This afternoon, I saw Avatar, directed by James Cameron. I saw it at a gigantic multiplex in Greenwood Indiana, in 3D in an IMAX format. I had an excellent seat – sixth row centre. The 3D glasses were large and comfortable.

My point is not to describe my experience of the film, although it is an important part of Avatar, and will play into some of my discussion of the film. I am not a film reviewer, nor am I much of a film theorist, but I feel this film requires my attention and focus for a variety of reasons that will come clear.

First off, people will ask “So what did you think of Avatar?” and “Did you like it?” These two things are not necessarily linked, and what Avatar is and does is very complex, and points directly at a number of critical issues in contemporary civilisation. What struck me on viewing the film, in terms of images, what I saw was a large number of references to films I very much like – and these references were seductive and interesting.

In the Home Tree, I saw the Camphor Tree in My Neighbour Totoro. This is where Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro. Totoro is a wood spirit and lives in the Camphor Tree – the Na’vi live in the Home Tree. The Tree is an ancient symbol of biblical proportions and esoteric meaning.

The general reference to Dances With Wolves is also obvious – a soldier who leaves European ways behind and goes to live with Native Americans. However, I see that actually as relatively uninteresting due to its obviousness, although that theme is something I will come back to.

The planet has floating mountains, which remind me of album covers for the Yes group by Roger Dean – covers like Close to the Edge

Close to the Edge: floating worlds...

and other images by Roger Dean from that period, such as flying dragons – looks a lot like a Banshee, no?:

Jungles floating in the air:

Alien landscapes:

Floating pastoral worlds:

And floating trees and rocks:

I could go on, but now, look at this preliminary concept art from Avatar:

and this still from the film:

and it is pretty clear that Dean’s playful organic fantasy artwork must have had some influence, which is fine by me. Dean is no Da Vinci, but his artwork reminds me of happy times in my adolescence, spent listening to music by Yes with my friends and arguing over the lyrics with precision I can best describe as Jesuitical. It was what teenage fans of ProgRock would often do in the mid 70s… When I was young, the floating jungles and weird landscapes of Dean were a fantasy space I would sometimes imagine myself inhabiting, especially the floating world of Close To The Edge. Seeing this realised in Avatar struck a comforting cord in me.

Another fond memory Avatar brought back with the Floating Mountains was that of Castles in the Sky, by Miyazaki. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki’s work – beautiful, lyrical, gentle and unalterably peculiar.

In these ways, the imaging was something I was immediately comfortable with and inclined to have “good feelings” about; they formed a seductive landscape.

The design of the extended starship in Avatar reminded me of the ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

Silent Running is a story that occurs before Avatar – In Silent Running, the “wild” world has been sent offworld into ships for its own protection. Of course, as soon as it became economically burdensome, the wild world bottled up in these ships is disposed of like so much useless baggage. Avatar talks about how the world the humans come from isn’t green – how it is dead and grey. That would be the world after Silent Running, and like Silent Running, whose name reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both films are warnings about the predations of industrial civilisation. Silent Running shows the imprisonment of the wild world, and its execution at the hands of capital. Avatar shows the pillaging of nature to feed the industrial war machine, as symbolised by the RDA corp. and the military goons it has brought along. In this way, I think Avatar is much more direct and accurate – Silent Running is a despairing work with a poignant ending of doom: a small robot must take care of the last remaining forest. In Avatar, direct action on the part of the Pandorans changes things and even defeats the industrial war machine (IWM).

In Avatar, the industrial war machine is only defeated when two things occur: the Na’Vi collectively band together and take up violent resistance to the IWM, and when knowledge of the Other is communicated and integrated into the world data system of the living Pandora planet. This idea of Pandora as a living planet reminded me of the film Solaris, first by Tarkovsky and then by Soderburg as produced by Cameron – only without the tedious psychology of the films or the book. Communication is a critical point in this film, and it is also important in my view of this film as an object in society.

