This weblog is pretty classy.
I came across this review of Susan Sontag's latest book on photography.
Sontag's book is the core of a special blog project that starts here
This is courtesy of wood s lot. It is a break or rupture from the standard way of thinking about aesthetics.
By and large Anglo-American aesthetics treats art and the human response to art as if they were intrinsic, permanent aspects of human life. It is certainly what I learned when I studied visual arts to balance philosophy) at the liberal university----just before discipline was wiped out by the cultural revolutionaries who saw the university as a corporation.
This timeless view of art is what Malraux challenges. His argument represents a radical departure from the tradition of Western aesthetics since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. It is a fundamental challenge to that aesthetic tradition because it historicises art.
The essay is by Derek Allan who is at the ANU. The paper can be found here
The key points in Malraux's argument are:
1. thinking about art begins with the objects that are in the art musem and not abstract philosophical definitions. This gives us the range of particular objects that contemporary Western culture considers to be art.
2. there has been enormous change in the range of these objects over
time (since 1900) to include objects from non-Western cultures such as, statues from Egyptian tombs, Mesoamerican figurines, or ceremonial masks from Africa and Oceania. Yet objects from non-Western cultures
3. What had once been seen simply as fetishes, idols, or curios - never as art--now became art. A good example are the objects of Australia's indigenous people.
4. This signified a new way of seeing involvinga radical break with what had gone before:- ‘une révolution esthétique’ that brought about a profound change in the very meaning of the term art and the experience it denotes.
5. The non-western objects of indigenous culture are not sacred for us; we do not place them in tombs, nor regard them as objects of reverence or as offerings for the gods. The ends they serve for us are those of something called ‘art’, and, in our eyes, belong in our art museums.
6. the art musem estranges the work/object from its orginal function -and this process is somethnng we take for granted. We see these objects as they are enframed by the art musem as ‘sculptures’, ‘pictures’ and ‘statues’.
7.Malraux’s rejects notions such as universal artistic ‘practices’ and timeless forms which say that these objects are ‘essentially art works' from the very beginning and that no essential transformation has taken place.
8.If art is time-bound - as subject to change and potential consignment to oblivion --then our aesthetic response has emerged at a specific point in time, and is susceptible to change. - The specificity, and ultimately the contingency, of the experience we name the experience of ‘art’ is distinctively ours and not something that we can, or even need to, see as deriving in some way from the ‘true nature’ or ‘essential purposes’ of the objects concerned.
9.The meaning of the word art in western civilization has changed throughout history. Art's various meanings were all crucially different from the meaning it has now assumed. Malraux argues that the closing years of the nineteenth century ushered in an ‘aesthetic revolution’.
The notion of art now, Malraux is arguing defines us as much as we define it, because it identifies a form of human response specific to us – specific to modern Western culture since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Suzanne has spent the last two days shopping for knitting needles so she could knit a scarf for her sister Barbara, jeweller to the lost. It was to be a birthday present.
No knitting needles could be found. All sold out.
All sold out. Can you believe that? What's going on here?
One newly opened store had sold out its entire stock---not just needles-- twice in the last four months.
I don't believe it.
What is the meaning of this? What is the cultural significance of knitting today?
Maybe this has something to do with it.
I naively thought that craft was being replaced by art and design. But it is not. Check out this or this
Scarf wearing has become connected to fashion Its a fashion statement.
Suddenly I found myself desiring a high fashion scarf. Looking good makes you fell better about yourself.
Suzanne eventually found the right needles and is currently knitting a high fashion statement whilst watching a program on yoga on tv.
I see that the selling of Hillary Clinton as a politician has even reached the far distant shores of Australia. We even have have 'exclusives' with a junior Senator from New York--about how a woman should be president---as she launches her opening shot in the 2000 Presidential campaign.
Now we should not get to carried away with all this. Buddy, the Clinton's dog, gets more space in Hillary Clinton's Living History than does Australia.
To tell the truth, I am more interested in Hillary's fashion, hairstyle and makeup than the deep political insights into international politics. This not meant as put down. After all she is a celebrity, a international brand name with a huge fan club. It is meant in the sense that the aesthetics of appearance is a key to modern politics in the glare of media exposure. The Clintons were very good at aesthetics and politics, even when they were under attack from the Republicans.
