade in 2004).



Time magazine published in April 1966 its famous "Is God Dead?" issue, which Levin also featured in Rosemary's Baby.

Peter Watkins: Punishment Park (1971)

Punishment Park (1971): trailer

And the whole film in its entirety @ YouTube:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

Punishment Park overview with Peter Watkins:

1 | 2 | 3

pHinnWeb has already featured War Game and Privilege, controversial "mockumentary"-type of 1960s films by the British director Peter Watkins. Common for Watkins' films were political, dystopian and even apocalyptic themes, critical of mass media, mind control and propaganda, and often taking place in a bleak near-future science fiction setting. Heavily reflecting on the heated political atmosphere of the Vietnam war and the Kent State massacre era, his 1971 film follows a group of dissidents who have chosen -- instead of a lengthy jail sentence -- to spend three days in the desert attempting to reach an American flag, as a sort of a survival game, while chased by police and National Guardsmen as part of their field training.

Info @ The Masters of Cinema / Eureka Video

Wikipedia

I'm Mad As Hell, And I'm Not Going To Take This Any More!

A scene from Network (1976)


Another scene from Network (1976)

From Sidney Lumet's film Network (1976).

Peter Watkins: The War Game (1965)

The War Game Part 1 (of 5)

Part 2 (of 5)

Part 3 (of 5)

Part 4 (of 5)

Part 5 (of 5)

Before Privilege, Peter Watkins had already stirred controversy with his 1965 nuclear war pseudo-documentary The War Game, which was banned by the BBC, who considered it too shocking for its graphic nature depicting realistically the possible consequences of a nuclear attack.

The War Game at the director's site

Privilege (1967) by Peter Watkins @ YouTube!

Privilege Part 1 (of 14)

Part 2 (of 14)

Part 3 (of 14)

Part 4 (of 14)

Part 5 (of 14)

Part 6 (of 14)

Part 7 (of 14)

Part 8 (of 14)

Part 9 (of 14)

Part 10 (of 14)

Part 11 (of 14)

Part 12 (of 14)

Part 13 (of 14)

Part 14 (of 14)

I told you last August about Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, lamenting the poor distribution status of this cult sci-fi film about the connections of pop music and fascism. Now one of those friendly YouTube pirates has brought this rare film online for everyone's watching pleasure, and this is what this person writes as accompaniment to the film:

"Privilege, a cruelly compelling, often brilliant film ... the real star ... is director Peter Watkins, only 31, who must get credit for this acidly anti-establishment film ... the quasi-documentary touches he mastered on BBC money are sharply and effectively in evidence. And in his first full-length film, he shows he can use color with startling success. No doubt about it: Watkins is on his way.' (Playboy)

'This is a bitter, uncompromising movie, and although it isn't quite successful it is fascinating and important. Watkins made a mistake in bringing the newsreel techniques of The War Game into a narrative film, where a director should be able to make his point with his story, the performances and the photography. Still the movie isn't a failure so much as an interesting episode in the career of a director who I think will eventually be ranked with Fellini and Bergman.' (Roger Ebert, Nov 1st, 1967)

The national cinema circuit in the UK, J. Arthur Rank, refused to show this "immoral and un-Christian picture which mocked the Church, defied authority and encouraged youth in lewd practices". Universal Pictures withdrew the film after brief screenings in a few countries, and the film has been rarely shown since - very occasionally on TV. Universal Pictures in Hollywood even refuse to let the director rent or buy a copy of this film, even on VHS.

For more information, visit the director's website: http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/privilege.htm

For a nice essay on the film, see: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/49/privilege.htm

(I apologize for the godawful picture quality, it's the only version of the film I got, since Universal still refuses to give this film a PROPER DVD-release... So please see this as a chance to watch this rare film!) ..."

See also: Peter Watkins: The War Game (1965)

Archigram vs. Brutalist Modernism

Modernism prevailed in architecture since the post-First World War era, in the visions of such people as Le Corbusier, Bauhaus and Functionalists; and by the 1960s this ascetic approach had developed into the minimalist, massive and menacing -- at its worst even post-Stalinist totalitarian -- style of the slabs of concrete, in what was called "Brutalist architecture". Combined with the technocratic city-planning, often manipulated by greedy and corrupt real estate deals, this was the style that prevailed all over the world, as the architecture of earlier eras was often ruthlessly erased and demolished to give way to the box-shaped steel and concrete office buildings and suburban apartment houses of element blocks. (My own hometown Tampere can well be called another example here, when several "wars" were waged over in the 60s and 70s to save such idyllic late 19th century/early 20th buildings as the City Hall or the Old Market Hall, threatened by an impending demolition in the hands of technocratic City Fathers.)