This brings me to the essential contradiction of Avatar. The film is an extremely expensive, complicated, ultra-high technology story whose very existence is predicated on the industrial extraction and processing of resources that are, for all practical purposes, irreplaceable.  The story it tells is how a society based on such principles is, by even a cursory analysis, inherently evil and self-destructive. Evil, in that it practices direct violence upon those who stand between the IWM and the resources it requires. Self-destructive, as discussed earlier: the planet Earth in the year setting of the film (2154)  is a grey and dying place. Also, the system is logically self-destructive: such systems require continuous exponential growth; growth that is simply impossible on a finite planet in a materially finite universe.

So, here we are faced with a film, a commodity, that points directly at the industrial system that spawned it. It says that collective action can stop the unrelenting madness of the IWM, even as it is a product of the very same system. Just as the Na’Vi will never leave the Home Tree voluntarily, the IWM will no surrender peacefully. The IWM must simply be destroyed, which brings us to some rather interesting conclusions. The film takes place on Pandora. The story of Pandora is well known, so I will simply note that the result of Pandora’s foolishness was that while she unleashed all manner of madness upon the world, we still retain Hope.

Derrick Jensen’s essay in the book The Future of Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. 2007.), titled “Beyond Hope”, he directly attacks the notion of hope in our present circumstances:

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held  among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in mis fortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power ssurely as a belief in some distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more thana secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.

… hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

His is one particular angle on hope, one vision of Pandora. He accurately critiques the common notion of hope, one I frequently hear from students when they say “give me some hope.” Counter to both my students and Jensen, I prefer the idea of hope as articulated by James Howard Kunstler:

“and a lot of time, college kids say ‘can’t you give me some hope?’ Can’t you give me some hope. Well, here’s the deal. I’m not a hope dispenser, OK? You have to generate the hope. It’s got to come from you. And the way you generate it is by proving to yourself that you’re competent people, that you can deal successfully with the circumstances and the changes that reality is sending to you. That you’re successfully negotiating your living arrangement and your reality. And that you’re paying attention to the tasks that need to be done in your society. And you’re not just relying on wishful thinking and waiting to win the lottery, or sitting around thinking you’re going to get something for nothing, or wishing upon a star. People who are generating hope are the people who understand the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.”

I agree with Kunstler more than Jansen, in that Kunstler is re-defining hope for the age we are in, and giving us a process for creating hope. And it is that sense of hope that is demonstrated in Avatar. The Na’Vi band together and DO SOMETHING. Their cause is hopeless – they cannot successfully fight the blitzkrieg of the IWM, and their casualties are huge. The Na’Vi are only saved when the “Cavalry Arrives” in an inversion of the Cowboys and Indians.

Here, the indigenous Na’Vi (the “Indians”) are fighting the Cowboys. Normally, in the Western Genre, the Cowboys are faced by a brutal and implacable enemy in the Indians, and are saved at the last minute by the U.S. Military  – the Cavalry comes to save the day. In Avatar, the cavalry is the biosphere itself coming to the aid of the Indians, and the Cowboys, the IWM, are the implacable and brutal enemy. This inversion is underlined in the casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. She is a human – a member of the invasion force. An Alien. But she is an Alien who cares about those she has invaded, unlike Weaver’s foe in the film, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.), which was an implacable and brutal enemy. In both films she is employed by an interstellar corporation. In both films she is an invader of an alien world. In Alien, we are asked to sympathise with her and her invading team sent there to mine ore. In Avatar, we are asked to sympathise with her as she attempts to help the Na’Vi, while despising her “team”, the RDA corporation who sent them to Pandora to mine ore.

The success of the Na’Vi is predicated on the arrival of the Cavalry – the giant and ferocious animals that are commanded to come to the aid of the Na’Vi by Eywa, the Mother Goddess of the Na’Vi. Eywa was informed of the peril of the situation by Jake Sully in his Avatar form. Dr Augustine’s character had died and her memories absorbed into a kind of spiritual database in the The Tree of Souls. Examining Augustine’s mind and her memories of the devastated Earth and the brutality of the IWM, allowed Eywa to understand how desperate the situation was. The war was won through information that allowed for the  amassing of forces significant enough to repel the invasion.