They give us a quite different understanding of aesthetics and politics to the standard one of the politics of modernity in which the primacy is on the aesthetic and one then considers the relevance of politics. The question here is whether the arts play a role in moral and political education and/or corruption; whether the arts further a democratic politics or are dangerous for such a politics.
The Clintons turn this relationship around. With them politics is an aesthetics. In doing so they managed to take it away from the old discussion of aesthetics and politics that is still talking about the German fascists.
It gets even more sophisticated with the re-election of George Bush
And we have Bill's book to look forward to for those who think that a women should not president of the USA. What will he tell us about how to manage the aesthetics of politics?
This is often proposed as a solution to Adelaide's problems. Flee the city and head for the hills.
I heard it just recently from the environmentalist John Coulter, a former SA Democrat Senator and Democrat Leader at a seminar. Speaking for Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). Coulter said the city per se is the problem. The city per se is not environmentally sustainable.
Coulter's solution of fleeing the city for the hills wher oen can see the stars and hear the birds ---turns its back on the city. It rejects the idea of Adelaide with a virbrant economy, a nice comfortable public arena, a good, innovative architecture and a lively arts scene. That is the sort of European city Adelaide aspires to become---full of nightlife, sophisticate dining, culture and style---and so able to retain the young who would have no need to go east for lifestyle.
But a stylish sustainable does not exist in Adelaide. It is not Barcelona or Bristol. There is little commitment from the state government to facilitate cultural businesses--an arts-based industry---in the form of start-up grants, mentoring, and business planning advice..
But it could be. So says John Montgomery of the consulting firm Urban Cultures. Instead of thinking of Adelaide as a country town in decay Montgomery suggests that we think of Adelaide as a city state like Barcelona, Venice, Lisbon and Venice. It is thinking of creating a city with spirit, interesting, stylish, sophisticated and design aware.
So lets forget about the farmers, irrigators, wine and food. Lets think cultural businesses: ie., getting more creative people and artists setting up businesses then helping them to grow and thrive. So says John Montgomery.
An enticing vision?
Being a romantic with a melancholy tendency I am offside with both the high modernists with their transcendental principles and the utilitarians for reducing life to egoistic utility. I see them as having a set of high principles with which they club you with. Violence lurks beneath their shiny, polished surfaces.
But I also deeply distrust a key cultural tradition of the US. It is not the squalor, violence, and ignorance you see everywhere; nor the European charge that American culture is mere pop entertainment and so is empty and full of junk.
What I distrust is the Christian tradition with its underlying commitment to salvific principles. This cultural bulwark of Christian belief (Protestant)---- the inarticulate Christian faith of common people in the Anglo-American world. This tacit common knowledge is very black and white, militantly Christian, is fundamentalist and seems to always drift to the right.
What I hear it say is this:
'Either you get religion and fight the devil to the death, or you lazily saunter down the road with him to the gulag that some call utopia. The devil used to be communists. Now it is Islamic terrorists. It is a fight to the death. You are either with us or against us.'
I shudder at the hysterical self-righteousness that is thrown at you whilst it paints a dark, terrible world ruled by the devil. It is all based around a ritual of repentance in which you are required to fall to your knees and profess their guilt for your evilness.
I distrust it because I fear it. Does that make me anti-American? Does that make my mindset one of 'America is evil and it's enemies are good?'
That implies that I think lin terms of the rigid dualities of the fundamentalist Christian.
When faced with all that thunder and damnation I turn away. I become lighthearted. I talk about sex and romance and my desire to be well fed and comfortable. I say I like to spend the day smelling the herbs and roses, looking at autumn leaves fall to the ground and watching the sunlight bounce off raindrops. I point out that my moral code comes from Elvis---Don't be Cruel---and I say that the animals should be freed.
Just a postmodern ironist folks. Thats all I am. Lets talk about Matrix Reloaded. Or watch Law and Order on the Canadian-owned commercial television.
This is courtesy of Angela Bell.
