The Tumblr thing was a bit of a disaster, yes. I'm now writing and designing stuff here. In a lot of ways, I've wanted to do stuff under a banner like Tracer for at least 13 years. Sure, it'll take me time to establish a tone and rhythm that will avoid what happened here, but that's something I've long been overdue to tackle.
Yeah, well obviously I’m a bit sick of this place. More occasional randomness from me (in a much more suitable context) here.
Taking stock: I just found some old notes of mine on a screening of Occupied Minds at the Dialogue Under Occupation conference last November. I met the film-makers Jamal Dajani and David Michaelis (a Palestinian/Israeli team) there, and they were great fun.
Basically, it’s an accessible and personal exploration of the occupation that looks at how it’s experienced or enacted by Palestinian and Jewish Israeli communities. Palestinians in the Territories are deliberately portrayed as not necessarily heroic, but yet incredibly stoic. There’s a great sequence where they help an old Palestinian woman through a crack in the Wall, and the poor thing’s really got the shits. When she bitches about “the Jews” deserving “a catastrophe” while her leg’s stuck in a crevice, it’s patently obvious to everyone — including the liberal-apologist Israelis in tonight’s audience — that her apparent “antisemitism” has no real connection to traditional European antisemitism, and that at least in this instance it’s actually quite funny, in a sad and ironic way — because she’s this old lady stuck in a fucking huge Israeli apartheid wall! And yet she crawls through it. Hurray! They also talk to a Jenin resistance fighter who bitterly lost faith in the Israeli Left when his mother was killed by the IDF, and none of her Jewish peacenik friends — whom she had cooked for in her house — even called to see how they were. Fucked up shit.
Given the Palestinian/Israeli setup, it’s refreshing that the film doesn’t try to give “equal weight” to Zionism. A leading left-liberal Israeli intellectual is exposed losing his cool, blurting that Palestinians have no right to set the parameters of debate in his interview, and that this is “what You People always try to do”. They even interview an ultra-Zionist settler leader, whose peace proposal is kicking all the Palestinians out of the Territories AND “OFFERING” THEM JORDAN to resettle in. When Jamal remarks that uh, Jordan ISN’T THEIRS TO OFFER, the guy says that ACTUALLY, IT IS, because they occupied part of it 2000 years ago. He smiles paternalistically. Truly surreal. It’s like Ali G or something.
[ tags: occupation, palestine, film ]
Today I became a Consultant. Hurrah!
[ tags: consultancy, work ]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvNpvM2Nf28
I’ve mentioned my love of this song before. Is she not magnificent? Sigh. Still no progress on unpacking the crazy UFO angle I touched upon last time, though.
Boomer passed out on the Wacom tablet, but I had to move him over…
I got a new phone yesterday — a Dopod 838Pro — and for the first time in many years I’m using a device running under a Microsoft operating system. Yep, it’s a Windows Mobile PocketPC thing. Most people know me as an Apple snob, and I am, but I was also one of the few people on the planet to put Windows 1.0 to serious use. I stopped using Windows when I got to University, where I could finally use Macs, which were in abundance there — I’d been relegated for years to lusting after the whole modern Apple user experience from afar. I mean, in 1985, as I put up with Windows 1.0, I used to decorate my school diary entries with ballpoint renditions of Apple Lisa user interface widgets, for fuck’s sake. (Hmmm, should I be admitting this?) A lust for “real design”.