So what message does this film have for us, today?

1. The destruction of the IWM can only be accomplished through direct action.
2. Key to this is the acquisition of substantial forces, which is accomplished through communication.
3. Hope (Pandora’s gift) is possible, however, it requires an enormous amount of work.

From Kunstler, we understand that it is precisely this work that creates the hope most needed in these desperate times, as civilisation faces the greatest transition and crisis it has ever faced in 10,000 years of indoor living, and humanity faces its greatest challenge to its very survival in 70,000 years.

This leads to the Necessary Contradiction of Avatar, and it is an instance of the Necessary Contradiction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as Avatar is simply an instance of ICT.

Per a Fox spokesman in an article by David Patten, Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million and an estimated $150 million for marketing, for a total of $387 million. To illustrate the size of that sum, For FY 2009, the budget for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was only $155 million. To fund this film, directly out of pocket, every man woman and child in the USA would have to pay $1.27. Obviously, this endeavor is something that American society deems to be of some importance, as it is willing to invest such significant sums in its development. Its development is that of a media commodity, one with significant and rapid profitability potential.

Media commodities exist in a commodity culture – the devices and systems that the media commodity is made on and distributed through are also commodities. These commodities are only possible through industrial production means and methods,and the resources that go into these systems are subject to thermodynamic losses and material dispersion. These systems, as commodities, exist in a system predicated on continuous growth. Any continuous growth operates by exponential mathematics and can be called exponential growth. Exponential growth, as it requires continuous exponential resource acquisition, is simply unsustainable on a finite planet.

In Avatar, the Earth of 2154 was unable to acquire a critical resource, comically named “unobtainium“. It is the exploitation of unobtainium – valued at $20 million a kilo – that has brought RDA corporation to Pandora, and put RDA and the IWM it is part of in opposition to the interests of the Na’Vi.

Science Fiction is often not about any actual future – it is usually a commentary on the present, and Avatar is no exception. As much as it is a classic tale of imperialism, restating the theme of “Dances with Wolves”, given the contemporary crises of peak oil, the impending peak of phosphorus and other critical materials, and the continuing growth of the human population creating a perilous condition of overshoot, films that engage the issues of peak oil, the disaster that is suburbia, the unsustainability of civilisation, or, if the film asks, “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Then we need to look at them differently, as all entertainment (ICT) systems are intimately connected to some of the most rapacious and destructive resource acquisition systems on earth, as well as being directly a creature and critical path creator of contemporary globalist economic systems. It is important to connect entertainment and ICT. Since the digitalisation of culture all such devices require electronic components and computational facilities, and these components and facilities are made from materials all over the globe, and the co-ordination of the production of these materials, their processing, and final manufacture into ICT commodities require the movement of digital data via ICT, we can only see ICT as both creature / creation of the global industrial war machine and its critical path creator, as without ICT, the co-ordination and manufacture of these globalised ICT systems would simply be impossible. As these systems are identical in both nature and function (a computer is a computer is a computer) we can only see our contemporary entertainment networks as creations of the IWM. The linkages between the I and the WM are well detailed by other theorists (viz. Virilio, Hardt, Negri, DeLanda, Jensen, Zerzan, and many others) and I don’t think it necessary to detail that here.

From this, ICT – as a critical path component of the IWM – brings this weight to any content it provides. So, a film, such as Avatar, that is critical of this relation, is then subjected to charges of hypocrisy. I do not agree with such charges. In fact, I stand opposed to such charges, and have put them into what I mentioned earlier: the Necessary Contradiction of ICT. It is not that  ICT embodies this contradiction (which it does, but not my point) as much as that it is necessary that we maintain ICT, even as ICT is such a destructive system to the earth and is part and parcel of the IWM. So, even as we decry the ongoing ecocide, we use ICT to decry the ecocide at the same time ICT is central to the ongoing ecocide.

Now, this is nothing new – above are links to media critical of the IWM, and you are presently reading some.