The article is about the culture of the Australian left being closed and locked into a mindset of anti-Americanism. Rob Shilkin says:
"Sadly, though, the members of Australia's anti-war set are now choked by such a thick fog of anti-Americanism that it prevents them from responding rationally to any issue with which America is even tangentially involved. Most on Australia's left display an unthinking knee-jerk reaction to all decisions or statements that emanate from the current US administration. In their narrow world, everything that President Bush and the "neo-cons" say, or do, must be wrong. It is simply not possible to reasonably engage in debate with Australians of this mindset."
Yep I'm pathological. This anti-American mood has a long history that says I'm an embittered utopian. I really need to see my psychoanalyst. Trouble is I cannot afford it. All my money goes into paying off the mortgage. So I'm left with my affliction.
Sadly, Angela agrees with this acount of the left's mind set and the knee-jerk reaction. She says:
"The fixed idea that America is a force of evil allows all other things to fall into place. Just watch what America does and disgree. America is evil, it's enemies are good. America is capitalist, capitalism is evil. Hollywood's badness is only excused by people in the film industry who also hate America. And, of course, anyone who doesn't share this hatred of America is also seen as evil or, at best, stupid."
Well let me set the record straight. I'm a lefty. I opposed the war. I do not like the Bush Administration.I love Jane Jacobs I have a soft spot for Richard Rorty and I respect American federal democracy. That refutes the 'I hate America' claim.
What is going on here is a crude determinism applied to the left but not to the speaker. As the editorial says:
"In principle, determinism would have the self-defeating effect of calling one’s own motives into question. In practice, however, it operates as a simple double standard. One’s opponents are bad; oneself and one’s allies are good."
Now consider the old lefty at Public Opinion. He raises issues about two levels of discourse around the war here says that there is a need for the government to level about the real reasons for the war. It is about a question of trust and Parliament needing to ensure the accountability of the executive. Public opinion even spells out the realist/idealist philosophy behind the two war camps.
But Rob Shilkin will have none of this. He is not interested in considering the issues. He is more interested in the pathology of the left. And he just dismisses the left's proposal to make the executive accountable. He says:
"Australia's anti-war brigade will lose more than moral integrity by maintaining its opposition to the operation that brought freedom to the Iraqi people..... Morally and strategically, opponents to the war should now leave the issue well alone and admit that the liberation of Iraq has been an almost unqualified success. Any suggestion of a Parliamentary inquiry into this issue should be quickly dismissed. All that it would demonstrate is that Australia's anti-war set is suffering from its own intelligence failure."
The charge is that the left's moral judgement is subsumed into blind ideological ferour. So the left forfeit the right to speak publicly. Why should we let the mad speak is the tacit question?
At no point is there any engagement with the ideas and interpretations that have been put on the table. Such an engagement is continually avoided in favour of dismissal because the opponent is deemed to be perverse, alien and dangerous.
Rarely is it asked:'is there something wrong with conducting public debates on matter so importance in this way?' Why do we demonise our opponents rather than engage with the issues? Why do we avoid considering the arguments on the issues that are publicly contested?
Could it have something to do with this?
Now just to make sure that this is not taken to be left wing tirade against conservatives. Let me conced this point. During the early 1990s some on the left did collapse public debate into mockery through their entrenched habits of disdain for populism; they did close down public debate through using racism as a weapon; and they did exercise a kind of soft censorship on what topics were permissable.
But this sort of political habit is being repeated by the conservatives. Same game different players. So it is the health of the public culture that we should be worried about.
I guess this is one way to break up a relationship.
It is better than slowly dying inside from bitter conflict.
But 14 months suspended sentence is a bit rough.
I thought a bit of pessimism is warranted.
(Its late and raining.)
The roots of this weblog lie in rejecting the idea that history follows a subterranean course towards enlightenment. You could call that upbeat idea a secular religion of the liberal state. It has the effect of keep our minds locked up in tradition.
Some of those who reject the upbeat philosophy of history sometimes adopt a dystopian conception of history. One example is a green strand, eg., its downhill all the way to catastrophe from when the whites conquered Australia. Only rarely does this strand of green suggest that history could take a dramatic turn for the better.
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Here's a dystopian account to chew on. Be warned its a strong brew.
“The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish.”
Alexander Herzen in Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Part III, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p. 34.
Something to share with one's loved ones?
Then again perhaps not.
This is a bit of fun. Fun and games for the girls. Apparently they are better at the sexual fun and games than the guys. Clearly Sydney is the play time city. Do read it. Its fun.
