THE SHOW SO FAR

Blogging is like crack for ‘otaku.’ I can’t believe how addictive it is. I can see the real danger in being sucked forever down rabbit hole. Seriously though, do you think it could lead to an actual problem? The interactivity is so addictive, i.e the feeling of intellectual control. And the linking. My God- the LINKING! It could absorb every hour of every day. Blogging is the true consummation of Ted Nelson’s 1983 ‘Literary Machine’ concept, i.e. the Xanadu project which you probably remember.
So I guess the question of striking a balance between blog interactivity and wet-ware/meat-ware/biological/human activity is paramount. This is an interesting discussion that would rate another blog, which of course is the problem.

Reminiscent of some kind of 19th century British painting, television presents us over and over with this colonialist, exoticised tableau of downtown Baghdad– a mosque beside a traffic circle festooned with date palms. The landscape is predominantly depopulated and very little happens in it. Occasionally there is smoke, presumably form the cluster bombs. Yesterday an American tank crawled up the traffic circle like some menacing dung beetle. We are drawn to this image because it is live and yet banal – free from the troublesome burdens of information that might make us judge. On the internet, the real time stream of images from this ancient city are juxtaposed with pornography.

I just have to say that blogging totally rules. It is helping me process enormously. I have been tracking the Palestine hotel situation. The BBC images of weeping journalists were heartbreaking. They know that it is open season on the truth. Today was just an opening salvo. The ‘new normal’ is extending its pervasive logic and what would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago, is now banal. ‘Shock and awe’ affects intellectuals disproportionately. It is too easy to give up. By coincidence, Ruth (with a streaming cold) was at the BBC nyc office giving an interview today. She said all hell was breaking loose re; the journalists who’d been killed etc.
Which brings me to my point, which is the kind of conundrum of the present historical moment and the ‘imagined unimaginable.’ I suppose the secret to successful sanity is to find a balance between critiquing the ongoing atrocity image stream and finding meaningful engagement in the local ‘real’ without retreating from the very necessary role of ‘witness.’ I have always had an on again/off again love affair with virtuality. It is at once beguiling as well as alienating. The map is not the territory and we do an awful lot of critiquing of maps. Television is the ultimate map. You probably remember the Herman Hesse novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’ which was all the rage when we were in high school. In it, the best minds were engaged in pushing beads around a board while the rest went to hell in a handbasket. (At least that is how I remember the text which is really all that matters) This hunger for the real is what took me away from the rarified milieu of conceptual art (which is basically a kind of ‘secret handshake’) into the realm of activism and urban agriculture. Growing food and bioremediating land provided me with the opportunity to act directly on my critique of contemporary (Late) Capitalism, which had previously threatened to disable me. Having this outlet makes the virtual less oppressive because I realize that I can ameliorate the local in a direct and real way. Oddly, this has brought me back into conceptual art by going kind of full circle. Passivity is a very destructive force.

I’m jacked into BBC World on the dish. I can’t drag myself away. It’s kind of an extended play version of ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. I am watching American armoured personel carriers crawling up the banks of the Tigris, the ancient lifeline of Mesoptoania. The venerable date palms are covered in dust and oil and black clad Iraqis are stripping to their underwear and getting blown to pieces by unseen aircraft. Other people seem to be commuting to work in their cars, a few hundred metres from the battle fields. Who knows what is out of the camera frame? Yesterday at about 2 in the morning there was a BBC report from behind a camera lens smeared in the camera man’s blood from a location in which Americans bombed themselves in Northern Iraq.
We should all re-read Karl ( Marx.) My minimal knowledge of Marx is mostly due to the influence of my McLuhanesque suburban Toronto high school, where in addition to doing away with walls, we studied revolutionary history from the French Revolution to Ho Chi Min. It was of course the 70’s. Only lately have I begun to value of this educational opportunity, which I had long taken for granted. I remember some enlightened history teacher organizing a bus trip for us to Madame Tussaud’s Wax museum in Niagara Falls to study the Chamber of Horrors, as a kind of pedagogical trope for world history. I remember visibly the drawing and quartering, the scalping, the flaying and the beheading. We got it, I think.
In social studies, we travelled to TV stations to watched banal afternoon game shows being filmed. I remember one chat show called ‘Party Game’, where a bunch of polyester-clad third tier celebrities yucked it up in an inebriated game of charades. They were so drunk, they could barely stand up to say, “sounds like . . . . BUNT.” It was around 11:00 am in Hamilton Ontario, ‘STEELTOWN.” As a souveneir, I was given a 16 mm film clip of a ‘Cool Whip’ commercial, which became one of my prize possessions, taped to my basement bedroom window the afternoon light shining through the Ektachrome cells. It was a good introduction to Eisenstein’s theory of montage..
More soon. . . .
(More) I am simultaneously, sickened, mesmerized and angry as I continue to watch the war unfold. Susan Sonntag wrote a good essay about the power of images to overwhelm us and make us passive. The quintessential modern experience is to watch atrocities being committed in real time, in the other half of the world. (Baudrillard) (His ‘l’esprit du terrorisme’ is a must read)

