Not only...

coincidentally I saw this seconds after posting about M & M's. It is the funniest hting I'm likely to see today.

Gay sweets

When I've been watching Big Brother they've been playing this advert featuring two sweets (ok, they're M & Ms). At the end, when the yellow M does something stupid the red M says "Why am I with You?!" or words to that effect. M & M's are gay apparently. Just goes to show what happens when you anthropomorphosise sweets:- you've got to have a whole back story and consider their sexuality. This picture of red M checking out yellow M's butt backs up the this statement

and doesn't he look impressed by it? Maybe this was the moment he decided that this was the one...

Big Bro on Speed

One thing I have been noticing is the quick cuts between shots in the live show. On previous series there have been long lingering shots of people, conversations, sleeping, which, it must be said, are still there, however now, rather than being intercut with long lingering shots of an empty garden or chickens, they are intercut with close-ups of furniture, different pieces of furniture, cutting at quite a rate.

Why this change?

You're not telling me that after 7 series they've finally realised it's dull watching an empty garden? There must be some, more sinister, other motive.

A sighting

Just saw this on Defamer:

Saw Avril Lavigne and a bunch of band-member-looking types waiting for valet outside Geisha House Thursday night (5/24). She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, short skirt, and too much eyeliner, for those who care. I was walking my dog and she ran up to pet it, then jokingly/not-jokingly accused me of buying him to pick up girls. (Couldn't really argue since I was walking a five-month-old puppy past a night club at 10:30 at night.) No sign of Deryck.

Thought it was cool. That's it.

Big Brother 8 Launch

Initial thoughts on the Big Brother contestants are like 'the usual bunch of people desperate for fame and the odd person who just doesn't fit in.' A huge risk by the producers...

A former candidate for Respect? Get some respect man!

Emily who said something about being a fan of that new fangled 'indie music' (a joke?) who was so obviously a conservative before Davina announced it (so strange has that become apparently) and who also claimed to be an intelligent woman against the usual big brother contestant. (Wanting to be on Big Brother is surely a sign of idiocy? Am I wrong?)

Lots of people who fix their identity by saying how they look like some famous person, and of course Chantel who took it that stage further by being quite literally obsessed by Victoria Beckham, but who still came across as one of the better housemates.

They want to get one premiership footballer in their and see centuries of feminism go out of the window (they've done racism already).

HAVE IT!

Nicky and Laura being the two obvious candidates for early favourites to win it. Just checked the odds and Carole and Laura early front runners, with Tracey, Emily and Nicky coming up the outside (any-other-not-in-there-yet-housemate-odds-on-favourite). Get yr money on Nicky while she's still out there I say.

Lots of obsession with where the boys are. Get over it, move on, live your lives!

Tony Blair is a bit of a pussy

First Global Peace Index Ranks 121 Countries

The United States makes 96/121 (1 being most peaceful) the UK comes in a measly 49/121.

And I thought Tony Blair was willing to take the tough decisions and commit our troops etc. etc.

Thank God he's off, Gordon so has that look of the hard man...

We're All Heroes Now

Just read this interesting article (probably have to go through some sort of advert deal to get to it, sorry):

"Heroes" was the most-watched new show on network television this year despite its demanding plot lines and stretches of subtitled Japanese. Its season finale, which aired May 21, dominated the 9 p.m. time slot. What explains the show's popularity, especially with younger viewers? I think it is that, like the Fox thriller "24," "Heroes" is a response to Sept. 11 and the rise of international terrorism. But while "24" skews to the right politically, "Heroes" seems like a left-wing response to those events. In fact, it functions as a thoughtful critique of Vice President Dick Cheney's doctrine on counterterrorism.

The whole article makes some interesting points. A couple of things to add: The episode 'Five Years Gone' shows the 'Dick Cheney' reaction to the fall out of the explosion and it is of course an exaggeration of the actual Bush Administration reaction to 9/11 (in the show this is shown leading to genocide). Wouldn't it have been more adventurous to simply stick to the way the Bush administration has already undermined freedom? In the show the problem has become universal (ie. the stigma of being branded a potential terrorist is not on any one race/ religion, but applies to everyone: we are all (potential) terrorists now), consequently it would have been a more radical critique to stick to the script of Bush/Cheney in this new, universal situation.

It would have also been interesting to play up the significance of the 'camp of wealthy and powerful figures, clearly on the political right'. While they are definitely an integral part of the show and also shown to be hugely influential in the attempt to elect Nathan Petrelli, isn't the use of Micah to rig the election an eventual cop-out? The money is not in itself enough to swing the election, the powers of the Heroes must be used. Of course here there is probably a nod to the Bush victory of 2000, but even that must seen as a distraction from the real conspiracy of money in American (and elsewhere's) politics.

The other point to make is that the problem with American liberalism is demonstrated in very pure form in the show: the fact that the world is complicated makes the liberal prone to inaction. This is something that the right has always known, that action is necessary. It was certainly inherent in that other TV bastion of liberal values The West Wing – the world is complicated so action can never be justified from every moral angle – there is always grey. The right is prepared to take the action it deems necessary, the left dithers. We see this in Heroes where it is precisely the figurehead of the cabal of right wingers, Nathan, who must come in to save the day. In the article this is seen as 'apparently conveying the Gandhian message that compassion and brotherly self-sacrifice are more effective in preventing terrorism than naked ambition and hard-line tactics.' But is it? Isn't it more that in the name of its values of compassion the left must take a lesson from the right and take the risk of acting?