I found some time yesterday to attend a 'seminar' on the future of Adelaide. It was difficult to get to at 5pm with work and walking the dogs but I managed to squeeze the time in.
Maybe it would give me some ideas about how to develop this weblog. How does romanticism speak in the neo-liberal present?
The seminar was organized by the Adelaide City Council under the auspices of the thinkers in residence program.
The thinkers in residence is a good idea. I had missed Herbert Girardet and his ideas of Adelaide as a green city--that happened about the time of the big shift, rennovations and a holiday. Time is a big problem these days.
The theme of the Charles Landry seminar was urban renewal and development through unlocking the creative potential of the city. The topic was double the population of the city or perish as a city but it was really about thinking creatively about cities as places to live and dwell. It overlaps with innovative Adelaide
Adelaide is on the cusp. It has been bypassed by global capital and it has little in the way of population growth. The young people leave the place for work and fun in Melbourne or Sydney. To all intents and purposes Adelaide is in danger of sliding from a good and vibrant regional city to a decaying large country town.
Something needs to be done. But little gets done in Adelaide. Hence the old 1970s image of Athens of the South is very tatty. It is a good image--a vibrant exciting place with a vigorous artistic life--- and it was recycled by all the speakers. They all started from the premise that Adelaide is a good place to live. As a place it gives an anchoring and sense of community belonging. They mostly addressed how it could be implemented.
The City Council has decided the answer to urban renewal and development is to double the population living in the city boundary----in the inner area surrounded by the square of parklands. So we have lots of new housing going up in the form of apartments, townhouses and units (we now live in one of these); but none of them have any connection to sustainable living at all. No solar power, no recycling of water water, no capturing of rainwater has been built into these mass of buildings.
Any form of urban renewal disconnected from sustainable living is scandalous in a city, which depends on the River Murray that is on a life support system and is facing a 20% decrease in winter rainfall due to global warming. These building are just plonked on the urban land without any sense of people dwelling within the landscape.
Under neo-liberalism the economy is a machine independent of social purpose.
Nugget Coombs said that.
With the shift to a neo-liberal mode of governance the market becomes the main instrument of governing the population ---co-ordinating the affairs of the nation. That has been the purpose of the economic reforms of the last two decades.
In this world it is held that a little more unemployment, a little less education, a little more market discipline and a little less freedom of expression would make the world a better place. It would be good for all Australians.
Well, GDP may have risen and the economy may be booming but I'm unhappy.
What I have experienced is that my economic security as a middle class person has been kicked away. I experience this new world in which the market is in charge of my future with a mixture of loss and anger. I experience my income as falling; I sense that I have been hung and drawn; that my life has been hollowed out. It has been a long slow downward slide in income relative to prices.
I don't like the steady squeeze on my income and the general decline in the quality of my life. I will grimly hang onto the past as I struggle with my life.
Nor do I want the markets to neutralize my social memory that things were different once. Nor do I want my values, motivations and judgements to be spliced into market ones as the market reshapes our culture and pulls us ever more into the structure of the new capitalism.
Poor old junk for code. It languishes at the bottom of the blog hierarchy. That means it is junk.
Junk for code does have a bit of an identity problem. It had an accidental beginning, and it became a culture blog that had its roots in the old Frankfurt School of cultural criticism (melancholy pessimism). It did okay in its earlier Blogger form, and it had a slow but steady growth in readership with no promotion on my part.
Then things feel apart with the shift to Movable Type around the time of the end of the Iraq war. The readership dropped way off. What was left from the Frankfurt School of cultural criticism was the voice of individual lived experience in a technocratic world. Its ethos was a romantic one od defending culture in a social world that is governed by maximising utility through exploiting natural resources.
But how to continue this weblog?
I'm rather fond of junk for code but I'm not sure what to do with it. I do not that have much time or energy to devote to it.
I feel saddened by that.
Anyone got any suggestions?
This looks to be very interesting. It is courtesy of the delightful Boynton.
It is about place and architecture and has a great quote:
"Place is to architecture, it may be said, as meaning is to language."
It develops my earlier regionalism & architecture post.
I will explore the link further when I have more time as some of the writings are familar to me.