This autocratic dogmatism of Modernism/Brutalism was now challenged by architects who respected more the organic, evolutionary aspects of the city. Perhaps the most inventive and influential thinkers in this vein were the members of Archigram, a group of British architects that got together in the early 1960s through the Architectural Association in London; comprising Warren Chalk, Peter Cook (no relation to the era's famous British comedian of the same name), Dennis Crompton, David Green, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. Archigram's ideas were expressed in imaginative, often playful fantasy projects and colourful collages in "pop" spirit, which were published on the pages of their eponymous journal launched in 1961. Many of Archigram's designs were actually never meant to be realised as finished buildings, only as joyful simulations of what architecture could perhaps be in some possible but distant future, such as Roy Herron's "Walking City" of 1964: with an outlandish idea of a city that could be moved on its mechanical legs from one area to another!

Archigram were influenced by science fiction, comic books and other popular culture, engineering, and generally taking ideas from outside their own medium to find new approaches for architecture. In Amazing Archigram 4 Zoom Issue of 1964 Warren Chalk wrote: "In this second half of the twentieth century, the old idols are crumbling, the old precepts strangely irrelevant, the old dogmas no longer valid. We are in pursuit of an idea, a new vernacular, something alongside the space capsules, computers, and throw-away packages of an atomic and electronic age".

Bibliography:

Peter Cook (ed.): Archigram (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, ISBN 1568981945)

Simon Sadler: Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (The MIT Press, 2005, ISBN 0262693224)







click for larger image

Archigram Image Search @ Google

Archigram Gallery

Archigram @ DesignMuseum.org

Archigram @ The Bartlett: Architecture

Archigram @ Art Tower Mito

Archigram @ Wikipedia

Privilege (1967) by Peter Watkins

Privilege in its entirety @ YouTube

Privilege trailer @ LikeTelevision.com

Several cultural critics have pointed out the connections between rock music (+ pop music in general) and fascism. Rock has always prided itself as a music of freedom and personal expression, but when one starts to think about it, there are not really so many differences between gigantic stadium rock concerts and Nazi events like Nuremberg Rally; with their massive stage settings, the hypnotic, stomping rhythms; power trips for the masses making the rapturous fans raise their fists in the air... Fascism makes use of the underlying frustrations (social, economical, political, sexual), inhibited aggressions and latent violence mass society tends to create in its members -- the same fuel which can also be found behind rock's emotional energy. Drawing such comparisons even closer to the point, one such charismatic rock star as the late Freddie Mercury of Queen was called by his detractors "the Adolf Hitler of rock'n'roll". One can only ponder all the potential there to mass control and manipulation.

Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, starring Paul Jones (of the band Manfred Mann) and Jean Shrimpton (a "supermodel" of her own era), is a dystopian tale about a near-future pop star whose success is exploited for their own means by the powers that be. A totalitarian government and church well understand the importance of Steven Shorter (Jones), an extremely popular singer, to their own efforts of mass control, pacifying the youth dissent and religious domination.

"Aren't you using this young man to further your own agenda?" a clergyman in the film is asked. He replies: "Well, in the middle ages the church used the inquisition to further our own agenda, and we think this is a lot less painful!"

Rock's undercurrent of violence is also exploited by the film's fascistic government: in one concert sequence, the crowd watches Shorter sing a plaintive plea for love and understanding while locked in a cage surrounded by police officers armed with clubs. It is said that at least one scene in the film was copied by Stanley Kubrick for his Clockwork Orange.

Filmed in a quasi-documentary way, Privilege was Watkins' only British feature film, and it was both a commercial and critical flop in its time. Privilege has since gained a cult film status, though, even if seeing it these days can be extremely difficult, only semi-bootleg DVD or video copies being available at the moment. (For me, this is another one I have liked to see for years but haven't, because of this poor distribution status.)