This leads to other ideas I have about the future of ICT and its relationship to society, but that is beyond this particular writing. All societies communicate with the systems they have at hand. Our system is predicated on the IWM, therefore, our communications are complicit to the actions of the IWM, even if they are inimical to the interests of the IWM. Avatar brings an anti-industrial message in the most advanced industrial method possible: large scale 3D digital cinema. Avatar is a product of the IWM, even as it satirises the IWM. This contestation leads to complex results: Avatar could be seen as Hollywood greenwashing, or the first blockbuster film celebrating the end of Industrial Civilisation, or, and this is very likely true: it is both.

Stuart Hall discussed these negotiated relationships people have with media, but this was largely around issues of content. Now we are faced with a radicalised McLuhanism, where the medium IS the message, and the medium is part and parcel, creature and creator, of the problem itself. Organised Networks rely on the technology developed by the IWM for their existence. At the Internet as Playground And Factory Conference in November 09, Christian Fuchs talked about a communist ICT infastructure. While an admirable goal, I don’t think it is either possible (politically or materially) or likely (due to the exigencies of resource extraction). This is a longer discussion that looks into an inherent weakness in Leftist theory and praxis, but the important point is to get the conversations started.

Avatar, a piece of blockbuster entertainment that brandishes a theme of anti-industrialism, and prescribes violent and bloody opposition to the IWM is, at root, entertainment. A fun story. However, given the crises we face, and the gathering storms of catastrophe on the horizon, its ecological message needs to be amplified and brought into public awareness. We, as a society, must make plans for a very different sort of existence in the next few decades, and use this huge transition as an opportunity to create a better, more humane and caring society. The easy road is one we have seen before in Rome, Central America, and Easter Island, and that road is a very sad and lonely Road. Avatar is deeply flawed in many respects (the reliance on Joseph Campbell formulae, the music was awful, the acting was wooden, and the story was predictable) but it stands in opposition to many other great Science Fiction Films. In 1984, the people are victims. In Blade Runner, the people are victims, even or especially when they’re artificial people. In 2001, Bowman is basically on a big ride – he has little agency. In Alien, we empathise with a crew who went someplace they had no business being. In Slient Running agency proves futile, and the biosphere is left in the hands of a small robot. In the Andromeda Strain, people are just disease vectors and victims. In Stalker, the Room in the Zone is all powerful, and personal agency is used against the agent. In Avatar, the people,as symbolised by the Na’Vi, rise up and smash the invading Industrial War Machine.

That they only succeed through the intercession of a “goddess” brings it to an interesting point, as the “goddess” is actually a material fact – it’s an organic data base held by the biosphere itself. It is the biosphere, the moon of Pandora istelf tht destroys the IWM on Pandora, and it is the biosphere on earth that wil smash the IWM on Earth, as we hit the wall of Peak Everything, and civilisation transitions to its next phase. Luckily we have had the luxury of the Golden Age of petroleum,  and we have seen glimpses of fairness and justice, and we need to preserve these ideas through the transition and build a better society on the other side. It may well prove to be a neolithic society, but the lives lived in it need not be nasty, brutish, and short.

My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

20 JULY 03

Today is a VERY busy day. LOTS of editing to do. Got a note from Dennis Young – wants some more ideas for his CD cover, so I’ll get to that later this week, once I sort out a minor technology situation on my end. Got a lot of editing done last night, lost a bunch of it, but will simply have to re-render it. I’ll probably save that for tonight and re-render the whole thing at once, rather than in bits and pieces and waste my day with it.

Lately I’ve been listening to Kim Cascone’s blackCube( ). It’s very uncompromising sound. Very smart, rather dissonant and distilled. I approve.

Elizabeth had a sleep over at her friend Gabby’s house. There were six little six year olds there. Gabby’s parents get a medal. In honour of the evening, Beth and I did something we *never* get to do: go out for a spicy dinner and watch a movie that isn’t something cooked up by Disney or Pixar.