Britney('s) rocks

Have you seen this cool ring that Britney was seen wearing. And have you seen the sanctimonious reaction to it? (I'm not linking to any of it, you can surely imagine, or look for it if you desire)

Big Brother 8

I just turned on my computer to write a post about Big Brother 8 starting tomorrow (I've stopped smoking so i'm looking for distraction if you must know, hence the three lengthy posts today with the possibility of a fourth depending...) and I was checking out news stories before writing, as you do, when I came across this story. Now, it's not so much the general stupidity of the story, the thought that a team of police officers is actually watching big brother (though of course the whole premise of modern policing is to place cameras to cover every inch of this great nation, so i suppose we shouldn't be too surprised). No, it's the more specific stupidity in this sentence:

A police source said: "No hint of that [racism] will be tolerated. If necessary, we'll visit the studio to apprehend housemates."

Why is it a 'police source'? Would he only say this (which amounts to, 'If there's a crime we'll consider talking action.' Quite controversial words from a policeman I'm sure you'll agree) on guarantee of anonymity? What an idiot.

So to the post that I was actually going to write.

I always look forward to Big Brother. It is the highlight of my television year. I have never been able to watch Celebrity Big Brother, for some reason (which I'll elaborate on) it seems like an entirely different show, so I only get one fix per year. I don't do other 'reality' shows either for reasons which...

The beauty of Big Brother has, to me, always been its lack of plot. Let me clarify my meaning by referring to other shows – I'm A Celebrity etc. (i'll be honest, not watching them I'm not too sure what shows to include, but my point still holds)- these shows all include an amount of plotting, the following of a pop star dream, the need to survive in strange conditions, whatever. Big Brother is (or at least should be as far as I'm concerned) simply a matter of people living in a house for x days. Which isn't to say that there is no plot, just no enforced plot. Given the possibility of watching 24 hours a day, the narrative is completely open. When a housemate is just sat one can read anything into the face(this aspect reminds me of certain Italian neorealist films just pausing the camera on faces for maybe a beat too long, a beat that gives you time for contemplation outside of the director's instruction), one can chose your own narrative from all the ones swimming around. This being what the programme makers have to do obviously, and I'm not claiming some sort of democratic utopia where the viewer is the only editor. I am claiming that interesting things can be thrown up outside of the editors boundaries, which can then 'infect' one's viewing of the 'highlights'. I'm not even going to claim that this is subversive in any way, being as it is a necessary part of the thinking behind the programme and as such already accounted for. I am claiming that it makes it interesting as narrative laid bare. The way that nothing can escape the logic of narrative.

This pure version of Big Brother is as every series passes more and more of a myth. The first one I watched (2) was pretty much as I have described it, but since then they've been going more and more to attempting to properly narrativise the show, bring it under control (maybe it was subversive after all?) with tasks and mini tasks and secret tasks and rooms etc. But even then there is always aspects which escape this control, things get out of hand, or, more often than not (and it is this which people seem to forget in the rush to tabloid fueled disgust) things stay under control, despite the best efforts of the producers.

So i'm looking forward to Big Brother 8. I'm hoping the whole racism row form celebrity Big Brother doesn't overshadow the show (though obviously this is another narrative that will infect the show unintentionally, everything will be read in the light of this, by us and by the housemates, things that would otherwise have been meaningless...), especially as I didn't watch it (and I note in passing that s'far as I can tell the careers of Jade and Danielle don't seem to have exactly suffered as the general consensus of papers and magazines had it at the time (the same papers and magazines which still publish shit about them)).

Fall To Pieces: Avril Lavigne and the Mirror Stage Part 2

The disintegration we are talking about is of a different order to a, let us say, ‘ordinary’ breakdown. This is made clear in the chorus, where we have the desire to not fall to pieces, but alongside this we also have, ‘I just want to cry in front of you’. The falling to pieces is not physical, or is not manifested as physical, which is to say that it is to prevent, rather than as a sign of, a ‘falling to pieces’ that we have a physical ‘falling to pieces’. To put this another way: it is not a disintegration of self which is caused by the presence of an other, but a disintegration of self which can only be staved off by an other, but which, at the same time, is sustained in the other. A point that is explicitly referred to in the change from the first verse, in which he is the cause of the problem, to the second verse, where he becomes the solution (‘When I come undone/ You bring me back again’)

The relationship between the self and the other is, as we have already referred to, initially formed by the mirror stage, and is further cemented by ‘the moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end [which] inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy …, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations' (Lacan). The importance of the mirror stage in this linkage is elaborated upon in Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis:

It is this captation by the imago of the human form … which, between the ages of six months and two and a half years, dominates the entire dialectic of the child’s behaviour in the presence of his similars

Which is to say that the mirror stage is the basis for interaction with the other: ‘The child who strikes another says that he has been struck; the child who sees another fall cries'. This is not the result of Einfühlung, empathy, but the result of the formation of the ego as other in the mirror stage, ‘the deflection of the specular I into the social I’.