Peter Watkins (born 1935) is known for such controversial film works as The War Game (1965), which with its disturbing scenes depicting the effects of nuclear war was banned by BBC. The Gladiators (1969) was filmed and distributed in Sweden, being another bleak sci-fi satire, this time foreseeing the so-called reality TV phenomenon, when the world governments decide channel man's aggressive instincts to a more controllable manner and start televised contests (with sponsors and commercials) between teams of selected soldiers from each country.

Privilege @ Peter Watkins' own site

Privilege article by Tom Sutpen @ Bright Lights Film Journal

Privilege images @ Reelstreets.com

Peter Watkins @ Subcin.com

Peter Watkins @ MySpace

Peter Watkins @ Wikipedia

Parrotzilla: Culture Jamming In Tampere

On 3 August 2006 the Tampere morning paper Aamulehti's Moro supplement on local affairs reported of a billboard modification that had taken place at the pedestrian tunnel of Tampere Railway Station.

An unknown person or persons had created a piece of culture jamming commando art: a parrot figure with a comic book balloon with the text "It's the Parrotzilla!!!" which had been created by ripping layers of paper off a Pepsi billboard ad. Parrotzilla remained there for a couple of days until it was censored away.

The Re/Search anthology Pranks! (1987), edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale, tells how American performance artist Mark Pauline used to create similar anti-consumerist billboard modifications in San Francisco already in the late 1970s. There was, for example, a billboard with actor Telly "Kojak" Savalas advertising Black Velvet whiskey, featuring the slogan "Feel The Velvet" -- which was changed into "Feel The Pain", Telly also getting new teeth in the process.

Of course, little boys have done these sort of modifications to advertisements and posters since the beginning of time, by adding new moustaches, spectacles, scars and so on to the images of unsuspecting models portrayed there (and there's a famous Marcel Duchamp work of art with Leonardo's Mona Lisa sporting a handsome moustache), but these prankish acts receive additional philosopical stance in the works of these Situationist-influenced artists; made famous by the "counter-ads"/"anti-ads" of such magazines as AdBusters.

Free the Billboards: Billboard Liberation Front's Guerilla Campaign

Détournement & Politicszzz

If I can, I consciously avoid wasting the space of this blog to political topics. Alongside newspaper commentators around the world, tons of other blog writers with greater argumentation abilities than yours truly (or then not) have already commented such things as Dubya's politics, Danish Mohammed cartoons or the Mayday night riots at Helsinki's VR-Makasiinit (or the burning down of said Makasiinit), so I don't feel I've got anything to add there to those discussions already filled with enough banalities, finger-pointing, mindless bigot attitudes on both sides; not to talk about downright idiocy.

Of course, I read two newspapers daily (editorial columns of the biggest newspapers in Finland seem to be filled daily by the sermon-like scribbles of 60-year old men pushing insistently such topics such as why Finland should join NATO as soon as possible, and why neoliberalist economics and employment politics benefit everyone) and try to keep up with BBC's World News and Euronews on TV, but I really don't feel I could add any worthwhile comments there that would somehow open up any new points of view or add beneficially to the ongoing discussion.

However, this little news item from Ken Knabb's Situationist Website Bureau of Public Secrets caught my eye, so I feel it's somehow appropriate to reprint it here (again, apologies to all copyright holders, etc. etc.) [You might try to find more information about Situationism from Wikipedia, provided any related info pages there are not yet ravaged to death by pedantic Wikiwankers and Wikidiots]:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 09:57:13 -0700
From: Bureau of Public Secrets

Subject: Colbert skewers Bush

[NOTE: Yesterday I sent out the message below to a few dozen friends. The response was so enthusiastic, and so many of them said they hadn't even been aware of the event, that I am sending it out to my larger, more general emailing list. Apologies for duplicate mailings. --Ken Knabb]

[NOTE ALSO: The fact that much of the mass media did not even mention this astonishing event, or dismissed it with a few contemptuous sentences, is one more demonstration of the media complicity Colbert was satirizing. And the fact that online video clips of his performance have now been seen by several million
people is one more indication that the Internet and other alternative means of communication are in the process of making the mass media increasingly irrelevant.
--KK]

**********************************************************

Comedian Stephen Colbert's keynote speech at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last Saturday may represent a new stage in the crumbling of the Bush regime's image from within the dominant spectacle itself. The following link gives a Windows Media clip of the last 15 minutes --
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/WH-Dinner-Colbert.wmv . The entire
talk (about 25 minutes) can be viewed in three parts here --
http://youtube.com/results?search=colbert%20bush%20cspan&sort=title_sort.

