President Bush gets out of his helicopter in front of the White House carrying a baby pig under each arm. The Marine guard snaps to attention, salutes, and says: "Nice pigs, sir." Bush replies: "These are not pigs, these are Texan Razorback Hogs. I got one for Vice-President Cheney, and I got one for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld." The Marine again snaps to attention, salutes, and says, "Nice trade, sir.”
Yesterday were touched on the subject of fetishes. Now check this out from MSNBC...
A London man, unemployed and apparently left with nothing better to do, has been harassing hospitals with repeated visits. His ailment: nothing, really, other than a fetish for medical items. He has hit up area hospitals more than 40 times since January, feigning illness in pursuit of hospital garb. He has even claimed to need masks and gowns for a dress rehearsal of a play. Now his fetishistic behavior has landed him in a fine mess. Banned from every hospital in England and Wales. If he ever becomes ill he will be allowed into a hospital only with prior written consent. Playing doctor can simply go too far.
AND A LITTLE MORE SERIOUSLY
Some girl (again, and thanx)... Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq... for the rest of the story go to... http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4629.shtml
Mind-altering drugs, bondage, nudity, sodomy, dog leashes, humiliation, sensory deprivation, electric shock, video cameras, women in combat boots – in another context it would all add up to one hell of a party. Not of course one that I would care to attend. (Well, maybe I would, depending very much on who was in attendance and engaging in all of the above. But isn’t that the way of it with most parties?) But this isn’t a fun context. Even aside from the macro-context of oil, interrogation, war, and global domination, the horrors of Abu Gee are what come about when two highly repressive and sexually challenged, patriarchal belief systems become locked in a major league, holy pissing contest.
Ron Garmon has already written an excellent piece on how the Iraqi Freedom Torture Tapes have already begun to circulate on the atrocity-porn underground, (http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=914&IssueNum;=50) and I think that I’ve also speculated in passing how the camouflage dominatrix/interrogatrix might – well before the current scandal – have established her place in the universal s&m; dogleash fantasy beside the more conventional whip kittens in sculpted, lace-up leather and whatever.
I have often been accused of having difficulty in differentiating between fantasy and reality, but I have always maintained this is not me problem. I actually have a highly tuned grasp – give or take a semi-tone or two – of what is fanciful and what might be plausible in some strange realm of complicity. I have also long been well aware that the control of fantasy is the key to the Jungian masterlock and fundamentalists, both Islamic and Christian, are well aware of this too. That is why they strive so hard to censor, and contain. They suppress the essential question “what if” and the seductive “just suppose”, and cloak sexuality in the shroud of guilt, hoping to make the subject mind incapable of anything but the angry lockstep of fear-ridden, God-worshiping rage.
Although the cosmic waitress has yet to present the check, a price is going to have to be paid for all this over and above the purely temporal condemnation of a government caught resorting to the torture manual. The well of psycho-sexual misery is deep enough already. This time, Bush’s America may lose its bucket.
The Buggers in Holland have just emailed me Position #6 in which they delve into exactly this abyss...
The sexually dominant women and pseudo-homosexual acts in the Abu Ghraib photographs have been interpreted worldwide as a deliberate cruelty against Muslims. We don't question that. After all, the most widespread and consistent criticism of Islam in the West concerns its inequality of men and women and rejection of homosexuality. There's nothing like a good kick in the groin to teach the Muslim buggers the meaning of freedom, is there? This interpretation, however, concentrates solely on the effect that the photographs have on Muslims, and ignores the effect they have on Western societies. An effect that hasn't been overlooked by military expert Elaine Donnelly* as can be concluded from her cynical remark that Lynndie England's portrait with a Muslim on a leash "is exactly what feminists have dreamed of for years." We are sure that this remark says more about Donnelly's fears and desires than it does about Western feminism, and denounce this attempt to criminate Western feminists in the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib.
It isn't the first time that conservatives hide behind gay and feminist causes to justify their attacks on Islam. Finding common ground with gays and feminists against Islam has already proved a successful strategy, notably in Western societies with large numbers of Muslim immigrants. As examples of such occasional coalitions we mention the attacks on headscarves and on imams, mosques and Islamic publications that condemn homosexuality. Attacks that endanger all sorts of fundamental rights in democratic societies and go to the heart of Western constitutions. In their attempts to gain control over Islam and over their own societies conservative politicians, parties and administrations shamelessly deploy any social and moral cause, even the causes of known political adversaries.
In many feminist protests against the Abu Ghraib torture practices embarrassment was heard at the fact that women were actively involved in sexual abuse. Embarrassment sometimes to the extent that not Lynndie England was held responsible for her acts but her boyfriend, the macho military system, male-centred pornography, etc. Gay rights organisations have raised protests varying from disgust at the discovery that US intelligence services use forced homosexual acts as an instrument of torture to indignant statements that this kind of torture has nothing to do with homosexuality at all. We feel that these reactions concentrate too much on the rejection of responsibility and underestimate the message of the photographs. After all, the gross and degrading caricatures of liberated women and gay men starring in the Abu Ghraib photographs reveal the true motives behind conservatives' concern with gay rights and women's liberation. Gay and feminist stereotypes are used as weapons in the war on Islam. As kinky roles in state pornography.
Although it looks like the Pentagon has miscalculated the effects that the photographs would have in the West, it's hard to say what the effects will be on an unconscious level. Elaine Donnelly unwittingly hints at this with her remarks that Lynndie England's portrait "has a powerful influence on young women" and that "these women may not have been aware of it." Military experts, we must admit, show little naivety when it comes to the power of pornography. Abu Ghraib as a real place of torture has served its purpose and can be demolished; as the filmset for military pornography, however, it will have longer and wider range of effect. As an example of this long-lasting power of pornography we mention De Sade's La Nouvelle Justine, written in the Bastille in 1788, in which Monsieur Rodin shouts "By all fucked Gods of Christianity, nothing is better than fucking this way", as he stacks the naked body of his daughter on top of that of the virtuous Justine and sodomises them alternately with his friend while his governess beats the two men. La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu** has had a long history of prohibition and censorship in Christian countries. Let's get it out and pitch the Bastille against Abu Ghraib.
This train's gonna run today, but time is a tad freeform.
CRYPTIQUE -- The White Rabbit frowned at his pocketwatch.