What I would like to suggest is that the coming together of Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” creates a short circuit which results in a disintegration. The knowledge that one has become “Avril Lavigne”, puts into question the very possibility of being Avril Lavigne; it is so easy to construct a new version of the self that the old self shatters at the knowledge of its own construction. The illusion of wholeness is shown to be precisely that. Leaving Avril to appeal to the very Other that is destroying her for her salvation - for there is no other.¹

‘The world is symmetrical to the subject - the world of what I last time called thought is the equivalent, the mirror image of thought’ (Lacan). The Other doesn’t exist. As we pointed out earlier, ‘the creation of the subject, this (illusory) mastery of the ego, also creates the universe qua organized totality’, I.e. creates the Other. This Other, this discourse - the unified world - is also under threat of disintegration. Lacan suggests that even the Revolutionary craves a centre, and this as such must limit the revolutionary: ‘A certain number of biases are your daily fare and limit the import of your insurrections to the shortest term, to the term, quite precisely, that gives you no discomfort - they certainly don’t change your world view, for that remains perfectly spherical’. We can see that alongside the disintegration of the self, the self as centre, we have another operation, that of the disintegration of the Other as centering. What I am suggesting here is that Avril Lavigne, in her attempt to create a new aesthetic space is more ‘radical’ than other, more explicitly political performers, ‘those who are so utterly compliant with the expected behaviour that they can even simulate the signs of resistance spontaneously precisely because they no longer feel such resistance in themselves’ (Adorno). What the use of the mirror stage demonstrates is that the two levels of disintegration are inseparable - they mirror each other. In another mirroring we can say that, as Lacan argues in The Mirror Stage - that the subject is caught between a wholeness that never existed and a wholeness which shall never exist - so Avril Lavigne is caught between an “Avril” who shall never exist and an Avril that never existed. In yet another mirroring, we find in the song ‘Sk8er Boi’ the inversion of ‘Fall To Pieces’, which is to say that ‘Sk8er Boi’ approaches the disintegration from the point of view of “Avril”. Here the disintegration is shown in the fragmentation of Avril between the three characters of the song, rather than in the actual lyrics which, as might be expected from the “Avril” side, are ‘whole’, they offer no sign of fragmentation (We could also imagine a song, not yet written (and given the third album perhaps never to be written), from the Avril side, a song which would also display no fragmentation, but which would display Adorno’s simulated ‘signs of resistance’ rather than the pleasure in celebrity of ‘Sk8er Boi’).

What we should see here is that “Avril” is actually responsible for the creation of Avril - meaning is retroactively created: ‘it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events’ (Žižek 1992:69). (Interesting in this regard is the appearance of ‘Sk8er Boi’ before the appearance of ‘Fall to Pieces’, and both before our hypothetical Avril song) Without “Avril” Avril remains meaningless, and with this we are in the realm of what Alain Badiou terms the ‘event’. The event is the emergence of truth. For Badiou truth is not knowledge, truth is always new and opposed to knowledge as repetition - what already is. ‘A truth thus appears, in its newness, because an evental supplement interrupts repetition’. For our purposes the important thing is that the event creates a subject of the event - ‘…a subject is what fixes an undecidable event, because he or she takes the chance of deciding upon it’. In our example it can be seen that the subject (Avril) comes about because of the decision to create “Avril”; if Avril had accepted that position as her own she would never have been at all. It should be noted that this reading seemingly works against what Badiou has to say about the subject in art:

It’s imperative for us to say that the subject in artistic creation is not the artist as such. … The subjective existence of art are the works of art. … The artist is the sacrificial part of art. It’s also, finally, what disappears in art. And the ethic of art is to accept the disappearance (2004b:109).

While this is a topic which must be dealt with in more detail elsewhere, here I shall just argue that the situation for Avril Lavigne is more complicated than this. For instance, it is arguable that the very desire of Avril is for a disappearance of “Avril”, which is to say, that as Avril is looking for space within the arena of consumer-capitalism, rather than attempting to attack this from outside - from some (mythical) position of Art, the whole idea of the disappearance (or otherwise) of the artist as subject is that which must be worked out within the space, i.e. in the open.

What Avril‘s songs represent is what Badiou terms ‘fidelity to an event’: ‘This decision [of the subject] opens up the infinite procedure of verification of the true … Such a procedure is an exercise of fidelity’. This is what we see in the insistence of all of Avril’s songs on honesty and integrity - an honesty which is impossible - and with this we have Love. ‘What makes up for (supplée au) the sexual relationship [qua nonexistent] is, quite precisely, love’ (Lacan 1999:45). In Avril Lavigne’s songs the idea of honesty bridges the orders of the personal [love], the aesthetic, and the political. Love and Art both aim for (impossible) honesty.

There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate - perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other, I would say. Isn’t it on the basis of the confrontation with this impasse, with this impossibility by which a real is defined, that love is put to the test? Regarding one’s partner, love can only actualize what … I called courage - courage with regard to this fatal destiny. (144)

Is it not this ‘fatal destiny’ which Avril confronts in the aesthetic, the personal and the political?² Consequently her belief in honesty is not some illusory shoring up of the ego, some ideological defence, but a faithfulness to her desire. Her act of vacillation between art and advert, Avril and “Avril” is an act of love: ‘love is the work of love - the hard and arduous work of repeated “uncoupling” in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into’ (Žižek).

Faithfulness to her desire? The Best Damn Thing? We shall see, in part three.

1 Note in this connection the song ‘How Does it Feel’ with its chorus of ‘How does it feel to be/ Different from me/ Are we the same’.

2 Here we must again recognise the influence of Alain Badiou and his four truth procedures (art, science, politics and love) with the caveat that Badiou suggests that ‘artistic truth is different from scientific truth, from political truth, from other sorts of truth’.