It's a bizarre experience because most of the audience was decidedly not sympathetic. Not only was Bush himself sitting a few feet away at the same table along with various other political bigwigs, but the major portion of the audience was the very journalists who with rare exceptions have treated the Bush regime with kid gloves over the last five years, and who were satirized almost as scathingly as
Bush himself. So some of Colbert's funniest remarks are received with a deafening silence, and the rare moments of laughter are brief and uneasy, the audience obviously not having expected such a scandal and wondering how they were supposed to take it.

The following article, which originally appeared at the Salon.com website, gives some information and commentary on the event, but is also of interest because the author makes a somewhat dubious and confused, but not totally inappropriate, link between Colbert's methods and the subversive tactics of the situationists.

On the latter, see:

"A User's Guide to Détournement"

"Détournement as Negation and Prelude"

"The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art"

*******************************************************

The Truthiness Hurts

Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

By Michael Scherer

May 1, 2006 | Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the Secret Service let him so close to the president of the United States.

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the D.C. press corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, "Tonight, no one is safe."

Colbert is not just another comedian with barbed punch lines and a racy vocabulary. He is a guerrilla fighter, a master of the old-world art of irony. For Colbert, the punch line is just the addendum. The joke is in the setup. The meat of his act is not in his barbs but his character -- the dry idiot, "Stephen Colbert," God-
fearing pitchman, patriotic American, red-blooded pundit and champion of
"truthiness." "I'm a simple man with a simple mind," the deadpan Colbert announced at the dinner. "I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there."

Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that
no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and
flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the "critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems."

Colbert's jokes attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he
believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."

It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth.

Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery
"détournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers,
books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our "freedom fries," have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the face of the president and some of the press, who, like myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand.

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the
Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing."

So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures
of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

A day after he exploded his bomb at the correspondents dinner, Colbert appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes," this time as himself, an actor, a suburban dad, a man without a red and blue tie. The real Colbert admitted that he does not let his children watch his Comedy Central show. "Kids can't understand irony or sarcasm, and I don't
want them to perceive me as insincere," Colbert explained. "Because one night, I'll be putting them to bed and I'll say ... 'I love you, honey.' And they'll say, 'I get it. Very dry, Dad. That's good stuff.'"

His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing.

Just don't expect him to be invited back to the correspondents dinner.

Momus Bashing MySpace

The problems of political correctness:
"To join MySpace or not to join MySpace...?"

You can read Momus bashing MySpace here. Gee, I guess now I'm supposed to feel guilty about having our own presentation there. Mike Not's and my friend Sakke called MySpace "social ring porn". I suppose it's another fad like iPods now and hula hoops in the 50s.

I don't know about this, then. Face it, the sad fact is that the whole world is these days owned by megacorps and greedy oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch. It has an effect on everything: what you read on papers, see on TV and movies, what you eat and drink, how you spend your leisure time. And so on. Everything bears a corporate stamp in these glowing halcyon days of neoliberalism and market economy. Politicians keep flapping their gums about the virtues of entrepreneurialism and free enterprise, which is a big joke when corporations do their best to swallow the small fry (that is, private entrepreneurs with their own small businesses) in the end, and we are eventually heading for one McDi$neySoft megacorp ruling it all. You can do your best to put your filters on, but mostly there seems to be no running away from that.

Then, could we also see a positive side too here? Sociologists keep talking about New Communalism (as opposed to old-fashioned Communism), which has its various incarnations everywhere where people put their collective efforts together to create something benefitting all, and -- this is important -- not necessarily gaining personal profit out of it: Linux operating system and Wikipedia as some of the most obvious examples. Could it be understood that even corporate-owned communities like MySpace could potentially create similar links to empower people: for example, in MySpace's case connecting private citizens, musicians, artists, fans and so on, in putting them into direct contact with each other, and letting also those voices to be heard that might otherwise be shunned, making people aware of those? Browsing MySpace I've noticed it's far from any homogenous community: everyone seems to have their own little slots there in the sweet spirit of anarchism -- alongside music and arts people already mentioned the whole political and religious spectrum and all possible mainstream and fringe and hobby groups represented from American gung-ho Republicans and Jesus freaks to Greenpeace, gays and Satanists. There are also loads of spoof pages doing nasty parody of people like Murdoch, Bush and their ilk. There's no way to put a lid on or control all that motley crew.