¶ 6/2/2004 04:49:40 AM
Monday, May 31, 2004
HOLIDAY WEEKEND
Memorial Day in the USA, remembering the fallen, or at least paying lip service, nothing in TV except war movie marathons, and no traditional orgy of eating or drinking to soak up the time, so I actually decided to take a day or so off, and so, before this moment, I had not opened the lid of the laptop for almost thirty-six hours. I kinda felt I was entitled. Recent recall has, to say the least, been hectic, and, except for one or two highly notable pinnacles, it has been that worst of all possible hectics – the relentless pressure of the mundane.
I did, however, finally manage to see The Return of the King, and, as Larry Wallis might put it, was mightily impressed. “Now this”, I muttered, as Aragon cut his deal with the Army of the Dead, “is what you fucking call an epic.” Gollum just gets better and better and in a perfect world would have his own TV show. I was kinda choked up by the fate of the pachyderms of Mordor. I mean, it wasn’t their fault they were on the wrong side.
I’ve also pretty much burned out on CGI battlefields, and grow nostalgic for the days when epics like Waterloo or Lawrence of Arabia made use of the entire Yugoslav or Moroccan Army. They had a real tactical ebb and flow.
I knew up front that the Hobbits’ final encounter with Wormtongue – and what the ever-reactionary Tolkien made sound a whole lot like post-World War II Brit socialism – had been cut, but I still hope it will show up on the extended DVD that will undoubtedly be released in time for Christmas. All in all, however, I was well pleased, and will avidly watch it all again before the disc goes back to Blockbuster.
It’ll probably be months before I get round to seeing the big weekend movie, The Day After Tomorrow, and get to liken it to the way George Pal drowned New York in When Worlds Collide, but I have been catching all the Republican indignation that anyone dare suggest that the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels is anything but the best possible way to treat the planet. I also discovered that we who are not flocking to Kerry, but are determined to see Bush out of office, have been given a name. We are the Bush-Haters. Hardly slick or original, but it does give a boy a sense of identity.
FROM THE EMAIL
Yukiko sends a climatic note for the other side of the Pacific, indicating I am not alone in my unease over global weather patterns...
We had the second typhoon of this year last week and about 40+ are expected by the end of October. As in L.A., the temperature keeps going up in Tokyo as well. The scientists have discovered recently that, if the buildings in Tokyo have a garden with trees on the roof, it will effectively lower the temperature in the city by 2-3C. Accordingly, some new enterprises have begun to develop the soil that weighs less, new plants that need less water, new watering system, etc. and more buildings have rooftop gardens now. A few years ago in a rural area, some toxic tropical mushrooms grew up in the forest due to the unusually hot weather. Since they looked exactly like the harmless ones that the locals usually eat, a man picked it up, ate it at home, and died. It's amazing how creative the nature can be to take its revenge on the human being.
The following list was forwarded by Bassmaster Doug. It was created by combining Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices of Average IQ with each state's election results from the 2000 presidential election.
State Avg. IQ and who they voted for in 2000 1 Connecticut 113 Gore 2 Massachusetts 111 Gore 3 New Jersey 111 Gore 4 New York 109 Gore 5 Rhode Island 107 Gore 6 Hawaii 106 Gore 7 Maryland 105 Gore 8 New Hampshire 105 Bush 9 Illinois 104 Gore 10 Delaware 103 Gore 11 Minnesota 102 Gore 12 Vermont 102 Gore 13 Washington 102 Gore 14 California 101 Gore 15 Pennsylvania 101 Gore 16 Maine 100 Gore 17 Virginia 100 Bush 18 Wisconsin 100 Gore 19 Colorado 99 Bush 20 Iowa 99 Gore 21 Michigan 99 Gore 22 Nevada 99 Bush 23 Ohio 99 Bush 24 Oregon 99 Gore 25 Alaska 98 Bush 26 Florida 98 Bush 27 Missouri 98 Bush 28 Kansas 96 Bush 29 Nebraska 95 Bush 30 Arizona 94 Bush 31 Indiana 94 Bush 32 Tennessee 94 Bush 33 North Carolina 93 Bush 34 West Virginia 93 Bush 35 Arkansas 92 Bush 36 Georgia 92 Bush 37 Kentucky 92 Bush 38 New Mexico 92 Gore 39 North Dakota 92 Bush 40 Texas 92 Bush 41 Alabama 90 Bush 42 Louisiana 90 Bush 43 Montana 90 Bush 44 Oklahoma 90 Bush 45 South Dakota 90 Bush 46 South Carolina 89 Bush 47 Wyoming 89 Bush 48 Idaho 87 Bush 49 Utah 87 Bush 50 Mississippi 85 Bush
Note to Republicans: This chart is not as bad as it looks. The correlation of electoral votes to IQ is a loose one. There are many variable that are obviously not included. Connecticut, for example, probably has a significantly higher rating now that George Bush lives in Texas. Though the pattern is a bit striking, this chart was posted to be somewhat amusing. What isn't amusing is the study showing a significant percentage of Americans are factually incorrect about very important issues. These include whether we found WMDs in Iraq, Iraq's ties to 9/11, and Iraq's ties to al Queda and terrorism in general. What's more striking is that of those who hold factual misperceptions of one or more of these issues, a vast majority support Bush. Bush's support is directly proportional to misperceptions of facts.
DO WE BELIEVE THIS?
An individual who says he’s Andy Kaufman has surfaced in New York City, claiming he faked his own death. Check it out for yourself. http://andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.com/
AS WE KNOW IT The following spam hit my inbox today...
Secretly read other people's E-Mails! Click here! a.. Now you can easily ready anyone's e-mails on your pc! b.. Use it to find out if your special someone cheats on you! c.. Act now and save big on the amazing EMAIL SPY! (No, I’m not giving the link.)
Days occur when I feel like I should be in hiding. The surrealism that streams from the inescapable screens seems to suck all the air from the life support. (To the point, in this instance, that Doc40 almost, but not quite called in sick.) But then – while watching finally watching Matrix Revolution on ppv, that wasn’t quite as bad as I’d been led to believe – a thought occurred to me. Could it be that the forty something percentile for whom GWB can do no wrong (and probably find Jay Leno entertaining) are really protecting a desperate-deep and bovine emotional investment? Could it be that, in the dire aftermath of the Al Qaeda attack on New York, some were so consumed by fear of the out-there that they cleaved to the bullshit of the Bush Gang and now are too far-gone stubborn, even when there’s the pointless fucking crusade being lost to the Saracens, and the generals are turning against their fatuous hero, to admit, even to themselves, they made a dreadful mistake? Can we offer them some dignified, face-saving way out by which middle America can disengage from the greedy simian clutches?
But what constitutes a way out to people who believe in the imminent arrival of the Rapture?