Meanwhile, I’m not one of those people who simply wants a phone that just makes calls really well. While I can appreciate the elegance of the concept, I simply don’t make enough phone calls to justify such a single-use gadget in my pocket any more. So instead I’ve gone down the foolish route of getting ridiculous, button-encrusted, Swiss-Army-knife-style PDA phones that try to do everything, but which end up being rather mediocre on most fronts. Bad design. I wait, as always, for the iPhone, which might arrive in Australia in 2008. Good design. But in the meantime, my last phone was falling apart, and my dodgy phone provider was letting me upgrade…
More interestingly, I also liked the idea of challenging my own brand/design fetishism and buying a phone that was openly from a Taiwanese original design manufacturer called High Tech Computer (!), whose ubiquitous products are usually rebranded in English speaking countries under much more, ah, reputable names like HP/Compaq. (Dopod is HTC’s own consumer brand.) In the widely perceived affective/design hierarchy of Asian consumer electronics brands, you have Japanese companies like Sony (now perched precariously) at the top, then Korean ones like Samsung and LG increasingly rumbling from below, and then the anonymous Taiwanese and PRC manufacturers at the bottom. Sony already equals “design”, while the recent design revolution in Korean consumer electronics has been notable. (The success of LG and Samsung in this particular domain, and the relationship between design and manufacturing, would be really interesting to contextualise in terms of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s…)
So: how are the Chinese people that design and manufacture for companies in Europe and the US figured in terms of their own “design excellence”, their capacity for credible, sexy originality? While the Dopod 838Pro isn’t exactly a design masterpiece, it’s relatively stylish as such things go, like other Taiwanese tech products. In other words, it’s sexier than you think, and why is that? And yet the veneer of the iPod-like über-commodity is still yet unavailable — seemingly disqualified in advance, as if will be for emerging, self-branded Mainland Chinese consumer electronics products. The idea that there’s a castrating absence of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan consumer population in the Chinese-speaking world that contributes to this disqualification is like the idea that there’s no civil society in the Middle East; the correctness or incorrectness of such mythologies aside, the fantastic imperatives invested in their maintenance are far more interesting. Meanwhile, my iPod was “Designed by Apple in California” and manufactured by anonymised “horde” of Chinese Foxconn workers in “the East”. How tenable will it be to sustain the geopolitical division of design/manufacturing labour that such über-commodification relies upon? These are the things I ponder as I stroke my new phone. :)
[ tags: apple, capitalism, design, dopod, phone ]
I’ve been wondering: are there many bands where the lead singer has developed at least part of their vocal style in imitation of another member of the same act? For instance, I’m convinced that Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode mimics the demo tapes he gets from main songwriter Martin Gore — to great effect. And of course there’s Frank Black from The Pixies, who has made his whacky impression of Kim Deal a significant part of his vocal persona.
I can’t find my ancient copy of Battlestar Galactica 2: The Cylon Death Machine, and it hurts. Of course, because I’m such a fan of the current series, it doesn’t seem likely that a novelisation of the original, cheesy Battlestar Galactica would have a place in my heart, right? I mean, my brother got me Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions for my birthday — I couldn’t possibly like this kind of trash, which barely passes for “real” science fiction, right? But I was a big fan of the original Galactica, for two reasons:
While it was undoubtedly drab in comparison to Star Wars, Galactica was shown frequently enough on TV to simply work its way, on a rhythmic level, into my playground fantasies when I was seven years old. And it’s not as if I hadn’t found “finer” sf, either — I was also reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories at the time.
By fleshing out all the aspects of the show that were atrophying under the family-oriented network TV regime of the day, the novelisations made Galactica seem so much better than it really was. Like many media tie-ins, Robert Thurston’s first couple of Galactica novelisations were based on the original scripts, and written several months before shooting. In Galactica’s case, this meant Cylons that weren’t clumsy walking toasters who couldn’t shoot straight (a last-minute change dictated by the network), but murderous lizards who (according to Thurston) thought bitchy thoughts about their superior officers, waited impatiently for promotions, and were driven crazy by the itches that developed under all that heavy armour!
Writing about my loss of The Cylon Death Machine is particularly poignant for me because the event is so recursive. From what I can remember, the novel’s narrative was interspersed with extracts from Commander Adama’s personal log — The Adama Journals — in which he muses about all sorts of seemingly random and inconsequential shit in the middle of the tactical emergencies of the time. Adama’s log is, of course, very bloggy. In this log, he finds the time to mourn how so much Caprican culture was destroyed in the apocalyptic Cylon attack on the Colonies. But rather than honour high culture, Adama chooses to remember pulpy kids’ science fiction: his own favourite childhood book was called something like Sharkey the Star Rover, and featured the insterstellar wanderings of an orphan human boy, Sharkey, and his best friend, an alien blob called — of all things — Jameson. Adama requests of a search of all the archives in the fleet, but alas, the book is lost forever. Just as I’m not quite sure whether I remember this book correctly, Adama wonders if his memory of Sharkey The Star Rover is accurate. Sharkey loves his alien friend Jameson, who receives much racist abuse from other humans. And yet Sharkey also wishes Jameson were a real boy, instead of a blob, so that he could hold him, and thus physically express his love.
I miss The Cylon Death Machine, and thus, Sharkey The Star Rover.
