Ruminations

My life has been strange lately; a weird combination of monastic retreat and jubilent extroversion, personal growth and personal loss, total eagerness and crushing ennui. As always, I've tried to keep myself busy in order to distract myself from the losses and solitude, but these things have a habit of catching up to me. Still, I think about the future a lot. It's almost all I think about: the ten million things I want to experience, achieve, and accomplish. It is both my opiate and my stimulant, a wellspring exuberance and a font of melancholy. (It's also potentially a source of all of this pseudo-romantic prose, but that's another matter altogether)

In my latest bout of - nausea? angst? melancholy? - I stumbled across a copy Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, which I had meant to read for a while and never really got around to. It's mystical and passionate, even if parts of it are totally opaque to me. His ninth thesis, however, has struck me, and I've included it below.

"A Klee drawing named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
- Walter Benjamin

I think this passage reflects the overall pessimism of the Frankfurt School, and it's hard not to think of negative dialectics and an inescapably grim historical materialism while reading this passage, which are not things I am prepared to totally buy. I also think that sometimes it's hard not to imagine myself/ourselves as being similarly hurtled forward through time by a force so inexorable and violent that it precludespossibility of meaningful change, and you/I/we are left with nothing to do but fixate upon the ruins piling up at our feet at a mounting pace.

It is 12:20 pm, May 19th 2010. It feels like it's about to rain. I am waiting for a train bearing a friend who will be late for a meeting that might not happen. I am working at a job that has been a learning experience, but has been spiritually exhausting. It is a limited tenure, but I have found out that I may be able to extend my contract for another year. Maybe. I need the money. I am beating my wings against the fury of an incoming storm and I am not sure how it will turn out.

Stay tuned.

Substance: Arkhon Infaustus - Orthodoxyn, Watain - Sworn to the Dark and Casus Luciferi, Busta Rhymes - When Disaster Strikes, Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter - The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, Ernest Hemmingway - The Sun Also Rises, Japanther - Rock n' Roll Ice Cream, LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

And ANOTHER Thing...

It needs to be said, so I'll just say it: the Olympic aesthetic is a decidedly fascist one. The torch burning, the flag waving, the mindless nationalism, the rhetoric about the "purity of sport" and supremacy of an elite class of athletes ... christ, we're one step away from eugenics here.

The ancient Greeks did not have a torch ceremony. The first Olympics torch ceremony was in Nazi Germany, in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Nice, eh?

Anyway, we've got another two years until the IOC uses the rights of the athletic elite to trample on the rights of the underclass in London, so until then let's everybody practice your indifference towards 95% of the sports that are involved in the Olympics (and 95% of the worlds social justice concerns that you have no stake in, apart from your shared stake in the wellbeing of other people).

Today's nutritional intake: Rational Youth - Cold War Nightlife EP, Iron Maiden - S/T, Zero Boys - Vicious Circle, Arghoslent - Incorrigible Bigotry

The Procession of Simulacra and Social Movements

I was in Vancouver last week for the start of the Olympics. It was a really strange time for me.

On one hand, I was excited about the Olympics. Large parts of downtown Vancouver had been pedestrianized, and were accordingly vibrant and brilliant. The massive support for street culture at this time reflected some of the excitement that got me interested in cities in the first place: it reminded me of sitting in classes during the fall of 2005 (!), after a year and a half of a boring and directionless university experience, and being stimulated by the thought of streets as a point of contact, social negotiation, struggle, and not-so-quiet beauty. I would be lying if I said I didn't find this really engaging. Many of my friends in Vancouver were similarly excited about the buzz in their city.

On the other hand, I felt some affinity for the argument that the glitz and the glamour of these games were obfuscating some disturbing social trends. The story by now should an unfortunately familiar one: gentrification, displacement, place-marketing, the construction of amenities for the wealthy at the expense of social welfare programs, and so on. In the case of Vancouver, however, these processes were hurtling forward at warp speed. Serious questions need to be (and have been) raised about the magnitude of funding that the City of Vancouver has dedicated to sprucing up Yaletown while a scant few blocks away the notorious Downtown East Side, Canada's poorest postal code, continues to grapple with deeply entrenched poverty, homelessness, crime, and drug addiction. Serious questions need to be asked about the viability of the Canada Line skytrain and twinning the road to Whistler, and why money wasn't spent on more sensible systems. Serious questions need to be asked about why housing promises for the game have fallen through, and about the scale of the games' incomprehensibly huge ($1 billion CDN) security budget. Serious questions need to be asked about the relevance of the Olympics themselves and the amount of investment they attract in a world where over 3 billion people still live on under $1USD per day (of course, this observation calls into question the whole spectacle endemic to neoliberal capitalism, and so it shouldn't be a surprise why it gets overlooked ... but still, come on).