I have just caught up with the news. Lleyton Hewitt was knocked out of the first round of Wimbledon. I did not have a damp eye when I heard.
Hewitt's competitive spirit is one of war against enemies. He takes on the world. Its an example of paranoid culture.
I see that one of the high priests of architectural modernism---Mies van der Rohe---is in the process of being rehabilitated at MOMA.
See here if you want to connect to the pseudo-avant-garde posturing of a transcendent modernism in Australia that separates architecture from life.
Lady Sun an Iranian blogger who writes well, is perceptive and has interesting things to say.
Let me quote her:
"I do want people to support the students in Iran, but I see no point but disturbance in Bush supporting the students. When he supports them, bells start ringing in the minds of the hardliners here that most probably the riots are getting nourished by Bush and his gang. The forgotten point here is that students didn't start rioting. Everything started from their peaceful marching to protest against the privatization of universities. Suddenly the members of the pressure groups attacked them out of nowhere hitting the students. Everything started when the innocent students were unfairly beaten by the members of the pressure group who seems to be immune by a secret power.
When they start hitting you, massacring you, and disrespecting you, you will become defensive. That's exactly what happened to the students. But when the defense started it turned out into a riot....."
She thinks (rightly in my judgement) that George Bush is a fairweather friend of those fighting for freedom and democracy in Iran.
".......Where was this philanthropic president 'for all seasons' when Iranian girls have been raped and buried in mass graves by Iraqi soldiers? Who was caring about Iranians' freedom, democracy and solidarity when cities of Iran were hit by US made Iraqi missiles?
Why is Bush listing Iran as a country that supports terrorism, and even if he is right, why is he setting limitations for Iranian ordinary people who have suffered the most from terrorism? Why are our movie directors being rejected to enter the States to participate in film festivals? Why are our sportsmen fingerprinted while entering the country? Why? What kind of support of the Iranian people is this?"
Do take time out to go and read her. She has a lovely entry on the fears of romance called Strange Me.
It's a gas. Does that girl hate liberals.
My my.
It is not just successful liberal women she hates. Its Liberals. Try this:
"Liberals don't care about the environment. The core of environmentalism is a hatred for mankind. They want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living and vegetarianism. Most crucially, they want Americans to stop with their infernal deodorant use."
The deodorant bit is a new definition of liberalism I have to admit. I go along with the totalitarian tendencies of liberalism myself, but, hell, I never got around to connecting those tendencies to deodorants.
But there you go. Anne can sure make those connecting leaps.
But I could not make sense of this one.
It's got me beat.
We have lots more of Anne Coulter soon with her forthcoming weblog called CoulterGeist.
Oh my, Anne has been reading those Germans on the movement of Spirit. That is a very unAmerican thing to do, according to Allan Bloom.
Anne just loves America. It's simple. If you don't clap for Bush on his big state of the union war speeches, then its treason. America is Republican.
And this response to Anne Coulter from my old weblog is for the record. It shows that the girl has depth.
the bourgeois left in Labor. Thats P.P. McGuinness saying that in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Who would that be? Are there any equivalents of a Packer or a Murdoch in the the left of the Australian Labor Party? Who could these left-wing capitalists in the ALP possible be? What politician does he have in mind?
Me thinks Paddy boy is seeing things.
Again.
I won't bother responding to Gerard Henderson's piece on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. There is little point.
It's junk.
Nothing more need be said.
Sydney Nolan is one of Australian's great modern landscape painters. He is notable for exploring the pioneering myths, the drought and flood.He also had a good photographic eye.
His 1940's landscapes of the Australian interior (outback) have shaped how we (white Australians) see our continent.
That aerial image of mountain ranges is an alien, inhospital landscape that is devoid of plant or human life. It is a dead world. An example of the sublime as a mode of terror that struck dread and fear into our very being.
It is a misleading representation----a European one of Australia as the other of European civilization.
Why a misleading representation? Consider these representations of specific places in the "outback"-----in the Macdonnell Ranges, west of Alice Springs---by Albert Namatjira.
Inland Australia is far from the dead heart. It is full of life.
The dead heart heritage of Nolan has taken white Australians a long time to throw off. His representation of the Australian landscape as death continues to be celebrated today as iconic rather than seen for what it was--a myth.
