“…if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the state of Israel…”
– Sen. John McCain, First Presidential Debate

I’m not sure what one of them is, but it sounds bad. Suddenly, French intellectuals in all their cafes! A coffee drought! Oh noes!

So, the presidential debates are probably important. I’m not sure what to make of them, except that for once McCain sounds good and Obama stutters a lot and sounds out of touch. McCain still refers to Afghanis as “bad guys”, and at one point proposes “league of democracies, a group of people, a group of countries that share common interest, common values, common ideals, and they also control a lot of the world’s economic power..” He goes on to talk about how this group can affect their behaivour and economies. What I’d like to know is how this is different from either the UN or the failed League of Nations? I thought this was pretty much the job of the UN. Is McCain proposing a UN sans “cheeky darkies”? Something like an overt Bilderberger committee?

While Obama sounds flustered, out of touch, and confused, I get the feeling that at least, he gets it. He has a sense of history. McCain believes too much in America – in it’s evil Friedman economics, it’s self-righteousness, sense of entitlement – while Obama sounds like the sort who is more interested in people than myth, sympathetic more to failure than to power. And he likely will fail, because I think what he’s asking Americans to do is to confront themselves a little more than they’re comfortable with.

Simple little haiku, but it sums a lot of this whole ridiculous economic “crisis”:

The world of money
is all imaginary.
Now everyone knows.

– Ran Prieur

David Foster Wallace is dead.

I mean, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. Fuck.

Killed himself too.

Fuck.

Juno – I’d say a Modern Classic, worthy of serious Academic Attentions.  But I come away from it with a sense of unease.  That kind of nebulous despair which leads people to various unapproachable Wars – on Terrorism, Crime, or anything which stands in for some sort of collection, any aggregation of concepts which exist only in language.  My war on the Po-Mo?  Perhaps, but if only it were that easy:

Juno seems to me to be that wasted blank page of potential scribbled upon by poor poets.  They reckon that the Stalin purges and genocides and gulags and et. al were all the end result of Communism;  to be just as sweeping, let’s say Juno is the end result of Democratic Principles.  “Poetry is made by all, not one” would be, as far as I know, currently the pervasive literary sentiment:  and implies the curiously unspoken corollary, that we are all free to talk, but few are worth listening to.  Poetry is made by an accumulation of breaths, syllables, expressions, sighs;  winds, currents, eddies; some baffling new hive mind muse.  Where are we now?  We have some new, external force which stands in for us.  God is Dead, perhaps, but has been instantly replaced by it’s shadow-form, a mirrored us, God not as flowing beard prophet, but fabulous androgynous metrosexual?  In that Scientific Rhetoric of Truth, we’re all essentially fragmented, borrowed and co-opted parts of everything else.  Our internal selves are essentially external.  We’re collaged, appropriated, counterfiet images.  Given that I can access anything constructed, thought, imagined, and commited to form at any point in time, from any other point in time, I’m not so much creating anew anymore but referencing anything that has ever been and re-assembling, my medium not necessary my hands or world rough hewn potentiality, but some external software filter.  My abstractions create abstractions.  There’s nothing created which stops still and stays itself;  everything morphs into everything else.  And outside ourselves, watching over it, that liquid form of ourselves which we borrow ourselves from.

So, this is who I reckon Juno is.  A complexity of competing, opposed parts.  A conversation about a subject in a language in which there are no words.  What the hell is she?  Feminist?  Hippie?  Girl?  She’s “different” – but from what?  All the people who can relate to her, being as they are, “different”?  She doesn’t refer to anything.  She’d probably like to be told that, but the edge to it is that she’s static.  She’s a neutral force, an oil upon water.  She may as well be nothing.

Good links from Ran Prieur this week.  Firstly a compelling essay by Naomi Wolf about the social implications of porn.  Here’s some good thought:

” But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.”