[ tags: battlestar-galactica, culture, pop-culture, science-fiction, sf ]
I’m completely overwhelmed by the rhetorical skills of American PhD students — actually, by the rhetorical skills of everyone who’s not an Australian humanities postgrad, which seems to be the worst possible combination of institutionalised incapacities to explain anything. Add my own personal disjuncture between talking and writing, and I’m scared shitless of presenting at conferences. Writing’s hard enough as it is for me, but it’s a fucking cakewalk compared to speaking — whenever I open my mouth in front of more than two people, my capacity for thought suddenly ends. This is why I’m reading my paper tomorrow, instead of using notes as I’d planned. Which is why I’m now writing my paper, the night before. :)
Am I the only one who’s intrigued and yet absolutely terrified that the slogan for Microsoft’s forthcoming “iPod killer” music player, the Zune, is “WELCOME TO THE SOCIAL”? I can’t help reading it as a general theoretical category — “the social”. The new Zune commercials are calculated to avoid an Apple-style fetishisation of the physical object or its campaign packaging, and instead present everyday, popular-musical social life as the commodity — hanging out randomly at picnics where dogs lick you, and where someone’s set up a set of turntables in a gazebo, etc. This kind of calculation feels really creepy — and I used to work in advertising. WELCOME TO SUBJECTIFICATION. The extra-diegetic dissonance of the musical genres in the ads is interesting, too — the soundtrack of each commercial seems oddly out of place. It’s either quite a clever take on what it’s like to live in headphone-world, or rank stupidity.
[UPDATE — Gizmodo’s caustic take:
almost every Zune commercial has folk-y indie rock going on, with white/hispanic kids breakdancing. It’s as if the dancing is cool enough, but they don’t want to offend the middle of the country with angry black music.]
Of course, if joining a WiFi network on a Windows laptop is anything to go by, I’m expecting the wireless social music-networking aspect of the Zune — the technical basis of the “social” in question — to go as well as Bluetoothing your vCard to another phone did two years ago. Ooops, my batteries just ran out. Or oops, I have to restart.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’ response — if you want to share music with someone, “just take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear” — elegantly cuts through the bullshit, and yet has a predictably phallocentric subtext. Just Put It In Her Ear, indeed; he begins abstractly with the idea of Microsoft’s fiddly, music-sharing technical hoopla, but by the end of the sentence, the hypothetical recipient has suddenly been gendered and given a definite article: “By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left!” Jobs is no doubt referring to the generic girl that nerds like Bill Gates couldn’t pull at school. Taken in context with one of Apple’s latest commercials (in which a PC-produced home-movie is represented as a hairy guy in drag who can’t compete with the much more convincing femininity of supermodel Gisele Bündchen, who appears as the product of Apple’s iMovie) this fantasy of the girl as the recipient of your musical manhood is kind of stunning.
Soon I’m off to Chicago for the Dialogue Under Occupation conference. How exciting! But what’s scaring me the most is that it’s 3°C there right now. Ouch. Anyway, here’s the abstract of what I’ll be presenting:
‘The Earth is Closing in On Us’: models of everyday and extraordinary political worlds in weblogs from Palestine and Iraq
We went to sleep to the rattling of our windows and invasive pounding and after-echo of the shells. We sleep as they fall. We pray fajir, and they fall again. We wake, and they are still falling. When they are closer, when they fall in Shija’iya east of Gaza City, they make my stomach drop. And I want to hide, but I don’t know where.
The Earth is Closing in on Us.
So writes Laila El-Haddad, a prominent Palestinian blogger living in Gaza. In this paper, I explore how weblogs’ intimate and often mundane inscriptions of everyday life can contribute to a mobile and transgressively “invocationary” kind of political discourse, especially when placed in the context of occupied, contested or traumatic territories. Its registers invoke everything from geopolitical commentary to the interstitially micropolitical experiences of occupation and contestation — plus the unlikely disjunctures that can interrupt both. In Baghdad, young girl publishes a constant stream of photographs of cute kittens, occasionally interspersed with reports of bombs exploding down the road. Another Iraqi blogger deals with annoying electricity problems and the terror of raids on her house by the US military. Back in Gaza, Laila El-Haddad’s blog revolves around the experience of raising her young son Yousuf, documenting how the Israel’s occupation and continuing military incursions into Gaza seep into the most intimate or seemingly trivial aspects of life, from changing nappies to buying bread and spices, or getting her son to sleep.
In this lived/media context, the divisions between macropolitics and that which has been relegated to the domestic sphere begin to totter and decompose, suggesting a traumatic political subjectivity that is topologically uncertain, in an ambivalently productive way. The blogging of “geopolitical trauma” can also be read as fundamentally concerned with space, from bloggers’ routine descriptions of endless checkpoints and blockages, to their frequent allegorical modelling of “the world” as a figure that is revealed in moments of crisis — a figure with which an ethico-political relationship is demanded by circumstances. This paper explores, then, the ways in which this ethical relationship unfolds under occupation, and what possibilities it provides.