Earlier, on PBS, Gore Vidal remarked that Hitler simply lacked the Bush charm. He smiled regally, but wasn't joking.
CRYPTIQUE – I’ve got a bike, you can ride if you like.
I started collecting the poetry composed to beat spam blockers, and folks like munz and HCB (who incidently has an irrate letter printed in this months edition the Brit rock mag Mojo) sent me examples. But it all fast became repetitive and I grew bored, deciding that enough was a enough, and mail stuffers with computers were not going to write Howl no matter how long I waited. But then this one came over the electronic transom, and being of such size and determination, and also so totally lacking in typography, I couldn’t restrain myself from posting it (if only on the principal of waddaya-want-ona-Sunday?) Are we supposed to conclude the first word is a statement of influence? The last word is “octant.”
Now Ahmad Chalabi is screwed, and might take Rummy down with him. How long, I keep asking myself, can this administration last? It’s unreal. Even Nixon would have been drinking heavy by now.
WE DON’T KNOW SHIT
This is real long, but I couldn’t resist it. The piece is by Jonathan Isbit and forwarded by our favorite southern belle.
The term "appendicitis" was coined in 1886 by a Harvard anatomy professor named Reginald Heber Fitz. Most people assume that the disease has always afflicted humanity. But actually, it's only been around for about 150 years - and only in the western world. Why did it suddenly appear? And why only in the West? And what causes appendicitis? Ask any gastroenterologist these questions and you'll get the same answer: "Nobody knows." A number of other colon and pelvic diseases also got their start toward the end of the nineteenth century - including diverticulosis, colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and prostate and uterine disorders. The medical profession responded by devising ever more sophisticated surgical techniques to remove the diseased organs. Once again, having no inkling of the cause, they ruled out any means of prevention.In the 1970s, a British surgeon named Denis Burkitt, who had practiced medicine in Ugandafor twenty years, reported a remarkable absence of these ailments among the people of Africa. The same diseases that afflict African-Americans in large numbers were curiously absent in the land of their ancestors. Further research by epidemiologists showed a similar immunity in Asian countries, especially the rural areas. And once again, on moving to the West, these ethnic groups quickly became just as prone to western diseases as the rest of the population. Dr. Burkitt believed that two aspects of the Africans' lifestyle protected them from colon ailments. First, their diet contained higher levels of fiber. And second, they used the natural squatting posture for bowel movements. Western researchers immediately latched onto the first factor, preferring to ignore the second one...that the true culprit may actually be the modern commode. Diet may have little or nothing to do with these diseases.
Historically, human beings have always squatted for bodily functions. Every infant instinctively uses this method until he is forced to sit on a potty. Most of the adults in the world continue to use squat toilets all their lives. It was only about 150 years ago that the "porcelain throne" came into widespread use. It was basically a fad that started in England and quickly spread throughout the western world. No country wanted to appear backward and uncivilized, and no one at the time realized what the medical consequences might be. Even if they happened to be aware of the drawbacks of this new, contrived method of evacuation, they were unwilling or unable to break the Victorian taboo surrounding the subject. As the fad continued to spread, doctors noticed a mysterious upsurge in colon, bladder, and reproductive diseases. The medical profession was caught in a conflict of interest. Since treatment was becoming so lucrative, they had little motivation to explore the cause or to find means of prevention. How does the modern commode contribute to these diseases? There are two basic kinds of damage. The first comes from pressure on the pelvic floor from chronic straining in the sitting position. Over time, the pelvic floor "descends," stretching and injuring the nerves that supply the bladder, the prostate and the uterus. The result is that these organs become dysfunctional and prone to disease. The second type of damage is caused by fecal stagnation, from incomplete evacuation. A polluted colon is prone to cancer, diverticulosis, appendicitis, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. The following explanation of appendicitis answers the questions with which this article began: The appendix is attached to the cecum, at the beginning of the colon. When fecal matter gets lodged in the appendix, it hardens, causing the appendix to suffocate and die. This only happens to users of the modern commode, for two reasons: The cecum cannot be fully evacuated in the sitting position. It needs to be squeezed empty by the right thigh while squatting. Pushing down with the diaphragm in the sitting position can force waste matter into the appendix. On a squat toilet, you don't hold your breath or push downwards. The posture itself effortlessly generates the required pressure for expulsion. The appendix was not "poorly designed" - contrary to what is taught in medical schools. Like the rest of the colon, it was designed with squatting in mind. http://naturesplatform.com
And while we’re in the bathroom, the following comes from both some girl and Keith Oberman
A toilet to keep men in line. Or rather, a gadget that attaches to the toilet. The ghost-shaped device (why a ghost?) sits under the toilet rim and if the seat is lifted, chastises in a stern female voice. "Hello, what are you up to then? Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up”... The device has sold 1.6 million units in Germany. (The land that gave us Zyklon B)
Sometime around soon you’ll be getting a tad tired of the excuse that there ain’t much of a blog because I’ve had a large hard day tending the obscene science fiction or the paid diatribing, and my resources are depleted. Unfortunately that’s the story today. And the truth. It’s 2.30 in the LA AM and I’m going to do this, and then fall into the couch and watch The Hulk which I understand is crap, but haven’t seen it and I figure that’s all I’m fit for. I would complain how Belle de Jour seems to fix renounced her pornographic content since she got a book deal, but I think I’ll leave that until tomorrow.
Jim Bath and Dubya were coke snorting, Texan drinking buddies back in their National Air Guard days, flying in that champagne unit... It seems that Bath's name was airbrushed out of the info Bush released to the 9/11 comish. Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911 charges this was because Bath was Bush's connection to the Bin Laden family and their money. They invested in Arbusto etc.
Do you notice, though, how much time and effort is being expended on getting GW fucking B out of office, when we could be doing so many, much nicer things?
AND...
Oh yeah, and the new email address is – byron4d@msn.com. I kinda like MSN except for the damned butterfly that flaps when anything is going on. It’s starting to irritate me. Unfortunately MSN won’t let me garbage their corporate logo.
Okay, so here’s the truth. I don’t have a single thought in my mind except those that are essential to survival. (That’s for the benefit of my varied editors.) The reason is that, as I think I’ve already mentioned, I am totally submerged in Slide On The Run #11, and am attempting to create the best inter-galactic, inter-species, inter-entity, pirate rape and pillage orgy that has ever been committed to the page. Okay? And it is not as easy as it sounds, if I am to shun all porn cliches with the possible exception of fluid mess. Can I do for literature what S. Clay Wilson did for comics? Do I want to? And also I wonder about introducing mugwumps. And then I realize that I’ve stated all this publically, so now I’m under even more pressure to excel.