Good shit.  Later on describes a process of isolation and alienation that I can only filter through the Modern Metaphor of Misunderstood Quantum Physics:  we all end up isolated and alone together, unto ourselves, drifting soundless and frictionlessly within voids.  I bring this up because it’s this Voice of the Vacuum that I hear when I read The Rainbow, and why that book excites me so much.  He got it;  he gets all this social fragmentation on a scientific level I’m so far ignorant of.

The other link is to an interesting review of The Dark Knight.  I am not allowed to watch these sorts of films.  Like the awful, awful Charlie Wilson’s War, such films are dangerous because they promote a shallow acceptance of terms, a general ignoring of fine print.  Oh, but it’s just a movie!  No.  It’s just a meme, a universally acceptable context.  We define ourselves on this sort of shit.  We shouldn’t promote bad politics and confused thought as entertainment.  But that ought be the end of my comments until I’ve actually seen it.

“I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn from a book. She is reading Anna Karenina.”

Holy fuck.

Please read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize Lecture. It makes you want to grab that happy cellphone girl tripping down the street with her Supre bag and scream in her face “FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOU!”.

This music video is really quite extraordinary.  It’s a celebration of anarcho-primitivism, I think, by a band called MGMT, who want to bring back psychedelic music.  It also strikes me as being the Pulse of the World.

You ought to watch the hi-res version, but if, like me, it makes your computer cry, here’s the Youtube version.

“Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura.” They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, “We want your aura.” I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for my ‘it’, I should try to figure out what ‘it’ is.

I think “aura” is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see as much of it as they want to. It’s all in the other person’s eyes. You can only see an aura on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all. I was having dinner the other night with everybody from my office. The kids at the office treat me like dirt, because they know me and they see me everyday. But then there was this nice friend that somebody had brought along who had never met me, and this kid could hardly believe that he was having dinner with me! Everybody else was seeing me, but he was seeing my “aura”.

When you just see somebody on the street, they can really have an aura. But then they open their mouth, there goes the aura. “Aura” must be when you open your mouth.”

- Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”

All I hear about Andy Warhol is bad things. “I Shot Andy Warhol” sympathises with Solanas, and makes him about to be a vapid, voyeuristic creep who created shallow artworks in the name of fame. I have got a good deal from his “Philosophy” – I really think he was trying to do something underrated, underappreciated, and completely new.

This evening I received mysterious and impromptu communique from a certain alien entity. We corresponded through a throughly disagreeable method: from the mothership a kind of morse code crossed with telepathic braille beamed from his spaceship which made me quite dizzy, and on my behalf, semaphore on my roof with road cones on my arms (those fuckers are heavy). He tells me he is well and his orbit intact. His interplanetary mission to take A and deliver it to B is much the same as always and still only tangentially important. The problem lies in the freshness of the recruits. They’re all stale. It’s been six stardates already and still only seen so many stars… Singstar cures these wounds with the “pornographic orgy” approach to the bonding which occurs only in deep ritual humiliation… of course I am not sure this is the right approach. I suggest that rare conjunction of the celestials which brings those of certain eccentric patterns into appropriate orbit. I still believe in the star-crossed. He sounded well and I sounded well, or at least as well as can be given the mediums of communication. Gusts of solar lumiere winds blew his spaceship back to Reticuli before he lost Team Champion Points. I couldn’t get the road cones off my arms and attempted to write my essay on Fabliaux; I think the broken mess that is my keyboard and the onomatopaeic death rattle gargle all over my screen will work out better than my other plans in the end.

Blog-girls post “Behind These Hazel Eyes” in earnest;  Stew finds a relatively obscure poem and finds that everything, everything is Illuminated, right here, summed up, immortalised in a Tarot archetype, the sum of the Postmodern world and his own paranoid place in it:

“there is nothing inside me but a large wound,
a hollow place where no one goes,
a windowless present, a thought that returns
and repeats itself, reflects itself
and loses itself in its own transparency,
a mind transfixed by an eye that watches
it watching itself till it drowns itself
in clarity:”

- Octavio Paz, “Sunstone”