I’ll let you know you how it goes. My brother was born in Chicago, but I’ve never been, so it’ll be interesting to engage with that familial, prosthetic memory. My brother’s a freak — he started speaking in sentences when he was 12 months old. And apparently he used to greet the janitor at their apartment block with “hi, man”. Incidentally: you know, it’s good having people in your family that just get where you’re coming from. For example, for my birthday this month, my brother got me Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was hot like me
Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was a freak like me
Don’t cha, don’t cha
This is a couple of weeks overdue: the best pop vocal performance I’ve seen this year was these guys, Ben and Jonny, doing a version of the Pussycat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha” at the TAG event in Parramatta. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a fun, carefree expression of male sensuality on stage. Sure, the chorus for “Don’t Cha” was originally lifted from Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Swass”, which went “Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was swass like me?”, but really, when a couple of guys do a take on a recent hit that goes, “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” and keep the “hot”, it’s daring and…hott. It totally eclipsed anything you’d find on Idol lately.
[ tags: sex, pop, masculinity ]
I’ve actually been blogging lately — not here, but at Three Way Street, “a group blog that explores how people remember, engage with and remake their environments in creative, everyday ways.”
It’s an off-the-cuff collaboration with some of the folks from the Community Museum Project whom I met in Hong Kong, plus some others you might know, like Jean from creativity/machine. It’s mainly a vehicle for to sharing observations amongst ourselves, towards the possibility of organising some kind of event/exhibition dealing with the aesthetico-political aspects of everyday life “environmental” creativity — from material visual cultures of the city to online spaces, etc.
While it’s a low key experiment, I do want to avoid Three Way Street being just a dump for our own random online link-trawling. We need your help: if you’re wandering the city, the countryside or cyberspace and come across something cool that people are doing — adapting existing infrastructures and technologies to weird ends, making great street art, disrupting capitalist urbanism, embedding protest into the rhythms of their everyday social performances, whatever — please let me know. Photos are extra cool!
Of course, if you’re actually working on a project that’s connected to the politics of everyday creativity, that’s way cool too. Howard, King, Pak-Chai and Phoebe from the Community Museum Project will hopefully be reworking some of their material from their book-in-progress about people’s matter-of-fact (re)designs of the tools they use. Lena and I will be contributing stuff about our Tracer projects — particularly the digital oral-historical mapping project we began in Hong Kong — and then there’s everything that’s been happening at ICE, like the TAG project.
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This doesn’t mean I’ve packed it in here, by any means, although I don’t think I have much to say at the moment. Jon has asked for my take on the latest developments in Battlestar Galactica, but to be honest, I don’t have much to add beyond the stuff that’s already out there.
[ tags: geography, urbanism, creativity, cartography, everyday-life ]
However did I miss this?
[ tags: urbanism, psychogeography, spatiality, space ]
I kinda painted myself into a corner with this blog — there’s been such a backlog of interesting stuff (which I haven’t been in the mood to write about) that I seriously considered giving the whole thing up earlier this week. So perhaps a change of pace is in order.
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I’ve lately been in the throes of a total Veronica Mars addiction, and am geeky enough to be thoroughly enjoying the prominence that Mac OS X enjoys in the show, down to the girl called “Mac” who has arguments at school about why she prefers OS X over Ubuntu — a couple of years before that rivalry became truly prominent in the blogosphere.
My dream job: doing all the on-screen design for Veronica Mars. Mmmm…
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I noticed that NeoOffice 2.0 beta 3 is out, so I gave it a whirl and am suitably impressed — it’s a workable OpenOffice port for the Mac that feels native enough. Now, I follow these things because I help with Mac administration at a community Mac lab that has been trying to get away with not buying Microsoft Office; I’d never actually use NeoOffice myself. Why not? Because the whole classical office suite paradigm is completely irrelevant to me.
I might have touched on my preference for lightweight tools over office bloatware a couple of years ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Word, but now I don’t even use a word processor that much. For writing, I’m using the latest beta of Scrivener, which emphatically isn’t a word processor (in the contemporary sense) — it’s more closely related to apps like Ulysses, which doesn’t even display italics, let alone fancy formatting. Being a blogger and advocate of structural standards, I’m familiar with using different kinds of plain-text markup syntax for writing, but I’m also a typographic nerd with an occasional hankering to see properly rendered italics, so this is where Scrivener comes in — it’s another minimalist, distraction-free, full-screen capable writing app, but with rich text support.
The features Scrivener does have are fantastic: concatenated editing of multiple, arbitrary fragments, the sexiest full-screen mode ever, integrated outlining, version control, etc. It suits a methodology of growing stuff from fragments, in an environment that’s somehow both lush (making writing a pleasure) and austere (without too many bells and whistles, thus encouraging focus). I don’t think I can do it justice, so if you use a Mac and do a lot of writing, download the latest beta and give it a go.
[ tags: macintosh, osx, pop-culture, software, veronica-mars ]
