surf’s up: columnated ruins domino

My uncle Peter died today. I never knew him, and only met him fleetingly. Of all the people in the family, he looked most like me. An overseas student in Sydney in the 1960s, Peter went mad, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalised for the rest of his life, ending up in a home in Canada.

All I really have left of him is an album of fine Australian surf music — 1963’s Bombora, by The Atlantics:

This remnant of Uncle Peter’s music collection haunted my childhood. I grew up with spine-tingling instrumentals like “Bombora” and “Free Fall”. And I just discovered the brilliant, spooky “War of the Worlds” while trawling for more on the net. All corks on the ocean.

the pop dialectic

A note on my new banner: as I explained a year ago, the somewhat misleading title of this blog was always “accidental”. The “anti” was added to the already-taken “popper.com” as a way of creating an “evil twin” substitute, as it were — I liked the way it suggested a weird kind of ambivalence and contradiction, rather than phobic disavowal (otherwise I’d have never used the name). It reminds me of the more nuanced and radical take on Hegelian philosophy implied by the name of the communist journal Aufheben:

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean “to pick up”, “to raise”, “to keep”, “to preserve”, but also “to end”, “to abolish”, “to annul”.

It makes you wonder if Deleuze and his mates are missing the complexity of Hegel. But in any case, I guess the ambivalence of the “antipopper” name wasn’t readily apparent to anybody else but me, so I’m now setting things straight by “bending the stick” and radically emphasising the “popper” part. (With a little help from everybody’s favourite Hegelians, the Situationist International.)

under the cobblestones…

I’m stuck in a whacky occupation of Worley Corporation, a war profiteering company that has an $800 million contract with the US Army to “reconstruct” oil infrastructure in Iraq. About thirty of us arrived at their office and started supergluing little toy soldiers to various surfaces, sticking up posters and generally making a polite nuisance of ourselves. Unfortunately we’re now in a negotiation deadlock with the company about confronting them with questions about their role in Iraq.

There are different positions amongst the occupiers as to how and why we should go about this: some want to get answers about how Worley’s contract is a reward for the presence of Australian troops; others think the quest for official word from these guys is somewhat irrelevant. I’m sympathetic to both kinds of position, but I also reckon that it’s pretty naive to think that a “valid” free-market contract, rather than one directly linked to Australia’s war involvement, would be much less scandalous. As with most of my opinions on the “scandals” surrounding the war, such things are horribly indicative of how things are working, but that our opposition shouldn’t hinge on corporations behaving or misbehaving according to various ideas of capitalist respectability.

We’re going around in circles with their minions. Tired now.

boys

The most awful thing in the world is waiting for the train on a platform with lots of boys who’ve just been to an Offspring concert. Just the right mix of idiocy, smugness and overwhelming Aryanness. Fuck. Off.

gellarisation

The cutest moment in film history occurs in Stanley Donen’s Charade: “I bet you don’t really need those,” says Audrey Hepburn as she snatches Cary Grant’s glasses and tries them on. Her eyes widen. “You need them,” she intones gravely.

These are the kind of moments that Sarah Michelle Gellar had in abundance in the first few seasons of Buffy, before the weight of too-literal, over-psychological drama descended on her shoulders. Tasj’s interest in “Hush” recently led me to even reappraise Season 4, in which you can still find so many shining, throwaway Gellar moments like [frowning, fumbling with leaky writing implement] “stupid pen…”. Now that’s acting. I mean it. None of the macho method crap, which is just another form of rockism.

But as the show shifted dangerously into histrionic Party of Five-isms, the increasing unlikeability and brittleness of her character, while interesting on paper, really didn’t serve Gellar well at all, and launched a fantasy within Buffy fandom that Gellar can’t act. What do you want, the prog rock guitar solo of acting? It’s like turning on your favourite punksters because they didn’t fare well as the backing band for a Hobbits on Ice arena concept show with Rick Wakeman. While the show never really revolved around Buffy (she’s rarely anyone’s favourite character), Gellar’s strengths were also the show’s structural strengths — the ditzy elegance, the economy of intonation, and the savvy, popist implication of depth, rather than its detailed and uninteresting reproduction. Here’s to Gellar.

money changes everything

Fly’s on the money. Here’s where I admit that I bit the bullet and bought Cyndi Lauper tickets. But to do so, I’m probably not going to Kelis. True! Lena was outraged when Caro and I discussed this last night, but I’m sure we talked about this twist — she probably thinks I “forgot to mention” Kelis in order to “protect her from the tragic truth.” :) Anyway, to celebrate bittersweet fate, here’s the b-side to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, “Right Track, Wrong Train”.

all we want is life beyond thunderdome

Okay, so I saw Troy the other day, and while it was infuriatingly pat — the whole Trojan war happens in like, three weeks (bah!) — it did prompt me to think more about how heroes figure in the battles of mythology. When Hector faces off against Patroclus, all the fighting around them stops, and when he slices open Patroclus’ throat, there’s dead silence. The idea of it seems so unlikely and ridiculous, like some kind of tacky JerryBruckheimerVision, but this scene of heroes flexing and bleeding in a sanctified bubble still somehow seems disturbingly appropriate. When confronted with this phenomenon on a reconstituted Trojan battlefield of the future, Hockenberry, the scholarly observer in Dan Simmons’ Ilium, notes:

I explained the Greek concept of aristeia — warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor — and how important it was to these ancients and how the larger battle would often pause so that the soldiers on each side could witness such examples of aristeia.

It’s not just displays of valor as a general substance that could coalesce anywhere, though — it’s no accident that aristeia is derived from aristos, “the best”, which also forms the basis for aristocracy, “the rule of the best”. And while heroes like Hector and Achilles have a logistical impact on the outcome of the war — they’re superhuman killing machines, and also serve as important attractors for morale because of this — their paths mostly occur on a higher, more “spiritual” plane to the logistics of battle. Their pivotal moments are imbued with significance other than military. Achilles doesn’t care about the war, he wants historical immortality.

In this I’m reminded of the function that Luke Skywalker plays in the Star Wars films. Luke gets his military-logistic duties out of the way in the first film by blowing up the Death Star, and then veers off onto another plane of dodgy spiritual significance. Interestingly, he only becomes a Commander in the Rebel forces, while Han Solo becomes a General, joining the characters like Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar who have real world authority, but who are quite incidental to the films. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s final showdown with Darth Vader and the Emperor occurs in a completely parallel narrative: he lets himself be captured in order to face the true evil of the Empire on a moral plane, while the Rebels engages the Imperial Fleet militarily.

In a time in which formal aristocracies seem somewhat irrelevant, the spiritual element of rule and war, which has gone from monarchy to investments in fascism in the last century, is reemerging in a glut of epic movies. Besides being just good fun, I can’t help but think that the sword and sandal epic is also the pill we take to forget about stuff like Abu Ghraib — it’s longing for a mythical time when war wasn’t so dirty. For when it had aristeia.

love bang crash wakka wakka

Is it just me, or does the Pixies’ “Bam Thwok” sound more like an Amps tune? I always thought the best thing about the Pixies was the space between Frank’s hyperbole and Joey’s tributes to Queen. A fragile relationship, and I’m not hearing it.