Well, before you get me wrong, I don't want appear as any MySpace apologist (or a Murdoch fan, vade retro!), just trying to weigh both the positive and negative sides here. OK, I know I'm naive. And us with our little Kompleksi duo, we do have our own selfish and opportunistic reasons involved here at the end of the day: to promote our music, which happens by creating contacts and also possible fanbase. Damned if we try, damned if we don't?

Comments:

DJ Orion (in Finnish)

PCL Link Dump

Oh well (blows a raspberry). Why do I get a feeling that people are taking these things far too seriously? We can live with MySpace, we can live without it. For us it's just the icing, it's not the cake.

Arto Salminen: Kalavale

I finally got read the late (and sorely missed) Arto Salminen's last book, Kalavale (2005). Here's a few words about the plot of the book.

Kyösti "Fisu-Hanski" Hannukkala is an old-school entertainer, familiar as a TV comedy veteran (clearly modelled after the late Spede Pasanen). He is also an elderly womaniser who has taken under his wings (and to his bed too) a foul-mouthed, uneducated beauty queen Oona, whose background is in the suburban slums. Oona is disgusted about having to do sexual favours to the considerably older Hanski (who finds out, though, that he can't "rise to the occasion" any more), but hangs out with him in hope of a slice of his fortune gathered together during his career of forty years. Secretly she keeps meeting Jami, a body builder and gym manager into fast cars and women, who peddles as a side business steroids and other illicit chemicals. This rogue gallery is complemented by Fisu-Hanski's right-hand man Kasperi, a slick offspring of an economy school who speaks flashy but ultimately hollow business jargon currently in vogue (the nearest equivalent in real life would probably be someone like Jari Sarasvuo, a Finnish celebrity lecturer, "motivation trainer" and the host of local version of The Apprentice who has has done his best to spread to Finland the gospel of American-type of "inner hero" business philosophies).

Fisu-Hanski is well aware that his days are numbered, both in the entertainment business constantly getting harder, faster and more vicious, and because of his ever-worsening heart condition. He knows it's time for his last stand, but he's not exactly delighted when Kasperi suggests him that they might create together a reality-TV show more ruthless and scandalous than seen ever before.

Called "Auschwitz", the planned TV show would get together twelve unknown people, all long unemployed, as prisoners and guards in a simulated studio prison camp. As we know, so called reality-TV shows, such as Big Brother, are always in fact psychodrama, innuendo and backstabbing-filled public contests about "the survival of the fittest" (read: society in micro-form), and in "Auschwitz" the task of the hapless contestants is to survive the harsh conditions of the "prison camp", their main task being to be able to take as heavy electric shocks as possible when sitting in a specially-built "electric chair"; alongside other continuing physical and mental humiliation, beatings and sexual abuse; all followed by cameras. Hosted by Oona, dressed as an Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS type of cruel dominatrix mistress, "Auschwitz" will fulfill its expectations and more when all evening tabloids and gossip magazines keep eagerly following its day-to-day progress.

The necessary moral outrage is raised and controversy stirred, gaining all the needed notoriety and publicity for the show. At the same time the race is on about who will manage to get their names to Fisu-Hanski's will: his estranged daughter Anna or Kasperi or Oona, all despising each other.

Arto Salminen has, as in all his previous five books, his finger exactly on what's happening in Finnish society today. His prose combines hard-boiled accounts of hard, dreary life with his usual greedy, predatory characters depicted in a biting satire; with often-poetic sentences which he always honed for a long time. Did Arto Salminen see his own early demise with his usual ill-fated characters? Did he feel just too strongly about everything that is wrong with this society, since the worldview of his books seems totally devoid of hope? We can probably speculate endlessly. In the meantime, I sincerely wish his books remain in print for the new generations of future readers who want to capture something of the 1995-2005 Zeitgeist. (And hopefully one day also as translations for non-Finnish readers too.) If there is any future at all, judging by the way things are currently going. The most alarming thing about Salminen's books is that though seemingly intended as satire, with a strong sense of grotesque and black humour, they describe today's reality so accurately.