(Or is this all just a degenerate’s tease?)
FROM THE EMAIL
munz sends a link to the Top Ten Alternet Conspiracy Theories. (I must confess, though, I have given up all conspiracy theories for the 21st century. (Except of course my own,) http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18735
CRYPTIQUE – I do, however, like to pop packing bubbles until people get irritated and ask me to stop.
And really not a great deal to say since I'm working on the long overdue episode of Slide On The Run, and still trying to work out the ramifications of what went down with Colin Powell on TV yesterday. Are the bastards actually fighting among themselves to the knife?
(And if you haven't seen Slide On The Run, just slide over to Funtopia on the right and check it out.)
‘Tis the weekend and the Doc is tired, okay? But I’ll pose y’all a question, and damn the typos. Is the Kerry campaign stone blind to the parallel Dump Bush (LEB) movement, or just staying above any embarrassing agitprop? Either way it sucks. United we stand, even if the next guy is an asshole or Howard Stern. I like that Kerry is ex-VVAW. Why the soft pedal? It’s playing totally by the Republican rules. Kerry has to take over the poker game. Go ask the Duke of Wellington about defining the battle even though out-numbered and out-gunned. And ask the dead Duke now, while there’s still time to whistle up Bucher. (And if you don’t know the history, shame on you. Without Wellington, we’d all be eating soufles and fucking in the afternoon. Look it up.)
And while on a relevant history jag. Let’s not forget that, had Bobby Kennedy not been shot, the Yippies would almost certainly have been backing Bobby as the anti-War candidate. In the last month of his life, Bobby was down. He’d lost his tie and suit coat, and was doing soundbites in the fields with Caesar Chavez, quoting Bob Dylan, with poll numbers building to beat Nixon (and thus shot dead). In this parallel universe we would have seen Mayor Daley’s cops beating on Kennedy supporters, for chrissakes. I suspect the so-called pros around Kerry are Havard schmucks who failed to make it onto The Simpsons writing team, and they just don’t fucking get it.
And where is the Kerry cyber-kommando? Doc40 is on a million mailing lists. I get shit from Arriana and Nader and even Wes Clarke, but not a damn thing from Kerry. And don’t tell me there’s no money. There’s no money over here, either. Know what I mean? We depend on the kindness of strangers. It just requires work, ingenuity, elves, and hackers
Let’s not forget, if we can’t get Bush out of office this November, that’s democracy in the toilet, and the only other option will become riot and revolution. Bringing it all back home, so to speak.
PORNO-PROP
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/2004/April/ashcroft.jpg Sent by some girl. All I can say is that it takes a long time to load on dial up, but it’s so worth it. And be warned, it isn’t what you initially think. (Adult content.) The folks who labored so long don’t need lives. They’re already demented. You also probably need to save it to some place of graphic tools to reduced the whole thing in size. Or blow it up. And check out the Heinken bottle 4 squares down and 8,9, and 10, across (l-er)
We’ve been getting a lot of stuff from the Buggers. Now they shamelessly stroke my ego to the point that I groan aloud, “Fuck false modesty. I’ll post it.” (And yes, Phun City did look like VC free zone.)
BUGGER!
When in 1970 Mick Farren, Edward Barker and David Goodman named the festival that they were organising Phun City, they condensed much of the commitment of the Western counterculture of that time in just those two words. Phun City: it reminds of a North-Vietnamese free zone in the middle of England. A hotbed of revolt and dangerous fun.
The three-day Opeople's festival near Worthing brought together drug-fuelled rebels like The MC5, William Burroughs, The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, Farren himself, and combined music, radical politics, literature, graphic design, and visual arts. It was one of the last large multicultural events that successfully mixed politics, arts, and fun before the music industry commercialised these events and pulled their teeth. Musician, writer, editor, and anarchist Mick Farren, at that time the spearhead of the London underground, was one of the few Europeans who joined forces with the Detroit based White Panthers. The White Panther Party was infact an artists' collective founded by John and Leni Sinclair that modelled and named itself after the militant Black Panther Party. In 1968 this collective dedicated all their creativity to cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on. Because of their strategic use of various art forms we regard Mick Farren and John & Leni Sinclair as pivotal figures in Western revolutionary art.
When multi-disciplinarity serves no other purpose than crossing nominal barriers between art disciplines or between various fields of research, it is no more than tame artistic play. We, The Buggers, feel that multidisciplinarity is only vital when it leads to dangerous or genuinely innovative mixes. In our view the drive to cross barriers in art should also be a drive to tear down conventions in thought. Farren and the Sinclairs demonstrated that multidisciplinarity is as much an artistic as a revolutionary tool and that it can be fun at the same time. Mick Farren and John Sinclair would probably have been rebels in any society. But much of their revolt resulted directly from moral rejection of the repressive and racist Anglo-Amercian societies of those days and the American war against the people of Vietnam. Farren and Sinclair are romantic revolutionaries. They take as much inspiration from political revolutionaries as from literary heroes or musicians. Ho Chi Min plays drums with Bo Diddley. Music is revolution.
In the 60s and 70s Farren and Sinclair reclaimed public space through riotous multidisciplinary events but also through self-created media: records, magazines, writings, photographs, posters, pamphlets. Part of their program was taking fun sex, drugs, music out into the streets. Their assault on official culture consisted of vandalism of public space (in its broadest sense) and the creation of free zones, Phun Cities, strategies that evoked serious repression before they were adopted and used for commercial ends by capitalist industries.
The Buggers repeat their call to reclaim public space and to develop contemporary strategies against the occupation of public space by capitalist industries. In our previous pamphlets we already mentioned vandalistic strategies like self-destructive art, hostile modifications, desexualisation and sexualisation as circumstances or times require, and now we add to that the creation of free zones. Bugger the sham!
And if you want to know more about all this, buy a book, dadnabit, buy two. Buy my own Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, or pick up a copy John’s Guitar Armies. Or both, and give them to friends. We elders of the tribe have bills to pay.
The Funtopia site (to the right) just logged its 20,000th hit. Which makes me irrationally happy. It almost happened once before, but then the counter malfunctioned and ran it back to 14,000. I know porno sites do the same traffic in a day, but what the hell?
NEW EMAIL I have a new email address that is good for now and the future – byron4d@msn Note it if you need it. The old on will die around Tuesday.
YOU WANT ICE 9 IN THAT?
Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I ran a couple of chunks yesterday and here are two more tomorrow. http://www.inthesetimes.com/
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning: As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all? How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. … And so on. Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
I believe I’ve already mentioned my concern at how the aliens, grey or otherwise, seem to have been totally out of the picture since G. Bush took over. You can therefore imagine my delight when a whole formation of UFOs showed up over Mexico City as detailed in this report from Sky News...
Mexico's largest television network has broadcast film taken by air force pilots of what they claim are unidentified flying objects. The film shows bright lights with "movements and characteristics that do not have - up to now - a scientific explanation," according to the Televisa network. The air force pilots are heard expressing amazement on the tape. A frame-by-frame analysis shows 16 UFOs, according to the network. Televisa said the film was taken with an infra-red camera and there are no alterations. "It is one of the most important film documents we have been able to access, especially because it comes from an official source," said Jaime Mausan, a journalist who has been tracking the UFO phenomenon for more than 25 years.
Leaving aside dumb and racist comments like “who knew Mexico had an air force”, I’m damn pleased to see them, even if they’ve only arrived to retrieve the Chupacabra, the nasty-fanged goat-sucker frequently sighed in Mexico when The X-Files was still on the air. I always figured, the Chupacabra had to be some kind of grey alien pet that had somehow escaped it’s alien masters’ flying suacer. I mean, what species that can supposedly cross galaxies and circumnavigate the infinite wants to suck goat? (Don’t all answer at once.)
PETS CORNER Since we already seem to be discussing pets, some girl forwards a link for The Infinite Cat Project that needs to be seen and not described. Suffice to say the Newton finds it silly and undignified. http://www.privatehand.com/infinite/
Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I present a couple of chunks (and maybe some more tomorrow.) http://www.inthesetimes.com/
Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddleypoo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint. Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.
BRING ME THE HEAD OF NICK BERG
On the comments board, agahastgrl wants to know what happened to Nick Berg’s head. I don’t have a clue. I’m still looking for the head of Ralphie Cifferetto. And, to be frank, I’m not that shocked. Okay, decapitation is a bummer. Jayne Mansfield taught us that. But the execution is being used yet another smokescreen to cover that systematic torture of suspects has been okayed from the top in the Iraq occupation. It’s sad the dude died, but he was hanging round in a war zone, in their country, trying to hire on as a low level merc.
And when is everyone going to listen to the low echelon spooks and Theorists of the Obvious like Doc40 and realise that Al Qe’ida is a get-America open franchise, not an octopus command structure?
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note on the Subservient Chicken, a disturbingly weird-ass promo from Burger King. Now some girl draws our attention to a Yahoo News report that tells how, after it’s fifteen minutes of cyber-fame, the chicken is officially in decline...
Between April 11 and April 18, the number of people who visited the site at least once from their home computers surged more than two-and-a-half times to 407,000, according to tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Since then, traffic has trailed off, with just 186,000 people visiting the site from home in the week ended May 2. Miami-based Burger King has remained mum about the chicken's future but said consumers should not expect to see his image at one of its restaurants. "That would be far too mainstream," Burger King spokesman Blake Lewis said. "The chicken doesn't do mainstream." http://www.subservientchicken.com
FROM THE EMAIL
kaymo writes at length...
Who the hell are these people? wonders Doc 40. In Mother Jones this month I see that 61% of Americans now profess to believe that the Biblical story of the creation of the world/universe in 7 days is literally true. We already know that Americans have rejected the sciences of biology, geology, paleontology, astronomy, cosmology, genetics, etc. etc. since a huge majority of Americans reject "Evolution" in favor of one flavor or another of Creationism. The same rejection ultimately has to include Physics, Math and even Chemistry, since all scientific inquiry is tending to move along the same rails towards similar conclusions. (As long as the Higgs Boson really does exist! If not, oh boy....) What does this mean? One could say that these Americans have chosen a kind of childish wilfulness, a deliberate refusal to see the world as it is. In doing so they have joined the Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, Ultra orthodox Jews and sundry other groups that have deliberately closed their eyes and turned their faces away from the "enlightenment" and the process of scientific inquiry.
Being "enlightened" is hard for some people. It means having to give up notions of being "special", "chosen", and somehow "beloved" beyond others by the lord or lords, depending on your religion. It means having to accept that rationally there are no races, that the very idea of race is a misnomer, although there are slight genetic differences between ALL humans who originate outside of Africa and the various groups that originate on the mother continent. For some reason the idea that we're all pretty much the same and that we're also animals, horrifies a certain (large) percentage ofAmericans as well as other peoples. This is an area deserving of some determined work with MRI scanning, psychiatric observation and genetic cross referencing. It might even turn out to be an inheritable genetic trait. Maybe they could come up with a drug or two that would turn it off. One moment a raving religious racist, the next a rational human being. Part of Bush's popularity is that he shares in the wilful childishness. Not much of a student at school, lacking much of a knowledge base of the world and not caring either, he presents himself as one of them, and they love this.
Other politicians have taken note. We will see more of this and for the possible end consequences I would suggest further reading of works like Ian Kershaw's two part biography of Adolf Hitler. Appealing to the irrational, the mischievous child, the wilful believer in his or her specialness and superiority is a potent political method. Combine it with tons of money from the ruling elite and you've got a successful strategy that no amount of rational good sense can overcome. Bush doesn't have the personality to take advantage of the situation a la Adolf Hitler, but someone else, as yet unheard of, probably does.
And the Buggers respond to the last post...
Thanks for putting The Buggers positions #2 and #3 on the Funtopia site. I'm really honoured and appreciate your comments. The Buggers had already planned to dedicate a position to you and John Sinclair as seminal figures to revolutionary art in the West, probably the next position. They will make up for the omission of The Who in that same position as the mutual influences of American and British counterculture will be mentioned. I understood that Ron Asheton saw The Who perform when he was in London in the 60s and took the idea of destroying instruments home. The Buggers would like to start that position with a brief analysis of the title PHUN CITY (the absurdist/anarchist combination of fun plus the association with Vietnam). Before they mention that I'd like to make sure it was you who invented it*. Let me know, if you can find the time. As to desexualisation and De Sade ... you're obviously right. But that will take some more time to work out. The Buggers have been going on about (de)sexualisation a bit too often now.
*The Phun City name and logo (see Funtopia?) was a joint effort by me and the late Edward Barker
Seems like Doc40 stays about 48 hours ahead of the news media. Two days after Jett had reminded us all of the Stamford experiment with prisoners and guards, it was all over MSNBC and our local Fox News (and those were only the ones that I saw) neatly packaged, along with a up-to-the-minute sound bite of the good doctor himself, like some government spin control office had the whole thing ready to go in case the whole subject of torture became public, and the “aberration” case needed to be made. (See yesterday.)