You have been very reassuring.
I’ve been a bit catatonic lately, not quite knowing how to deal with the horrific nature of world events. I am told that in America, many intellectuals are no longer talking about the war. This is deeply troubling. This is what my parents told me happened in Germany during the ascent of Hitler. The bourgeoisie and intelligensia are often the first to pull in their horns. It is up to the ‘lumpen’ intelligensia to pick up the psychic slack. Aboard the ferry this morning, I watched a pod of Orcas playing in the boiling, gun metal gray sea off Marina Island. Their purposeful recreations cheered me up despite the fact that this population is threatened with extinction. In Japan, the carp always is said to strive mightily to achieve its goal. The orca, being a mammal, revels in distraction. Maybe it’s the consequence of a ‘big brain” and a ‘short life’, (cf. Vonnegut) That’s our problem in a nutshell.

war rages, a testament to the consilidation of power by the dark empire of neo-conservatism The days of enlightened public sector investment into things that really matter are probably gone forever, so much road kill, rapidly receding into the rearview mirror of a speeding yellow Humvee, like the Indians, the buffalo and the tall green grass that have gone before it. One can only hope that within this emerging ocean of banality, there will remain a few scattered islands of progressive dissent.

There was a paleontologist on the radio today who spoke of the feathered dinosaur fossils that they keep finding in China. It turns out that dinosaurs are much more closely related to birds than they are to crocodiles and lizards. They never really went extinct. Only the big ones did. They are in fact all around us. Avian intelligence is something quite cold yet equal and in many cases superior to mammalian intelligence. It is much older and more calculating, yet capable of supreme abstraction. It survived the evolutionary palimpsest and prospered. There are far more extant species of bird than there are of mammal.
I have seen ravens up here in the Pacific northwest, collaborate in hunting. One will distract a dog and the other will come in and take its food. My roosters frequently feint finding food to entice hens in close enough proximity that they can jump on top of them and mate. It’s kind of a Mesozoic form of date rape. James Blish, in Midsummer Century imagines what would have happened if birds had gained pre-eminence over mammals on a parallel earth and formed the dominant culture. Hitchcock of course imagined this as well. They are out there waiting. We don’t really understand them, but many of our cosmologies imagine us turning into them when we transform into the next level. What are angels if not hybrid bird men? Radio bird men- way up high. They evoke our deep desire to become more avian- more evolved. Tibetan sky burials return our flayed bodies to the sky via the vector of the Lammergier who soars above the stony plateaux, dropping our bones from dizzying heights to crack them for their sweet freight of marrow. What could be better?

I’m still wrapping my head around blogging. I’ll have to just start. I was planting Japanese green onion starts today and remembered the little twitches that started emerging in Doubleyuh’s face, shortly after 9-11, followed by an odd and sudden increase in the coherence of his speaking. Also, you probably remember the bandaid on his chin a couple of days around 9-11. He was supposed to have cut himself shaving. That was the implant site. The human jaw is a pretty good resonating transducer for minute electrical impulses. Many folks have experienced picking up some annoying AM radio signals via the capacitance caused by fillings in their teeth bathed in the weak saline solution of their saliva. The KGB used to use wooden spikes as undetectable bugs, to pick up audio from distant rooms. Doubleyuh became a very effective ventriloquist’s dummy after 9-11, via his jaw implant. His new, measured speaking patterns incorporated delays to download what he was to say next. It was kind of like talking on a satellite phone. At first it was obvious, but now he has internalized the timing a bit better. The ultimate ventriloquist’s dummy. Our pal Phillip Dick often imagined such things. Have you read “The Simulacra?” Tony Blair is also showing some cracks. He is definitely losing it and I am sure something very horrible is happening to him. It is probably torture or the threat of such. He has developed the giddiness of someone who is threatened on a daily basis.
Anyway, the “tracking banality with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter” quote is from Chris Marker, Chreees MarKHER, ( French) who is the closest I can think of to a Blog filmmaker. He used this line in his 198(3?) film Sans Soleil.

I’m thinking I might have to go down the blog road. I’ve been trying to correlate disparate elements in my fevered little mind, such as an exceptional treatise on relic Paleozoic, living fossil, forests in Western China (home of my favorite tree, “Dawn redwood”-metasequoia glyptostroboides (metasequoia ), which apparently used to grow in the Canadian arctic during the periglacial hotspell and learned to lose their needles in the long but warm arctic night, now living only in a remote valley in Hupeh province, (I’ve been planting them everywhere) with the rise of “Science” based music such as GRANDADDY and the FLAMING LIPS. I sense a deep nostalgia for the language of science as we understood it in “the space age” without the tyranny of the corporatism that has so taken it over. In a way, we may be living through science’s last gasp. We’re starting to no longer trust it. It again points to diminished faith in the ‘general model’ and the appreciation of the need for empiricism and criticality. Perhaps this is the high baroque of post modernism.
Anyway, this is what keeps me awake at night, in addition to, of course, the unsettling perception that we are about to consumate many of our planet’s collective Armageddon cosmologies in the Persian Gulf.