The All Tomorrow's Parties Post

Day One

The Journey

Six hours sitting in a car (with a brief stop for a stretch and some scran about half way). This six hour journey involves pretty much 3 roads, motorways are a beautiful thing. I am self appointed navigator (because the navigator gets to sit in the lap of luxury that is the front seat , and gets to be the DJ (CD changer) which is an added bonus) and after a bad start while the driver and I have a dispute over the meaning of “left” and “right”, everything goes well (what could go badly in a three road journey?). We arrive in good time having listened to some quality tunes and sucked on some really fruity sweets.

The place

We go first to the wrong room, but these Butlins women let us in anyway and it's only after we've pondered on how the four of us are going to sleep in the one double bed on show that we contemplate the fact that we are in the wrong room.

We find the right room.

Drop off our stuff and it's off to the main bit to watch some bands.

Bands

It starts off inauspiciously with The Thermals, who are ok but lack a certain edge, we only catch maybe the last half of their set then it's off to check out the scene. First impressions are, as expected, downbeat. We're so used to Camber Sands. The main stage especially seems a touch soulless. The upstairs stage feels right though, somehow. The downstairs Reds isn't open yet, first impressions will have to wait.

We take in Daniel Johnston from the bar. He seems ok, I'm not a fan of that whole thing, but stood at the bar, getting used to the festival prices, he makes it feel alright.

Go down to the main stage for the beginning of Yo La Tengo. No matter how many people tell me they're brilliant I don't really see it. I've tried (at least twice) to listen to some Yo La Tengo, but they leave me feeling ... nothing. And I think it's the same tonight. For one minute it almost clicks, when they begin to rock out it almost feels right, but then they come down and the feeling goes before it's fully there. Maybe the daylight big stage ruins it, but shouldn't a band be able to transcend the surroundings? There's a big enough crowd so maybe it's me that's wrong. Must try harder.

The Notwist (is that no-twist or not-wist?) are truly amazing. The first proper ATP experience of the weekend, a band I have heard nothing of before blowing the mind. Neu Order anyone? Not that they really sound like either but it drifts in and out like a trace of collective cultural memory, they remain essentially other while
all the time being only themselves.

Decision time: Mogwai or Sparklehorse. Mogwai were apparently mind-blowing so maybe I chose wrong, catching Sparklehorse then the last ten minutes of Mogwai (who did sound like the bomb), but Sparklehorse were pretty good. Simple but effective, stripped down, engaging, moving. Lacking a killer spark perhaps, but i'll be definitely checking some more of their stuff out.

Alexander Tucker with his layers of looped sound I didn't altogether take to: good for a taste but I couldn't eat a full one. Though he did raise several questions about presence and mastery: the masturbatory pleasure of the great artist vs the anonymous pleasure of great music. He seemed to be on both sides at the same time. The craft and the guitar heroics vs the loops and wordless singing.

Saw a little of the Akron Family but remember nothing: that good. Ditto Death Vessel. Subtitle seemed to have put together a show in ten minutes but couldn't work out whether this was a defensive strategy in case we didn't like him or whether he had really cobbled together a show from scraps of music off of his laptop. He was OK. Dudes seemed to like him.

And that was the bands (think I might have seen some of Tall Firs but not exactly sure. Can't have made an impression.

Did I mention I was drinking copiously?)

Back to the room. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld to come down to.

Day Two

Not the greatest night's sleep.

We hit the beach. The beach always seems like a great idea but when I get there I'm always left thinking, wow (in a sarcastic way, obviously). Guess i'm not much of a beach person. Hit the arcades. Back to the resort for Shellac and the Cup Final.

Shellac are delayed by an hour (due apparently to Wilco taking far too long over their soundcheck, which as the dude introducing Isis on Sunday says, “is a soundcheck, not a quality check”) so I miss them, which is always a disappointment, even if they're on again tomorrow. The FA Cup Final is the low point of the afternoon, stood and watched it in the pub next to two Londoners. Say no more. Please.

Catch the end of The Go! Team. Again the bigness of the stage seems to detract a little, and the lightness doesn't help, they seem to suit a smaller area. They had energy though, the new songs sounded ... like ... The Go! Team. Which I guess isn't such a bad thing but...

Lots of pizza in generic pizza chain.

Ghost. I'm a big fan of Ghost so was ready to be astounded. And I wasn't disappointed. With the band anyway. It was disappointing that so few people turned out for them. Guess they were against Battles on the upstairs stage. Battle were apparently kick ass, sorry I missed them, but decisions had to made.

Anyway. The only complaint I had with Ghost was that they rocked just a little tooo much; except for the first song they did there was just no prog. The problem with these short sets: there's just no time to build anything.

Everyone was saying how great Cornelius were, and i was there in body but my mind was drifting in and out of consciousness so i'm not too sure. They seemed to be pretty good, but that might just have been my dreams – regardless, the soundtrack to my dreams was cool, whoever provided it.

Saw brief snippets of Apples in Stereo. Brief because they were shite. How I hate that type of chirpy rock.

The Books weren't too bad, nice projections, interesting music, but perhaps too cerebral.

Trans Am were quality. At one point one of them ate a hotdog while continuing to play – clever comment on the performer as shaman or disregard for the fans? Discuss.