BUT LET’S NOT FORGET...
Fox Butterfield writes in today's NY Times...
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates...The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex. The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.
THE BUGGERS ARE AT IT AGAIN
Another position statement comes from the Netherlands-based Buggers, and is reproduced below. (Although I did cut a lengthy first paragraph about pulling down Saddam’s statue in Iraq, partly because I felt there’d been enough talk about Iraq this weekend, and also because it made the thing much too long.)
The use of vandalism to undermine the ideology behind official art or the media has been an effective strategy of revolutionary art in Western societies since the early 20th century. In fact, the vandalistic techniques developed by Duchamp, Picabia, Heartfield, Burroughs & Gysin, Guy Debord, the Dutch Provo movement, Destroy All Monsters, and many others, have proved to be vital impulses to Western art, literature, music and thought. In its purest form vandalism is no more than the destruction of capital or property. But even this seemingly uncomplicated form of vandalism has led to vital and complex art, music and thought. We already mentioned Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive art in our position #1, but now also think of people as various as John Cage, Dick Raaijmakers, Iggy & The Stooges, and The MC5*. The controlled but real destruction of goods during performances refuses to represent anything else. It blows up all representation, and radically forces the spectators to face the void. Dangerous buggers! Seemingly more complex techniques of vandalism adding something to objects, taking something from them, damaging them in various degrees, etc. can be summarised as hostile modifications of objects, and range from the simplest drawings in school diaries to the attack on national monuments. Duchamp demonstrated in his modification of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (using the schoolboy's technique of adding a moustache and an obscene subscript) that vandalism can give access to the unconscious, much like the Freudian joke or lapsus. Burroughs & Gysin's cut-up technique shows that hostile modification can induce paranoid lucidity and disclose covert ideologies and connections. But the sheer impact of ridiculising, sexualising, desexualising, cursing, damaging, etc. can be effective too.
As long as its powerful and loud enough. Vandalism offers a wide range of possibilities to change the perception of reality, to expose the ideologies and mental constructions that define objects in public space (Space in its broadest sense, also including television, the internet, language and history). Anti-vandalism regulations and measures determine to a considerable extent the design, construction and choice of materials in public space. This, together with the increasing surveillance and control of public space, makes it fair to say that we live in an environment of suppressed vandalism. The suppression of vandalism is not synonymous with public order but is an important part of it. In Western capitalist societies public order mainly serves the protection of property, investments and the conservation of ideologically valuable goods. For that reason The Buggers believe that vandalism directly undermines the grip of Western capitalist industries on citizens, and that strategic use of vandalistic techniques is a powerful weapon in reclaiming public space. At present the Robert Johnson collective in Paris demonstrate that deconstructing advertisements and reclaiming public space through vandalism forces the capitalist industries to expose their repressive nature. Bugger on!
The Buggers are hosted by: Sea Urchin Editions, PO Box 25212, 3001 HE Rotterdam, The Netherlands, email: the.buggers@sea-urchin.net
* I was kinda surprised, however, at the omission of Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and The Who. I recall one of the first times I ever spoke to Pete was at a 1967 after-party for DIAS (Gustav Metzger's Destruction In Art Symposium) at which an upright piano was sacrificed.
I catch myself in repetition, describing over and over again how my mind whirls at current events as they stream from the TV, from the corporate online news and from newspapers and magazines, and how, after a week like the one through which we have all just passed, the emails to Doc40, Howard Stern, and alleged crazy people make more logical sense than those who are foisted on us as experts. When I hear a fool like David Brookes on PBS News Hour blandly claiming that the systematic torture of prisoners is just an “aberration” I start to want to scream. It’s in all the CIA torture manuals, goddamn it! Chapter and verse. Disorientation and degradation. All that’s missing is what has to be a new addendum on how to attack Moslem prisoners via their weird sexual mores. (A gift from Sharon/Mossad?) As in get girls to attach the electrodes. The outrage burns so intensely that it would take an major essay to organize, so instead, let me just huf and puff offer a shit-list of the unfocused impressions...
1) For once, the military-intelligence complex is doing its own dirty work. A history of torture extends from Saigon to El Salvador, but was usually conducted by local proxies. The CIA and Special Forces may have trained the torturers, but the deeds themselves were done, more often than not, by ARVN, the Arena Party death squads, or the local secret police hot out of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Plausible deniability? I guess the Bush boys were in too much of a hurry, or simply, in their arrogance, assumed that, after 9/11, they could get away with anything.
2) Why the fuck did we expect anything different. Neocoms like Ann Coulter have been shrieking for years how anything goes when smiting the evildoers.
3) Danger in all this talk of the Zimbardo experiment. (Thanx Jett – see the infamous comments board) It’s already been picked up by Bush media hacks as proof of the “aberration” defense. Like, you know, it was just stress-related weirdness. Yarbles, I say. Yarblockos. And refer everyone back to1).
4) And didn’t Harry Palmer long ago point out that torture was ultimately pointless, because torturers only get told what they want to hear.
5) Meanwhile the poor busted MP grunts cry, “I was only following orders” – the mantra of Nazi war criminals. Except, at Nuremberg, the brass was on trial. Again in their arrogance, the Bush crew seem to believe they can stem the destructive tide with the courts martial of a few rank and file military police. Blame it on Pvt. England, She Wolf of the US.
6) Bush and his handlers have not only started a war under the most inconceivable of pretexts, but are now managing to lose it. In a parliamentary democracy, Rumsfeld would have been forced to resign weeks ago, and Bush, were he prime minister, would be fighting off a Vote of No Confidence and removal from office. As it stands, almost half the country still thing he’s a great guy doing a grand job. Who the hell are these people? Are they so lumpen deluged by Friends, Jesus, snacks, and American Idol they believe any garbage that’s fed to them?
7) Okay, forget the plain benighted folks, what about Disney? Suppressing Michael Moore and the story of Bush and the Saudis until after the election, because of some short term business interests? Who do they imagine is going consume their damned movies and dopy theme parks when the economy is wrecked, a pointless war drags on, and the nation is in a state of Homeland siege?
8) Or what about John bloody Kerry. Where’s the towering condemnatory rhetoric? Where’s the wrath and the power? Yesterday I heard him mumble a sound bite phrase, something about “a huge historical miscalculation”, but delivered like a schoolboy buying condoms in an old fashioned drug store. Are his handlers telling him to stay out of the fray? Is this a tactic? Am I naive to expect more?