The Howard Government's recent raids on Iranian homes of people involved with The People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) by the Howard Government strikes me as unjust.
The organization has a military arm in Iraq that is involved in an armed struggle with Iranian government. Australian foreign policy follows the US and so it holds that Iran is part of the "axis of evil" and has targeted Iran for being due for regime change. Acording to this logic the Iranian people whose houses were raided are the good guys trying to overthrow the bad guys for a more democratic Iran.
So why see them as terrorists? Why raid them? Why are they seen to supporting or financing terrorists? The representatives of the People's Mujahideen claim that the Iranian Government is repressive, tortures its own citizens and supports terrorism. Yet they are deemed a security threat by the national security state.
The Iranians were puzzled by the raids as can be seen from the interviews on this Insight program on SBS. Well this gives some indication of what is going on. Iran will crack down on Al Queda inside its borders if Australia cracks down on the People's Mujahideen:
"It is understood that in talks with the Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, this week, Iran proposed a deal to take significant action on al-Qaeda if the US cracked down on the militant MEK. Formerly funded by Saddam Hussein, the MEK is based in northern Iraq but did not come under heavy attack during the US-led invasion... Iranian officials confirmed they were still holding a number of al-Qaeda operatives, and suggested exchanging those prisoners for senior MEK figures."
Downer has cut a deal. Innocent people in Australia suffer. No matter. They are expendable, even if Australia is a multicultural society. They are Arabs. We do not want those sort of people here anyway. So they can be used as cannon fodder in power politics.
The Hutt Street Centre does a stirling job in looking after the homeless and disadvantaged in Adelaide. The homeless come to the Centre for a feed and a shower. The staff at the Centre see around 200 hundred a day, many of whom have mental health problems.
Increased numbers of homeless people with mental health problems exist because of the de-intitutionlization of the big mental hospitals. But no money has been put into the community to provide services for mental health. The Centre does its best with its two social workers seeing mental health clients; but the Centre is given little assistance from the state bureaucracy.
The Rann Government said no no no to money for the homeless. Treasurer Foley took great satisfaction in preparing a economcially reponsible budget. What happened to the Labor compassion? Fogotten. The welfare state has turned a blind eye.
So what happens to the homeless? The police become involved, that's what. Why? Because of the homeless with mental health problems commiting minor offences. So without institutional support mental health is transformed into a law and order issue. The courts direct the lost souls into special programs but these cannot cope with the overload.
And that much heralded Social Inclusion Unit of the Rann Government. This was the sign of Labor compassion in a government thats tough and hard on law and order and obssessed with a budget surplus? What is the Social Inclusion Unit doing? Nothing.
So much for Labor compassion.
Here is a solution to my spatial anxiety about the poor architectural design in Adelaide, and the reproduction of the same old stuff in the name of heritage in a city that once saw itself as the 'Athens of the South.' That 1970s image has well gone and it has been replaced by a conservative provincalism.
How to move forward? The suggestion holds that Adelaide should embrace its design community including its architects, and help them assert a regional identity through good design.That is the view of Francesco Bonato, (director of Tectvs Design) the new President of the SA Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
I support this desire. What is needed is good design suited to teh climate and the need for Adelaide to become an eco-city.
Regional identity is the key here.The suggestion is that it is based on an architecture that is rooted in the characteristics of a specific region while still utilizing the technological advantages of modern building.
By this I presume Bonato means that we get behind good design that responds to the needs and opportunities of a specific region; is rooted in the region; and so is an architecture that is meaningful within its context. This would be an architecture that acts as a reaction to the phallocentric forms of the International Style that symbolized the later phases of modernism. This modernism is a stand alone, technological architecture that is free of local reference and meaning, and which assesses buildings in terms of the function and integrity of materials.
Sad to say, Adelaide is not nurturing good regional architecture. From what I see in the building boom along the coast near Victor Harbor, the new seaside architecture is dominated by the ethos of the biggest house on the smallest at the lowest price. This has very little to do with developing new forms of architecture that draw upon local knowledge and traditions, and are adapted to the local climate, economy, and culture. There is very little by way of a careful design response to a localized, physical sense of place. It is more a case of living around dismal architecture.