65 Days of Static were adequate but couldn't survive to the end of their set. Back to the joys of Curb/Seinfeld.

Day three

It's a mistake playing football first thing in the morning. Still dehydrated and after about ten minutes of demonstrating my awesome skills my head feels like it may detach and become another Sun. I slow down. I promise myself I will drink more water today.

Shellac first band of the day and they are superb (as always). Todd gets pissed at some guy heckling, much hilarity ensues. These. Guys. Rock.

Slint complain about having to play on the main stage in the daylight. They still cut it though. They have a very cool way of just wandering on and off the stage when they are not required for that song. Maybe the experience would have been better (more) indoors and in darkness, but they are still one of the weekend's highlights.

Architecture In Helsinki? I don't get them. They kinda have the feel of some zany Australian movie which gets loads of critical praise but when you see it you end up thinking – that was too zany, it just tried too hard. Too much thrown at the canvas hoping something will stick. It doesn't.

Band of Horses surprised me by how good they were. The album had never struck a chord with me, 'The Funeral' was a song that made hairs stick up on the back of my neck (as it does again tonight), but the rest of the album (bar 'The Great Salt Lake' as well to be fair), take it or leave it. But tonight the songs sounds somehow meatier, they pack a punch which, now i've revisited the album, they apparently did all along as it turns out. One complaint - ending on a new song and playing 'The Funeral midway through the set: perverse?

Isis KICKED YOUR ARSE (and mine). The set was just too short though (a quibble: why did Grizzly Bear and Isis only get 45 minute sets whereas Built To Spill got 75 minutes? Share the love), they needn't more time to fully blow my mind. They only blew half of it.

Chose Echo and The Bunnymen over Built To Spill. Approached them with trepidation but they were pretty good. Or at least half of their set was. Half the time they sounded sublime geniuses, the other half they sounded like every other lame ass scouse band that ever played crappy guitar shit. But maybe the sublime just about outweighed the shite. It was a great chainsmoking performance as well. And some unintelligable scouse banter added to the feeling that we were witnessing a fluke.

Capricorns also KICKED YOUR ARSE (but not mine). They rocked but lacked a certain something, a certain sparkle, a certain magic. Enjoyable though.

Grizzly Bear were brilliant. Music for lovers I would have said. I was surrounded by couples snuggling into each other and looking into each others' eyes swaying to the sounds. Except one couple were having a huge argument and the guy was trying to demand the girl follow him out of the gig. She was having none of it. I think, I lost sight of her and know not how the story ends. And another couple stood right in front of me and talked throughout the entire set. Sod lovers I then decided. This was music for sunsoaked days (and they did play a set on the beach, which I missed. Goddamnit. Thankyou Youtube):

This was music to fall in love to, fall in love but briefly, love at first and only sight, the type of love you get on train journeys and the pretty girl you've been flirting with gets off the train and the last glance out of the window as the train pulls away... music to fall in and out of love to.

And that was that. No curb/seinfeld tonight. Catch the last hour or so of Requim For A Dream. A rather downbeat way to end the festival.

A Train Wreck

I think my life would be a better place had I never seen this video.

The ATP post is coming soon.

Why the World is Wrong

The royal mail advertises the new Harry Potter book

On July 17 Royal Mail will issue a series of seven stamps depicting the colourful covers of each of the books in JK Rowling's series. The commemorative designs will be released to coincide with the July 21 launch of the last of the Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Also, was at All Tomorrow's Parties over the weekend, am working on a post, will hopefully be up tomorrow.

Paris in the Springtime

'To you and to everyone. She had only to be what she is – and to be it all round. If she's charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she “acted” - as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them – the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it's she who's the real thing.'

(The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I've tried reading it before and got about halfway. This time I intend to finish. I seem to be enjoying it more this time. I think. I'm still only about 100 pages in (114 to be precise, the page from which the above quotation, which I will get to, comes from), but it seems to be making sense this time. I began rereading after listing to Joanna Newsom's Ys and the similarities struck me. Ys is an album I've had difficulty getting into, but, like The Golden Bowl, I'm enjoying it more than I used to. The similarity that struck me was the amount of concentration necessary for them. Joanna Newsom: so many words, so intricately strung together, so much to hear. So that if one misses something, let's one's mind drift off for a second, that's it, the thread has gone. Henry James too. And in both cases it's not that they are badly put together, they are too well put together; the sentences, long affairs, so many clauses but always flowing, are always perfect. There's a sentence in the Author's Preface to The Golden Bowl which I keep meaning to put up here, probably right at the top somewhere summing things up as well as it does, but I never get round to it, copying text from books can be a trifle dull, especially as my typing skills are such that I have to look at the keys as I write and that slows things down considerably. I'll get round to it. Let us end this diversion here: read The Golden Bowl, read all of Henry James.)

I didn't mean to start my Paris Hilton piece with this quotation, but it struck me as apt when I came across it. I was going to start it like this: Paris Hilton occupies a peculiar position in modern culture. Her position is not unique – Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan to name a few more – successful women who enjoy themselves too much.

What the quotation adds is the difference between Paris and the others: Paris is the real thing. Paris, in the popular perception, works at enjoyment. The others enjoy themselves and work. One can see this difference in the attitude of Perez Hilton (my reading of Perez doesn't constitute one of my guilty pleasures simply because reading his site is never a pleasure) to Britney Spears: to a new picture of her boozing or whatever, he'll berate her, to news that she has stopped drinking, started doing some work on her music or whatever, he'll praise her and wish it to continue. His reticence to Paris is perhaps borne, not of some 'friendship', but from the fact that Paris cannot enter into this binary logic, for her work is enjoyment, her drugs, her booze, her parties.