We went to Guymas in Tiburon. It was very good, and the view of Angel Island and SF is fantastic. I had a seafood mix (squid, octopus, coho salmon, mussels, and an assortment of veggies in some kind of spicy butter sauce) and Beth had skewers of lamb and chicken with various veggies. And Margaritas!!! Yum. We did some window shopping, bought a very nice bottle of Wine (Windsor Merlot, 1999 signature series…oOOoOOoo. We tasted it first – it’s very good) then went on to see a movie: Northfork by Bros. Polish.

It was very good, but not great. I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5. I liked the magical elliptical plot that keeps you dangling and wondering. I loved the idea of the story – that a boy might actually be a de-winged angel, now dying, and soon to accompany other angels who have come to find him. I wondered if the boy was actually the angel of the town that was about to be submerged, and that as the town died so did he; and as the town entered the world of forms in history, so too, the boy ascended to his rightful place as an angel. I liked some of the acting – I thought Darryl Hannah and Nick Nolte were very good. They seemed to care about what they were doing. Some of the performances I thought were a bit flat, but sometimes it was hard to tell, given the exigencies of the characters. The worst part of the movie was the music. It was continuous, obtrusive, and never ending. As soundtrack, it was OK, nothing special in terms of composition, and could have been used very effectively. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. It was used VERY badly, and it bothered me. A lot. However, given the utter shite that normally gets pumped out of Hollywood to dull and distract the masses, this is well worth watching.

We got home, and basically passed out. We slept in till about 8 when the cats wouldn’t let Beth sleep any longer and insisted on being fed. We went out for breakfast – something else we don’t get to do very often. We went to All you Knead, in Haight Ashbury. We stuffed ourselves (their portions are large and very reasonabley priced) and we basically skipped lunch. Elizabeth is now out with her “godmother”, Bree, feeding kitties. Bree said she’d feed E. so Beth and I get a dinner to ourselves tonight… Yippie! I think I’ll cook something spicy… I have some tilapia defrosted in the fridge…

This afternoon, I’ve been editing sections for SEI. Sometimes I look at this and think : I’ll never get this done. Ever. I’m doomed. But then I start working on it, and little by little each shot transforms into a clip, and everything slowly clicks into place. I’ll be up most of the night and for the rest of the week working on this. It’s one of the linch pins of my thesis work.

Saturday, a few more submissions rolled in for the Symposium. Gotta work on that too, this week. Woof.

I also watched the interviews with Brakhage on the retrospective DVD I bought. He’s one of my heroes. That DVD is amazing and wonderful. Truly a remarkable document, and a must have.

Political Statement of the Day: Fuck Ann Coulter and her skanky fascist lunacy. People like her make me wanna clear my throat.

21 JULY 03

Well, the submissions deadline for the San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium has finally passed and I am now BURIED in submissions that all arrived in the past 3 or 4 days. Ug. Some of them look Excellent, some look pretty cool, some are dreck. I am very excited by the prospect of this coming off in Spetember. I need to start focussing on the promotion and getting an audience. I’ve asked about a dozen corporations for money, all have either said no or have simply not responded to my request. Life is tough right now for everybody, I suppose.

Today I do more editing of SEI, and then start exporting clips into Florence. Florence is software I designed that was developed by Peter Nyboer. Florence is my mother’s name. I’m dedicating SEI to her memory.

Any time left over, I will work on Dennis Young’s CD covers. I’ll focus more on that towards the end of the week.

Political Statement of the Day:

There’s a piece circulating the web right now – about Bush’s trip to Senegal was completely insulting to the Senegalese and a bit of a disaster on the ground. It pretty much rakes him over the coals. Some of it is a bit over reactive (like whinging about Bush having his own meals – sorry, but poisoning is too easy, and given the violent evil things Bush has done since his usurpation of power, he’d be a fool NOT to bring his own food along…) but some of it is pretty spot on target about how Bush is basically filth. Pure and simple.

while I find such emailings informative, I also find them irritating, because there’s no DATE on the thing, the author’s name was taken off, so there’s no way to verify the authenticity of the claims made. So: a word to the wise on the left – IF you’re going to pass stuff around like that, INCLUDE the SOURCE and THE DATE. Otherwise, you’re just passing a likely story along. And likely stories, while entertaining, are not useful in building an historical case against the Bush legacy.

