THE SHOW SO FAR

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

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

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

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

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