What a critical regionalism would do is react against Sydney as the metropolitan center of the Australia, which embodies the victory of universal civilization over locally inflected culture. A regional architecture can be sustained if it distances itself from both the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the pre-industrial past.
This would be an architecture that explored possibilities for natural daylighting, natural ventilation, shading and for passive solar heating and cooling are all important. It would foster the creation of an architecture that can selectively be opened to its surroundings, and has a sensitivity to nature through the interaction of inside and outside spaces.
Though I respect Harry Seidler as an architect I've never been overly fond of his high modernist architecture with its roots in the Bauhaus. He also dislikes criticism (scroll down the page to Angry lecturer) of his buildings. Here is some criticism of Seidlers modernist buildings.
But I do agree with this remark by Harry Seidler:
"To be perfectly honest, Australian architects don't measure up in international terms – I only measure success in those terms. There's nobody and nothing here that sends the blood pressure up. It's a backwater, a provincial dump in terms of the built environment."
Rewrite Australian with South Australian and I'd agree.
Though I think that Adelaide's regional architecture should be conserved as regional cultural heritage, and so is not simply a constraint on the progress of a universal architecture, I also concur with Siedler on heritage:
"All this heritage mania is mindless junk most of the time. I'll defend a heritage building but all of this neighbourhood character stuff is unsupportable. The dictum is, often, if you can't keep the building, keep the front. If there is no old façade, imitate one, copy an old-looking neighbour. The result is architecture reduced to two dimensions with remnants of the old stuck on new buildings like postage stamps. It amounts to nothing more than fakery."
There is a lot of fakery in the new/old architecture in Adelaide. But heritage and high modernism are not the only options. Consider Glenn Murcutt
It was around the time that I realised I was but the waste product of an academic system that I discovered that romantic love (ie., exquisite abandonment, the ability to lose myself in someone else completely, to trust them completely) was a necessary illusion (scroll down to Love’s Reverberations Deborah Pike). It was around that time that I also grew tired of the performative aspects of gender, with their diverse masquerades played out in the codes of femininity and masculinity.
Gender-bending was all the rage in academia and everything was being read through the lens of queer theory.
Me? Well even though I detested the decayed enlightened economic reason that ruled public life I embraced the enlightened model of love, with its heavy emphasis on reason to loosen the pathological straitjackets. Sort of philosophy as therapy if you know what I mean. Others call it psychoanalysis.
What I did I find was that it was impossible to integrate the sexual and sensual into our everyday bodily relationships in academia. The academia, for all the postmodern talk of gender bending and queer theory, was too caught up in an austere high modernism that deeply despised popular culture. That high modernism (in philosophy) was in thrall to the technocratic ideal of instrumental reason with its emphasis on objectivity, efficiency and utility.
To cut a long story short I had an awakening. Romantic love was not the ground on which to fight a rear guard action against instrumental reason. Others, of course, thought I'd lost it. How could any one who wanted to be sane and sensible think that way.
The obvious solution to being torn and frayed was the family. You know the middle class family in leafy suburbia.
Invisible Adjunct does a stirling job writing about the corporatisation of the universities. I came across this post this evening. Its a beauty. The post is based on this article
The post captures my experience of academia so well. This bit is spot on. There is no academic job market. Now why is that not being said openly and honestly.
When a postgraduate student and an adjunct I was told that there would be serious staffing problems in essentially all fields within the arts and sciences due to early retirement. Jobs galore was the account given. I was on the money. Tenure beckoned. Just work hard, publsih books and get your teaching up to speed and everything would be hunky dory.
The opposite --no full time jobs---was what actually happened. Along with a process of low-wage, casual positions for PhD's; the deprofessionlization ogf academic teaching and the rise of a academic underclass. The reality was that the universities were full of dead wood in the senior tenured academics and they were institutionalizing the rise of permanent underclass working outside the tenure track.
What was happened inside academia was what was happening in the rest of the Australian economy under a neo-liberal mode of governance (the link is to a bit of Marxist analysis). It led to the establishment of two-tier academic labor system.
And my reaction to being an adjunct and so excluded from the protective guild system of the tenured staff? It was a road to nowhere. Whilst being on the treadmill you felt like the waste product that must be flushed out of the system. And when you look at it dispassionately, the whole point or the purpose of the PhD production process is not to produce degree-holders for tenure-track jobs in academia but to provide cheap and exploited non-degreed teaching labor. That strips the ego bare.