2004 can’t come soon enough…

26 JULY 03

Re-edited the trees section of SEI, so I can more easily cross fade between two different camera angles at once, making for a more fluid performance. Right now it’s too choppy and eats up too much keyboard space. Beth and E went to see Sinbad at the movie theatre, and then went to the park. Tonight, I cook up some din din and then tomorrow Beth goes to Texas AGAIN, and with E out of summer camp, I’m basically SCREWED as far as getting any work done is concerned. But I’ll have lots of fun playing with Elizabeth.

Last night I went to SomArts for the Electronic Music Festival.

I missed the first act, but the second show was Bran(…) Pos. He ran his voice through a mic into some processors. EVERYBODY who gets a mic and some processors does this. He’s just very systematic about it. I think the sutff I did in 1992 with processed vocals was intrinsically more interesting. I didn’t find his work that vital.

Next was DISC. DISC is a mix of Matmos and kid606. I found them loud and tedious. A big disapointment. I’ve listened to both Matmos and 606,so I figured this might be really interesting. It wasn’t.

The last act was O.Blaat. The music played was much more interesting than the presentation. There were several lights (incandescent and flourescent) strung about the hall. They would come on at seemingly random times, loosely affiliated with the music. The music was better than DISC, and was really quite interesting until the very end when it got so loud I had to leave. The lights were pointless.

Overall, a mediocre evening. But I ran into Charles K., Pam Z, and Dan J., which was nice – it was good to touch base with them. Afterward, Jef, Mark, and I went to Dylans and hoisted a few.

27 JULY 03

An ongoing conversation I’ve been having with Ian Wallace about Jazz is ongoing, and he was so kind as to reprint some email I sent him in this regard, so he might clarify his position regarding the state of Jazz in our world to myself and others.

Read his online diary thing at:

http://diaries.krimson-news.com/IanWallace.shtml

Ian’s a great guy, and a fantastic drummer who’s way inside all this stuff.

His (and Keeling’s and Reuter’s) diary is one of the highlights of my day.

The present conversation is as follows:

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Sunday, July 27 2003
I got a letter from Henry Warwick relating to my thoughts on the state of jazz and rock. I think he missed the point I was trying to make. So in case anyone else out there felt the same way, I will try to clear it up.

From Henry;

In your latest diary, you wrote:
> So what is jazz now?
> Well to my mind it is now another form of classical music just like the
> symphony orchestras and chamber music ensembles of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
> Brahms, Haydn, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Vaughn Williams, John Williams, Leonard
> Bernstein, Elmer Bernstein, etc., etc.
> So is there anything wrong with that?
> Well no, absolutely not. Just because something is old or played in a certain
> tradition doesn’t make it any less beautiful and moving. In fact, it may
> serve to make it more so, like old wines or an old violin. And that’s what
>Annie does; she plays classic jazz.

Henry responds;

I’m sure Annie is a great singer, and I would never detract from her
efforts, but I must strenuously disagree with your assessment that it is a
new classical music. That is the line taken by Marsalis / Couch / Giddins et
al – that it was something that happened and isn’t happening any more.

HW

Part of my reply was;

Also while I’m writing to you I’d like to say that I think you got the wrong idea in regards to my posting about jazz and rock and the general state of music. This is my fault in the fact that I didn’t make myself clear enough. I love jazz more than any other musical form and continue to believe that it is still being played creatively and soulfully. It’s just that I think that it has gone as far as it can go in form and structure. This to me isn’t a bad thing.

Wonderful classical music still continues to be written and so does jazz. They just allude to the tradition that has been created in the past. Take Wayne Shorter’s last two albums; Footprints Live and Alegria. These are the highest form of playing and composition and creativity, but there’s nothing particularly new in form, harmonics and construction. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. I happen to think it’s a wonderful thing. Annie is the same way, she carries the torch using the tradition of jazz and making it her own.

I certainly don’t think jazz or rock is dead. Far from it.