So why do we hate Paris? Here I think we should consider a psychoanalytical analysis of racism from Zizek (without wishing to equate the hatred of a rich white woman (a rich white woman whose racist behaviour has been documented) with racism):

We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. ... What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us

Paris is a symbol of this “excessive enjoyment”, and given the media portrayal of Paris we should also add here Lacan's statement that 'Jouissance is what serves no purpose'.

The final point to be made is that, and anyone who has seen any of Paris' “home movies” will confirm, there is not a lot of pleasure in the work of Jouissance: 'Jouissance is suffering' (Lacan).

A different morality

This story has been doing the rounds for a while, and a number of (supposedly) left wing MPs have put their name to a motion supporting it already, but this line from the committee:

The House of Commons culture committee said people had a "moral right" to keep control of their creations while alive.

seems like a peculiar escalation, bringing the amount of years a copyright should be in force into the realm of the moral.

Tubular

Just seen this story:

Mike Oldfield has complained after the The Mail on Sunday gave away his album for free.

The musician said handing out Tubular Bells, the musician's most popular record, devalued his music. Oldfield told 6 Music he would not mind some live tracks being given away, but the entire album was too much.

He explained: "I feel the same as if I had lent something to somebody, and it had come back trashed."

However, Peter Wright, the newspaper's editor, has responded that the give-away has actually boosted sales. He commented: "The week before we gave it away, it sold 600 copies, the week after, it sold 900 copies, so sales of the disc have actually gone up since we gave it away, not down."

The agreement was between Oldfield's record label, EMI, which has the right to give it away.

"devalued" his music?

Music is only good if paid for?!

More Than Music 2

It occured to me that that the line I quoted is actually quite intricate:

there's the fact that actually shine and rhyme aren't a perfect rhyme

together with

the fact that The Diplomats, to my ears anyway, quite often use awful rhymes, the amount of times they resort to using the same word to rhyme with itself

brings us to the conclusion that this is a clever defense using non-rhyming to defend their bad rhyming. Do two wrongs make a right?

This post doesn't exist

I was looking through news stories today when I came across something about a Free Paris demonstration, and as I read it I thought I should post about this story in a what's-the-world-coming-to-when-people-protest-about-this sort of way, and I say that as someone who likes Paris (see my previous post on the subject). But anyway after clicking through and seeing the photos of the event (which i'm not posting or linking to purposefully) I decided that the story was more, how little does an event be before it isn't news? This demonstration seemed to consist of one bloke and one woman dressed as Paris. News?

I've also given a little more thought to the why we hate Paris question, which i'll post here later.

Idiocy

Lewis Hamilton from today's Sunday Times (a Sunday Times that came with a free punk rock CD, as if we needed any more signs that culture should be put out of its misery):

Already he admits that he will have to consider whether a move abroad might be necessary to preserve his sanity and finances. “At the moment I like living in the UK as I’m close to my family and friends, and I’m young, so London is the best place to be,” he said. “But I have no idea what it’s going to be like over the next two years. If there is an escalation of interest I would have to reconsider – and also of course the tax situation can be a problem, not now but in the future.”

Why we hate the rich...

More Than Music

There 's a track, "Show And Tell", on the new Diplomats CD, More Than Music Vol. 2, which includes the lines

I gleam for the talent that couldn't shine/ speak for the poets who couldn't rhyme/ I strive for the innocent doing time

And I thought the inclusion of the people in the middle, the poets who can't rhyme, a little odd. Giving words to the voiceless is one thing, respecting talent that never got the chance, fair enough, standing up for the innocent in prison, nice. But untalented poets? A bit strange.

The Disappointment

I kinda like The Klaxons so was quite disappointed tho not surprised when I saw this:





Go look here as well to offset the bad karma of the advert i just posted

Oh Paris...

I am usually quite perplexed, but at the moment even more so, at the way people respond to the name “Paris Hilton”. And I say this because it seems to be what the name signifies, rather than the actually existing Paris Hilton and what she does, to which everyone seems to respond. This post, and it's comments, are indicitive of the whole DUI thing. This comment in particular - “I read that her license was re-instated in March. But it’s still not very smart to have all of these pics of her driving.” Her license was reinstated but she shouldn't drive because she rubbing our noses in it, how dare she drive! What insanity is this?

Her name signifies a certain type of richness which it is acceptable to hate. The idle rich, the rich who are without work ethic, the rich that the bourgeiousie all but replaced, and the few remaining examples can either keep a low profile, maybe surfacing to donate money to charity, or feel the sanctimonious wrath of the middle classes. How dare she go out and party, rubbing our noses in it!

The name is all important because as she has shown by her actual work ethic, perfume line, music, TV, modelling... the criticism has nothing to do with reality.

Unless of course it's a question of how dare she go out working, rubbing our noses in it!

Avril singing a couple of songs in Australia

Save The Penguin, Save The World

Recently watched Happy Feet and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was (tho to be fair I was actually quite looking forward to it anyway, I do like a good penguin movie – soooo cute etc.) The biggest surprise was in its portrayal of this penguin utopia in which copyright didn't seem to exist. The penguin's songs are all spontaneously created out of elements of actually existing pop music. They are free to perform any song without paying lip service to the concept of authorship.