9) And at this point, I feel myself running out of steam. History is so tiring, my dears. But I can’t help wondering when some swine in the White House will start wondering if strapping electrodes to domestic enemies might be a workable idea? Or if, at the other end of the sado-fantasy, any Washington domination parlor has opened its very own Baghdad Room? *
10) Is there anyone out there who knows DC and its surrounds really well, and can suggest a fictitious address where a ultra high class, s&m; bordello might be situated? *I feel prank fiction coming on. (Maybe I should offer stuff as a prize.)
JOIN THE ARMY VISIT EXOTIC LANDS MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE AND KILL THEM (Except now we can add...and if any are left alive, strip them naked, put plastic bags on their heads, and attach electrodes to their genitals -- and then put a saddle on their grandmother and ride her around the cell.)
Or there was Simon de Montfort, who had it all going on with slaughtering infidels and heretics in the 12th century, and who operated according to the maxim...Kill 'em all and let God sort it out.
And was it Barry Goldwater or the Marquis de Sade who claimed that...A measure of excess in the defense of freedom is never a bad thing?
THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH
The story circulates that the real reason Disney are attempting to bury Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 -- that demonstrates the links between GWB and the Saudi royals -- is that Jeb Bush has leaned on them, threatening Disney World's Florida tax breaks if the film sees the light of day before the election.
I also understand that Homeland Defense has a truly lunatic plan to start fucking with the Muslims in the Federal Corrections gulag. I wish them luck. My money is on the jailhouse Muslims.
But don't despair, (and talking of prisoners) Charlie Manson will be on today's Entertainment Tonight.
While well aware that no one outside the LA basin gives a rat’s ass that the city is going through it’s second cruel and unusual heatwave in eight days, and most are probably bored with my complaints like how yesterday’s 101F totally derailed your humble correspondent and the wonders he desires to perform. My theory is that the unseasonable temperatures are another symptom of global warming, and the waters of the Pacific are in entirely the wrong place (a idea possibly supported by yesterday’s TV panic about sharks – maybe great whites – in the bay.) Kaymo, on the other hand, emails what may be a different, but equally alarmist explanation...
Commiserations etc. but there may be something else going on... article in NY Times this Sunday indicated that scientists are finally coming around to accept what archaeologists and hydrologists have been saying for quite a while.. the 20th century was freakishly wet in the Western USA. Now in 6th year of drought the thought is occurring that maybe there will be a return to the real dry times, like those between 900 AD and 1300 when so little rain fell that even the Anaszazi abandoned their settlements in Arizona and New Mexico. The question that has to be asked is what will the millions of Americans now living in a desert do if – for instance – the Colorado River simply stops flowing? (and the cost of fetching water from Alaska or British Columbia remains prohibitive)
On a deeper level than the weather, however, or even the climatic fate of Los Angeles, the great problem of the 21st century is that exchanges like the above finish up blowing in the wind while communications are bowed down under the weight of Bush and his bloody war, the sadism of his minions, the short-attention-span unscrupulousness of his corporate backers, and the madness of his fundamentalist support. We don't even have the time to discuss whether the Anaszazi moved away or were kidnapped en masse by aliens any more. (Or how the aliens seemed to move out when Bush moved in.)
And talking of blowing in the wind, I hear that Bob Dylan wants to be a judge on American Idol. Senses taking leave? Jeez. But maybe more about Bob tomorrow.
In LA, the disturbing climate cycle is now in a repeat phase and the temps promise to climb into the Fahrenheit hundreds again. Mercifully stuff keeps coming down the ether and today (after taking yesterday off) I don’t have to write too much. The following comes from Ben, and although I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with the call for a new desexualization, it’s a fun piece of theorizing that I hope stimulates thought. I fear, however, that Ben and his crew make little distinction between (say) Britney Spears and the Maquis de Sade, when, on days of more intense cultural desperation, I’m prone to muse on the idea of how, in some timeless libertine dimension, the former might be handed to the latter for an education...
BUGGER!
Although the discoveries in the USA and Great-Britain of photographs ofAmerican and British soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners should make us wary and wonder if their simultaneous disclosures aren't a deliberate move in Anglo-American war propaganda to demoralise the enemy, they do reveal an aspect of the clash between Western capitalism and Islam hitherto less manifest. The most striking feature, the overall atmosphere of the photographs, is a sexual one. Sexually active champions of capitalism are opposed to sexually passive Muslims, or Muslims are forced to take part in sexual activities against their will. Sexual abuse of Muslims, especially by female soldiers, has also been reported by prisoners released from the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. At the same time in several Western European countries the controversy about headscarves worn by muslim girls and women has grown to absurd proportions. Wearing a headscarf (an instrument to desexualise girls and women) by pupils and/or teachers has already been forbidden at all schools in France, and at conservative schools in Germany and Holland. The fury that this traditional symbol of desexualisation evokes in capitalist countries and the perverse delight with which muslim girls and women are forced to expose themselves in public show similarities with the sexual harassment revealed in the recently published photographs. For that reason we, The Buggers, believe that sexualisation has become a capitalist strategy in the conquest of its opponents.
Based on the theories of Marx and on misinterpretations of Freud the sexual liberation of the masses used to be a revolutionary strategy to bring down a repressive capitalist system and its bourgeois values and social structures. Western revolutionary art in the 20th century embraced this strategy, from surrealism to Beat poetry to the counter-cultural art of the sixties and seventies. Although the pursuit of individual sexual freedom has brought about many positive changes in capitalist societies, it failed to undo the capitalist system itself. We now know that the strength of the capitalist system lies in its absolute lack of morals and its subsequent ability to absorb the moral force of its opponents, only to pervert it for commercial purposes. Now, instead of pursuing sexual freedom and changing society in the course of it, the masses find themselves chasing the sexual mirages produced by the capitalist industry - without ever finding gratification. The capitalist system deliberately keeps its sexually emancipated consumers in a prolonged sexual frenzy. Bugger it!
Since Lacan's interpretation of Freud we know that sexual desire centres around a void, a lost 'object', and that it can never be really satisfied. An endless string of ungratifying substitutes for the lost object marks the trail of individual sexual realisation. Capitalist industries consciously exploit this phenomenon; they promise sexual fulfillment, provide eroticised substitutes for the lost object, know how to sell them, and make huge profits in doing so. Desexualisation, the refusal to become part of a public sexualised circuit, poses a genuine threat to capitalism. Anti-capitalist cultures and religions, and particularly individuals or groups within capitalist societies that scorn sexualised consumerism, have come to symbolise the origin of the sexual desire that capitalism feeds on: the void, the nothingness. They shatter the illusion constructed to keep consumers prisoners of their own desires and must therefore be sexualised or destroyed.