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To which I can only agree, really, and so the conversation continues…

Today, I drove Beth to the airport. She’s back in Dallas for more SAP training – this came up without much warning. So, now I have to rehearse and pack for Vermont, design Dennis’s CD cover, AND watch Elizabeth all week because E isn’t in summer camp this coming week. I don’t mind being with E this week – it’s just that I have all these other MASSIVE deadlines to deal with, including sending out acceptance letters to people re: the SF Performance Cinema Symposium. I also need to line up news organisations to help promote this event. And keep an eye on her Boo-ness – this isn’t going to be easy.

So – it looks like I have my work cut out for me. Oh – and I have to find a job, ‘cuz I’m broke. Details, details, details.

Also, the bounty of bugs I found in Florence were mostly user error. There are other bugs in it, but they are so peculiar and oddly functional, that I’m actually able to use them, as a kind of glitch aesthetic. Eventually I’ll need them smoothed out, but for now, the errors actually enhance the material. Well, who’d-a-thunk-it?

PS: Listening to Harry Shearer’s Le Show, I heard someone do a parody of a song by the Pheremones. They did a song back in the 80s about “If you ain’t got the DOUGH Ray Meeee folks” which had to do with immigrants coming to America and finding nothing but poverty. The singer of this new version adapted it to California. Clever and kind of funny, but mostly if you live here…. Shearer’s website hasn’t listed the song yet, so I’ll find out who did it later this week. I always liked the Pheremones – I saw them play every Wednesday at the Grog and Tankard in Washington DC.

I wish they’d get some new music together – with the likes of George (sock puppet) Bush blowing thigs up, emptying the treasury, and ruining the planet – and the puppetmaster NeoCons running rampant all along – the world NEEDS Al and Jimmy doing that Pheremone thing.

28 JULY 03

Elizabeth is out with her godmother, Bree, today. Bree is a professional cat sitter / dog walker with her own business, Claws and Paws. She’s great with furry beasties. And E loves going with her to feed the little critturs. Otherwise:

Feeling over worked and bleak.

Came across this in my lyrics collection.

It made me laugh, because it was written by the Pheromones back in 1989. So I thought it might be of some interest.
Goes to show just how little the world has changed… The tune is a modified Irish Reel – sing songy, kind of surgy, and very silly – the arrangement being a guitar, squeezebox and vocals.

Dance with the Young Republicans
by Al and Jimmy Pheromone

Let me tell you all a story about a modern master race
That eats industrial food and raise their kids on atomic waste
They’re as tough as they come and when they’re young
They play with guns and bombs
Disemboweling bad guys with the endorsements of their moms.
In high school they play football to the atonement of their minds
- to the sound of cracking ribs and the splintering of spines.
In college they pay time for their tops to be refined -
Then gathering in hordes to hear the wisdom of Holy George!

And we’ll lift our heads high
And Dance with the Young Republicans
We’ll tighten our neckties
And Dance with the Young Republicans

They’re not great businessmen suited in starchy etiquette
Just passion minded youngsters who look great in leatherette
And sport the latest colour, as long as it isn’t red
They look so natural in khaki pants and a brown shirt instead.
Well I guess the social thinking of the army has a bond -
You’ve got to admit there’s something about a man in uniform.
The best part of this trend is you don’t have to spend
A part of your lives having to serve
When you’re in the fashion reserve!

And we’ll lift our heads high
And Dance with the Young Republicans
We’ll tighten our neckties
And Dance with the Young Republicans

She can drink and smoke and vote and has a place out with the boys
Her goal is to control the things the privileged class enjoys.
And motherhood will follow a career with equal pay,
She doesn’t think her drinking buddies would take it all away.
But the rights that she’s embraced were won by people she’d despise
And opposed by those who top the list of men she’d idolise.
And if she had nothing to lose, I guess I’d understand
She’s just a political reactionary of THE FATHERLAND!

And we’ll lift our heads high
And Dance with the Young Republicans
We’ll tighten our neckties
And Dance with the Young Republicans

And we’ll lift our heads high
And Dance with the Young Republicans
We’ll tighten our neckties
And Dance with the Young Republicans

YO!