Arto Salminen @ pHinnWeb

More Dostoevsky, less Wrestlemania!

In the 1970s Finland was mostly a monoculture where everyone pretty much watched the only existing two TV channels, listened to two radio channels of the state-owned Finnish Broadcasting Company (and one channel in Swedish language to boot), read about the same papers and magazines.

In the 1970s Finland there was an express concern about culture and education and a worry about the "mental junk food" of commercial entertainment taking over people's minds. Finnish TV was still heavily regulated by the "Programme Council" (ohjelmaneuvosto) with a special concern over TV violence, and for example, such TV shows as Space: 1999, Starsky & Hutch and Magnum, P.I. were targeted or banned altogether. (Also political concerns were high on ohjelmaneuvosto's agenda: anything that could be interpreted as "anti-Soviet" was to be condemned.)

These sort of patronising attitudes seem to belong to a bygone era now, and I am not longing back for the old days, with their overall heavy political demagogy and bleak black-and-white mental landscapes of the days of "Finlandization", when in comparison Western mass culture seemed more appealing and exciting, but obviously we have turned 360 degrees since those days in what comes to having only one "official" truth dominating general thinking.

In the 80s and 90s the earlier monolithic media hegemony started to crumble when commercial radio stations came along, with new TV channels (TV 3 ca. 1987, Nelonen (Channel 4) in 1997), and the whole yuppie-driven "city culture" (yes, Finns with their forest dweller and agrarian roots took this whole "urbanism" concept seriously).

Paradoxically, in spite of the seeming variety of choices we have these days, there are actually fewer of them with the current commercial overkill of 24/7 entertainment inferno: Hollywood blockbusters, reality TV, American "pro" wrestling (Shakespeare for blue collars?), strictly scheduled Top 40 playlists radio, celebrity cult and so on. The ratings are the king, and mostly anything on TV is viable as long as it sells, obviously. It seems old black-and-white movies or European classic films or most anything coming from outside the Anglo-American cultural area are not part of this scheme. Current radio station programming with their industry-driven playlists epitomises the similar deserting of variety in favour of commerce. Current "freedom of choice" boils down to the crucial question: Coke or Pepsi?

The late Finnish author Arto Salminen notoriously wanted back the "Brezhnevian" era of the 1970s in one of his interviews, with the return to the age of state-controlled protectionism over currently prevailing neoliberalism and worldwide "free trade". This comment was heavily criticised in Finnish media (which leans increasingly towards the right these days, the little pinko devil in me would like to add) where the stagnation of those days still remains in common memory, but perhaps the 1970s -- when the so called high-brow culture was still cultivated -- had some good aspects there too.

Arto Salminen In Memoriam

Finnish author Arto Salminen has died at the age of 46 in his native Hausjärvi. The cause of death was sudden seizure. Salminen was born on 22 November 1959 in Helsinki. He penned six novels which earned him a cult reputation in Finland. Those were Turvapaikka (1995), Varasto (1998), Paskateoria (2001), Ei-kuori (2003), Lahti (2004) and Kalavale (2005). Salminen's books were biting social satires spiced with morbid black humour and ugly characters; criticizing life in modern Finland with its increasingly neo-liberalist politics, the growing power of yellow press, sleazy gossip media and reality-TV. Arto Salminen's death is a serious blow to Finnish literature.

Arto Salminen @ pHinnWeb

Koskipuisto Bulletin Board

An architect working for the City of Tampere criticises on Sunday's Aamulehti the shabby outlook of Tampere's downtown, mentioning among all this public bulletin board of the Koskipuisto Park, where I have been sticking also Eclectro Lounge's posters.

On the other hand, Saturday's free tabloid Tamperelainen tells that a multinational advertising company JCDecaux has a contract with the City of Tampere until the mid-2010s for outdoor advertising. For this deal JCDecaux provides for the City of Tampere its bus stop canopies and their maintenance. Furthermore, as part of this deal, JCDecaux doesn't have to pay rent for its advertisement stands to the City of Tampere. (JCDecaux received some notoriety recently when it stopped the outdoor ad campaign of the animal rights organisation Animalia.)

The tendency here is quite clear: the ads of small underground clubs (with no large advertisement budgets) are an aesthetic nuisance. The glossy underwear and beer ads of JCDecaux, obviously, are not.

Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri (b. 1933) is an Italian philosopher, who has been one of the most proponent members and inspiration for current anti-globalization movement. In the politically charged years of 1960s and 70s Negri was an original member of the Italian movements called Potere Operaio and Autonomia which succeeded it. Antonio Negri was jailed when his writings were claimed to have been inciting the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the Italian Christian Democrat party president Aldo Moro by the terrorist organisation Red Brigades.

The political developments after the "mad year" 1968 had radicalised European youth, and had worked as the platform in forming RAF and Baader-Meinhof groups in Germany, Italian Red Brigades, and also outside Europe, the Japanese Red Army, whose goal was the violent overthrowing of bourgeoisie society by the means of armed terrorism. Instead of the hoped-for revolution, the terrorists' actions only strengthened this society, by giving it an excuse for the police state-like actions and more tightened surveillance of its citizens (in a parallel to what was happening in the United States and the rest of the world post-9/11). This can be compared to body's natural immune system strengthened by the bacterial attacks; thus, terrorists only shot (and will shoot) themselves in the leg.

Antonio Negri left Italy for France to live in exile, living there for 14 years, and returning voluntarily in 1997. After spending some more years in prison, he's now a free man again, even though his public performances and political activities in Italy have been restricted.

Empire (2000), which Negri wrote with Michael Hardt, has already been called the Communist Manifesto for the 21st century, which takes information society into account when taking a look into the development of postmodern/postindustrial capitalist society. As Eric de Place writes, "Hardt and Negri maintain that Empire -- traditionally understood as military or capitalist might -- has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that 'the multitude' will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms".

http://www.antonionegri.com/

Antonio Negri @ Generation Online

The Relevance of Antonio Negri to the Anti-Globalization Movement

"Postmodernisation, or The Informatisation of Production" from Empire

Download Empire for free

pHinnWeb's Conscience Links

Michel Onfray On The Slavery By Economists

These following quoted excerpts (via Voima magazine) are from Michel Onfray's book The Politics of a Rebel. A Study on Resistance and Uncompromising Nature. The English translation from Finnish version by Tapani Kilpeläinen (and all ensuing mistakes) my own.

"In the politics the incurably melancholic are only those who want to keep the rules of the game unchanged: capitalism winning as the unruly, infuriated liberalism. It is to the advantage of them to promote the idea that there is only an enormous global movement we can't disengage ourselves from. Without the spirit of oppositional resistance to the totalitarism of standardized thinking, the economic monotheism and the end of history will soon force one to obey their own laws, thus accomplishing a dictatorship with no equal in history."

So, this is how Michel Onfray writes. I think 'Economism' is the one, only and true religion of our days; the economists being the high priests, and the stock exchanges being the temples of worship. 'Liberalism', the word loved by the economists is nothing but a pernicious oxymoron since the notion of 'liberty' included in that very word means the total opposite of freedom for the great majority -- who work more and earn less to keep the minority of economists and shareholders satisfied. One should think that automation, computers and new technology would decrease people's workload, but in these days of quartal capitalism it seems people (i.e., those 'happy ones' still holding on to their jobs in the age of mass unemployment) have to work longer hours under greater stress to maintain their current living standard, and to meet the demands of this well-greased machinery. Michael Onfray goes on here:

"Technology in itself is not good or evil, but its use dictates whether it's excellent or not. Therefore one has to celebrate and develop all technologies, the novelty of which allows economy, or, prevents the kind of sacrificing of dignity which is allowed under capitalistic means of production."

"The machine should not be submitted only to its owner seeking profit and benefit, but also to the relieving of any tasks and even to reducing the working hours. This preconceives the ethical regulation of mechanization and blind production. Every such victory in ethics would mean the retreat of the devout ideology of the believers in capital."

"Returning enchantment to the world can only happen by ending the religiously celebrated economism which is now understood as the only possible social bond. It is vitally necessary to subordinate the economy to the laws of politics. As long as the contrary situation goes on, only the law of marketplace can win, without there being any counterbalance. Thanatos has been chosen as the protecting god of the unrestrained capitalism. Its shadow and its cross, its fetishistic divinity are to blame for the burnt offering and daily sacrifices made to it."

"To work less, better and in other ways, to separate the income and the workload: one has to strive for economy which is submitted to the people and their liberation, to serve the cause of people reclaiming themselves back to themselves."