And yet at the same time they have the notion of the 'heart song' a song which is there own, which is from within, from the soul. This too is likely (some of them being songs I didn't recognise so wouldn't like to comment on) to be an already existing song. So we have a 'heart song' that is both from the soul and yet completely external.

Firstly, I thought it strange to see this type of appropriation in a big Hollywood movie, obsessed as Hollywood is with piracy and respect of copyright (even for numbers).

Secondly, we have a whole issue going on with the interpellation of the subject. At first the heart song appears to be spontaneous, but it's origination is a response to the question “What is your Heart Song?”. This question determines one's penguiness. The only acceptable answer is “this is my heart song...” Which is why Mumble is never fully accepted – he has no heart song and so is not fully a penguin – The elders of the penguins find it easy to exile him because he is already different. In this sense it has the feel of a racist ideology which would posit the other as being somehow less than fully human (or penguin).

Thirdly, the turnaround at the end where it is Mumble's abnormality (his dancing) which saves the penguins rather than their singing (which to humans appears, of course, as meaningless squawking) is particularly interesting: is it meant to be read as a victory for the guy who is different against the conformist society? Is it actually an attack on copyright infringement (they thought the songs they were singing were authentic expressions of there selves whereas they were really owned by someone else – only Mumble's dancing was authentic)? Both these readings seem unacceptable to me, the first because it is only by imposing conformity (they all have to dance in unison) on the other penguins that they are saved, the second because of Mumble's selling out at the end – this expression of the soul is both easily reproducible by every other penguin (and human) and too easily used to pleased, it is as an advert for the penguins rather than as an outpouring of the soul that Mumble uses it (even in the very strange scene in the zoo where Mumble, at the very bottom of his despair, uses his dancing to reach out to the little girl, it is not one last desperate act of affirmation, but one last pitiable attempt to communicate to the humans).

Isn't the only reading that one can take from the film the rather pessimistic one that we will never do anything to stop global warming? The film is of course not directly about global warming (it is about the disruption of the penguins food supply through overfishing), but it must be seen in the context of it, given it is a film about humans interfering with nature. The first thing to note is the return to our rightful place at the top of things that this gives us: after centuries in which human agency has taken a battering we are at last back on top and responsible for something! It might only be the destruction of our planet but its a start! Thus the penguins have to come cap in hand to us asking us to save them. What a pleasant feeling of power (This is reflected by the fact that the elder penguins claim it is the God Guin who is responsible for the loss of fish stocks, whereas it is really the humans). But OK, you want us to save you but what do we get in return? Dancing? Well, I'm not exactly sure, it's not a lot is it? A whole colony of penguins dancing for the cameras? Now you're talking! The pessimistic part of this being that obviously even if nature was going to come up and ask us in this way for help, we wouldn't listen. Indeed, the bit after the Zoo, in which Mumble returns and saves the penguins, should well be considered the mad dream of a dying Mumble, here he is, dying futilely in the zoo, dreaming a preposterous dream of humans saving the penguins...

Fall To Pieces: Avril Lavigne and The Mirror Stage

Here's part one of the promised piece on Avrilian aesthetics: Fall To Pieces: Avril Lavigne and The Mirror Stage

“I don’t want to fall to pieces

I just want to sit and stare at you”

Avril Lavigne sums up Lacan’s mirror stage in a catchy couplet - almost - for in Lacan the infant ‘unable as yet to walk, or even stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial, he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image’, rather than sitting down. Despite this, Avril Lavigne still manages to sum up the essentials of the mirror stage: ‘the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. By looking at the song from this angle we can uncover certain aspects of Avril Lavigne’s position as an artist in the world of commercial pop music and tentatively approach a popular aesthetic running against the post-modern commodification of culture.

The mirror stage is Lacan’s theory of the formation of the subject, the moment when the infant separates itself from the other, when it recognizes itself as a self, as I. The child is captivated by its image in the mirror, ‘he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him’, leading to a ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image’. The child’s body is given to it only as an image, an image which is in the field of the other. The mirror stage creates an illusion of wholeness, of a subject which is a totality, and yet, as this totality is constituted both from and in the outside, it is essentially alienating:

the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him.

The subject is constituted as an exteriority: it can recognise itself as a subject only because it has become externalized in seeing itself in the mirror.

It is important to recognise that there is no original ‘subject’ - no original wholeness - which this external image displaces. This is already known by Freud: ‘We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed’. The mirror stage is this formation of the ego, the subject, which is to say that prior to this the baby should be seen simply as an exteriority; while the baby does not distinguish between its self and its outside it should not be considered as an interiority, as existing regardless of the outside world: ‘Personally, I have never looked at a baby and had the sense that there was no outside world for him. It is plain to see that a baby looks at nothing but that’ [my italics](Lacan). In Seminar XX Lacan goes on to talk of the ‘development of mastery’, in connection with the development of the ego: the creation of the subject, this (illusory) mastery of the ego, also creates the universe qua organized totality. That the ground for the creation of a symbolic universe is present in the mirror stage is stated already in The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience: ‘the function of the mirror-stage … is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt’. However, it is not just a relation that is created, it is reality itself: ‘This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history’. Lacan makes clear that the mirror stage, though operating in the field of the imaginary, prefigures the symbolic and so this use of the word history should be seen as meaning more than a personal history, but as the projection of the individual into history, or the world qua symbolic, itself. Which is to say that while the symbolic is that which constitutes the world, the symbolic is always already there and having an effect, even before the assumption of language by the child: ‘These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality’. We shall come back to this later.