I had one friend who shared these concerns, and he took to me a large protest of the games on opening day. I would estimate that the protest drew about three thousand attendees. It was peaceful and inclusive, and managed to march all the way to gates of BC Place, where it was stopped by a line of (surpsingly congenial) police officers. It was framed in class terms, which I think was the right idea. It emphasized democracy and communication, which again I think was the correct notion. And yet there is one thing about the protest that bothered me, and continues to bother me.

There were a small group of self proclaimed anarchists wearing requisite balaclavas and waving black flags at the forefront of the march, chanting anti-state slogans and coordinating their action with scouts operating ahead of the march via their cellphones. There were bored looking teens in brightly coloured keffiyeh snapping pictures, undoubtedly for their blogs. There scraggly looking men smoking joints and shouting "viva la relolution!". There is a no 2010 site offering "militant merchandise". There is a Tent City in the DTES where the population of homeless persons is outnumbered by middle-class UBC students. I look at all of this and can't help but wonder if revolution itself has become an empty signifier.

Revolutionairy social action, or playing right into the hands of
what marketing has informed us we should anticipate?

Have suburban malls selling Che Guevera shirts, radio-friendly punk rock, flag-burnings in Rage Against the Machine videos, romanticized accounts of revolution in television and film and so on commodified the concept of revolution so thoroughly that it has precluded a popular conception of what a real revolution (or really effective social action) might look like? If so, no matter how well-meaning these protests are, how effective can they actually be? Is the Spectacle, as Debord has it, really so skilled at processing and coopting dissent, turning it into a hapless caricature? Is there any hope for meaningful social action that can escape cliche, irony and marketing logic, or are these forces too deeply entrenched - in short, has Adorno's negative dialectic crossed the rubicon?

I don't want to think about the answer to that question right now. I'll have to, soon, but I don't want to right now. I want to believe in communication, I want to believe in democracy, and I want to believe in consensus, but some days...

Artistic ammunition for ontological warfare: The Raincoats - S/T, The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace, David Harvey - The Urbanization of Capital, Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender, Magrudergrind - S/T, Antipop Consortium - Fluorescent Black, Iggy Pop - The Idiot and Lust For Life, Jig Ai - Katana Orgy, As the Sun Sets - 7744, Lioness - S/T EP

Fin de siecle

9 hours ago I watched a man who had been teaching at this university since the early 70s give his last lecture ever before retiring. He finished his career with some Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

And then he frantically urged us that if we didn't rage now, all would be lost for us in the future.

Jesus, man.

Motivation: caffeine, Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime, Q and Not U - Different Damage, Sex Machineguns - Ignition, Squarepusher - Big Loada, The Tuss - Rushup Edge, The Smalls - S/T, and all the reading I've done on successful urban agriculture programs in Havana, which gives me some hope to rage against the drying of the light myself.

Cargo Cults

There are two Tim Hortons right beside each other in Mac Hall. As in, less than 20 feet away from each other. Apparently one of them is owned by the Student's Union and one is owned by the University. These two Tim Hortons are competing with each other, and both establishments are totally lined up at all times. This is the sort of coke or pepsi "choice" that is slowly driving me insane.

I have never bought a coffee from either of these places, and I never will. For an extra 20 cents or so I can buy fair trade coffee from a locally owned business. Sure, my 20 cents isn't changing the fucking world, but if it can help me feed my caffeine addiction without completely selling myself out to the system I hate, then that should be enough.



Also, I've written a ton of songs lately. Like six or so. What the hell? I haven't been writing for months, and all of a sudden I've had a weird rush of creativity. What new thing or person in my life is causing all this creativity? Some days not only do I not know the answer, but I don't think I really know the questions either.


Support: Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights, Daughters - Hell Songs, David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, David Harvey - The Right to the City, HEALTH - Get Color, Horse the Band - Desperate Living and the 1987 Ridge Monte Bello Cab that made last night so fun for me (and is making this morning excruciating).