The Buggers' second proposition is that modern revolutionary art can no longer employ sexual liberation as a weapon against the capitalist system. We believe that nowadays desexualisation, emphasis on the void behind the sexual drive, provides a more appropriate weapon. We invite you to explore the artistic possibilities of desexualisation, and to redefine the 'obscene'. Or to be more precise, to develop revolutionary strategies of public desexualisation (we wouldn't want you, or any other individual, muslim or non-muslim, to stop buggering in private).
The Buggers are hosted by Sea Urchin Editions PO Box 25212 3001 HE Rotterdam
KING OF ALL MONSTERS
While Henry Cabot Beck brings us back to the more pleasant topic of the relativity of Godzilla and Elvis Presley. (And let’s not forget that Godzilla’s official birthday occures on November 3rd of this year, and it’s probably morally and culturally incumbent on all of us to party like it was 1999. (It will also be the day after the election, when we will know if we've dumped Bush, or at least if the elections being stolen in Florida all over again.)
I'm researching Godzilla for a Daily News piece, and I discover today that the day the Godzilla production was announced by Toho in Japan, July 5, 1954, is the day Elvis cut That's All Right. Don't know if that makes Elvis the Godzilla of America or Godzilla the Elvis of Japan, but it's fun to think about.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Hiding the faces of the war dead makes the motivation seem like saving face in an election year. Americans won't take casualties for the credibility of the Bush administration. That's not a good enough reason for people to die. – Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
Last night, Howard Stern second banana, Artie Lange, supplied us with the following fascinating statistic. In the last year (I guess figuring the war had been won) President George Bush had 98 days of vacation time, plus long weekends at camp David.
THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN CHAOS
Earlier I was lying on the couch half-watching the movie Basquiat for about the nineteenth time, and I started idly wishing that I could get up one morning and string together a whole bunch of words that made absolutely no sense at all and get paid obscene amounts of money for so-doing. But, alas, it is not 1981, and may never be again. I do ask myself, however, what is the use of having the bloody Republicans in power if it can’t generate a totally spurious, bullshit art boom? I recall how Uncle Bill Burroughs and many others did very well for themselves in the Reagan era by doing very little. Today we simply wait for the roosting chickens, as in...
THE HARDEST LURKING ANXIETY FOR 2050
What did Jim Morrison tell us? “The old get older and the young get stronger”? When he said it, the young was my generation, but now Jim’s dead, and I don’t feel so great, and the young are doing the will of Allah. The point is made by Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Times that the Muslim world has double the Western birthrate, which then causes him to make the following grim but all too plausible, not-so-longterm projection. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize a senescent Europe to the north and west.”
THE HAPPIEST LARGE ANIMAL
Meanwhile, Brother John is concentrating on the important stuff, and tells us more about the perc-a-pop (see yesterday)... "Carfentanil (Wildnil®) is an analogue of fentanyl with an analgesic potency 10,000 times that of morphine and is used in veterinary practice to immobilize certain large animals" I hadda look up Fentanyl (and its analogs). In general I've always been rather against animal tranks -- not a gentlemanly indulgence -- but that's rooted in a natural bias against PCP. Not a prejudice that extends to opiates. I don't see how anybody could refuse something 10k the potency of morphine. I feel convinced that I could qualify as "a large animal"...
Yesterday a wall o’climate fell on Southern California like the Wrath of the Molten Brain-Eater, as the temperature hit 102F in downtown. The eyes in the cars are bloodshot, and I feel as though I’ve been run over by a busload of the living dead on the way to a company picnic. For those of you with an interest in meteorology, the spring in LA is always something of a tussle between the cold of the ocean and the heat of the desert, but never conducted according to such brutally extreme parameters. Until the end of June, the sea usually wins, at least before lunch. It’s cooler today, but we are warned by the TV weathermen that the heat will return as another head of high pressure builds over the land. Meanwhile the battle for Fallujah rages with the US attempting to fight counter insurgency with gunships, like it’s 1969, but no one seems to be paying attention, more concerned that American Idol may be fixed in favor of a geeky, tone-deaf, ginger-haired, white kid*. Maybe drugs are the only answer to despair and the impulse to mass homicide with an accurate rifle from a tall building. Give the anarchist a perc-a-pop. (As in...)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A narcotic painkiller that looks like a lollipop - designed to speed relief to cancer patients - is starting to show up in illegal sales with the nickname "perc-a-pop." The drug's ease of use and sweet taste have law enforcement officials worried about the potential for abuse. Actiq, a berry-flavored lozenge on a stick, contains the synthetic opioid fentanyl. "We're starting to see it emerge as a drug that is, as we call it, 'diverted,' which is a legally prescribed drug being used illegally," said Kevin Harley, spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Pappert. "It's a drug that is easily administered or taken by somebody who might be afraid to either take a pill, snort or inject a needle in their arm."
Ducking the war and all the rest of the dementia and turning to Pay for View for a chance to become prone in front of the TV but not totally mindless, I ceased to be one of the few inhabitants of the LA Basin who hadn’t seen Lost in Translation. My reactions?
1. Boy was I disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, but it had been so over-sold to me that I was expecting considerably more than I got. And, folks, I love Bill Murray. I have seen Groundhog Day some 38 times, and this, Ms Coppola, was not Groundhog Day.
2. Boy would I like to back in Tokyo amid all that neon. I could have watched the teen-rituals in the video arcade for an hour. (And all the ennui of the characters seemed less than sympathetic in a city that so positively vibrates. If you’re fresh in Tokyo and bored, you got crisis energy problems, Bob and Charlotte. I recall being in my hotel room with jet lag, and watching inexplicable movies, but bouncing up and down with delight, even at the commercials.)
3. Boy was that some racist movie. The dumb-depicted Japanese were such stereo-parodies of the infinitely courteous and helpful people I encountered, I just found myself becoming irritated to the point that I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he whispered to her at the end.
4. Boy do I want one of those toy machine guns with the laser bullet-effects.
KILL THE WABBIT
Later, on Letterman, a resemblance between George W. Bush and Porky Pig was more than adequately demonstrated with film clips. Yes, kill the evil d-d-doers.
That’s all folks. It was 100F in LA today. The end is nigh, but distaff ire, if nothing else, seems to have brought the comments software back online. (Open now for "soft" jokes.)