What Freud calls the ‘unity comparable to the ego’ is an illusion created by the mirror stage. The linking of an image of the body with the ego is already present in Freud’s work, for whom ‘the ego is represented as a psychical map, a projection of the surface of the body’ (Grosz). In Lacan’s mirror stage the ‘assumption of the specular image’, is a contrast, for the child, with its ‘motor incapacity and nursling dependence’, thus is created the ‘mirage’ of the ‘total form of the body’, ‘this form would have to be called the Ideal-I … but the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego … in a fictional direction’. However, this image of wholeness can not simply be assumed wholeheartedly by the subject: the subject ‘anticipates’ - a wholeness he will never have - ‘in a mirage’ - nor has ever had. ‘This Gestalt - whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination’. This is to say that the subject both recognises and misrecognizes its image at the same time - it recognises it as itself, but at the same time, in the fact that the image appears whole and has a mastery that the child’s lack of motor control means it doesn’t have, it is ‘scarcely recognizable’:

If the child simply recognizes the image, we would have another version of Freud’s realist view of the ego - an ego essentially in contact with reality. But if, on the other hand, the child merely misrecognizes its image, it is the subject of error and falsehood, unable to produce knowledge, a subject of ideology. Instead Lacan posits a divided, vacillating attitude that is incapable of a final resolution. (Grosz)

Thus ‘the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation’: there is no finality or wholeness at either end: what there is ‘the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development’. It is, we could say, under the skin of this ‘armour’ that Avril Lavigne’s song, ‘Fall to Pieces’, wishes to see.

In The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience Lacan posits the idea that prior to the assumption of the specular image, the child, due to its motor incapacity, feels itself as fragmented. With the mirror stage there is a retroactive effect which creates the idea of an originary wholeness. The fragmented form of the body is thus one which can not be proven to have existed - it can only be assumed from later fantasies: ‘This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual’. Is this what we are witnessing in ‘Fall to pieces’? The idea we have of Avril Lavigne, at least in her first two albums, being in conflict with the notion of herself as a created ‘artist’ could well lead us to answer in the affirmative. The original record company conception of “Avril Lavigne” was as a new Celine Dion, when it was discovered that this idea was non-realisable it was necessary to look elsewhere for an “Avril Lavigne”. They found her: Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” were made one. It is this which has created the insistent tone of honesty and integrity in Avril Lavigne’s songs. It is the attempt to find a space separating Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” which creates a space in her work for an attempt to find an “authentic” aesthetic - ‘a certain minimal aesthetic distance … the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last.’(Jameson). From this perspective it would be easy to say simply that the strain of this impossible balancing act between Avril and “Avril” has resulted in ‘Fall to Pieces’ and the disintegration of the individual.

However, there are two problems with this simple conclusion:

1) All celebrities are liable to the same problem of identification, indeed everyone, when they assume the mandate of a name must, in some way, be prone to such identificatory difficulties: ‘The paradox of symbolization resides in the fact that the object is constituted as One through a feature that is radically external to the object itself, to its reality; through a name that bears no resemblance to the object’ (Žižek). Thus it would seem that there is nothing special happening in the case of Avril Lavigne. What I would argue is that the difference is in the fact that we have a double naming, a double mandate - on the first level she is already named, symbolized as Avril Lavigne, only later is the second level introduced - that of “Avril Lavigne”. The difference being that, for example, in the case of Britney Spears, she assumes “Britney Spears” as a public persona, a fiction; they are different entities. In the case of Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” there is an apparent sameness, but a sameness which can only be felt as the Freudian “Uncanny”, summed up by Žižek: ‘what is so horrifying about it is not its strangeness but rather its absolute proximity’.

2) We must be aware that there are two aspects to the song: alongside the exploration of the mirror stage (the song’s approach to her own identity), there is also the level at which the song explores her relationship with a boyfriend (the approach to the other). These two aspects are not mutually exclusive, and, it should be pointed out, this is the same duality which we find in many of Avril’s songs. As we pointed out earlier the mirror stage prefigures the entry into the symbolic, and as such it should be seen that the mirror image operates in the same relationship to Avril as the boyfriend: the image of the self is sustained not just in the mirror, but also in the other. It is not just a matter of different interpretations of the same words either, which is to say that both readings are working together in different parts, in different ways in the song. For instance, in the first verse: ‘Things that you can’t undo’, becomes ‘When I come undone’ in the second verse; the song is not simply about sustaining a relationship with her boyfriend, nor is it solely about the need to sustain her own image for herself, but about the relationship between the two.

The other popular Avril Lavigne motif which is used - the tautology - is, in most Avril Lavigne songs used for emphasis (‘don’t speak words against me’; ‘crying out loud’), however, in ‘Fall to Pieces’ it too is used to show the duality: ‘I don’t want to talk about it/ (and) I don’t want a conversation’. The difference between the two is the presence of someone else: in the first it is only implied, in the sense that all speech is directed to the Other; in the second this is made flesh in the presence of a conversational partner. The apparent tautology thus demonstrates the intertwining of themes in the song.

It can be seen that the simple notion of disintegration does not go far enough - but it is where we shall continue in part 2.