Ten years of academic training as an apprentice to become a waste product. I along with a whole generation.
Excluded from a closed guild system with a PhD means that you are too highly qualifed to be an adjunct. So you become surplus to requirements, as they say in the state bureaucracies. Whilst becoming surplus to requirements I started reading material along these lines. I felt like junk and I wanted to know what I had become. What sort of person had been created by a PhD in philosophy within the "iron cage" of a rationalized modernity? I embraced Heidegger's view that human beings are mere "standing reserves," raw materials to serve the technological system, which treats nature as if it were a gasoline station.
I concluded that there was a pervasive crisis in Australia's Higher Education institutions and I lost interest in doing what I was officially supposed to be doing in terms of academic philosophy. Philosophy's fate was similar to the fate of classical studies three or four generations ago. I embraced the postmodern belief in the continuousness of academe and the real world (the rest of civil society including the marketplace).
I looked for the bridge across the divide between academia and the rest of civil society.
I managed to get the TV working last night in the Victor Harbor holiday shack. (Something is wrong with the arial connection). It was just in time to catch a few seconds grab of John Howard holding forth in the House of Representatives about the weapons of mass destructon issue.
Our Prime Minister was responding to claims that Australians had been misled over the weapons of mass destruction issue and a forthcoming Senate inquiry into the misleading.
His response?
"I had some investigations made through the Office of National Assessments. have been informed as follows: that United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies have concluded that at least one of the three vehicle trailers found in Iraq is a mobile production, biological weapons production facility."
No one else is saying this. Never mind. Australia is speaking independently for once on foreign policy.
Then there was this great line:
"Those on the opposition who now seek to denigrate what this Government and this country did are in effect calling for the restoration of Saddam Hussein."
Then a big patriotic flourish about the Government being proud of Australian involvement in the Iraq war rounded off the speech.
I was so knocked out I went and poured myself a drink of a good quality chardonnay. This was beyond political bluff. Howard was losing it. He looked threadbare and pathetic. There was no aura of the statesman.
As Tim Dunlop comments this is "reaching the bottom of the barrel" and "getting close to being the sort of 'reds-under-the-bed' comment that finally got Malcolm Fraser laughed out of office."
The newly revamped The Adelaide Review has an article on the homeless. The image of the 1930s is returning.
The article is by Andrew Mole. It says that there are about 6000 homeless in Adelaide and the numbers increasing. As is to be expected since homelessness has multiple causes: primarily intravenous drugs, mental illness and gambling; followed by domestic violence, alcohol and unemployment. The old profile of the male homeless is changing as there is a surgence of middle aged women due to the rise of pokies gambling in pubs.
Those trying to deal with the problem, such as Baptist Community Services, are committed to the issue but they have no money. Others providing services include the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul. But there is little financial support for community health ----health out in the field---where it is most needed.
The Baptist Community services argue that the whole dry zone aboriginal issue has nothing to do with homelessness. The Dry Zone pushes many of the indigeneous people who use the city's squares for meetings and socialising beyond the fringes of the CBD. It makes them invisible.
The Adelaide City Council tips in money for support services but it does not see the issue as its problem. It is obssessed with dry zones for aborigines gathering together to drink and talk and in shifting these aborigines from Victoria (and Whitmore) Square to the western parklands. The Adelaide City Council appears to be caught up in a Tidy Town Town mentality.
Despite a buget surplus of around $300m the Rann Government says there is no money. Little money is forthcoming from the Rann Government. It supports the dry zone, sees the dry zone as a part of the homeless problem, and sees the rise in the homeless being caused by the harsh breaching scheme of the Federal Department of Social Serivces, which results in people dropping through the welfare net. The Rann Government says that its caring hands are tied because of the lack of federal funding for mobile health services, detox units, housing support agencies and staff.
Since the Olsen Liberal Government the homeless problem has been swept into the Dry Zone issue----ie., it was constructed as a law and order problem. The Dry Zone is used as a smokescreen by Liberal politicians.
Often when I turn the pages of The Australian I notice all the journalists mentioning the inepitude the sports administraton of Soccer Australia in the sports pages.
(Just check the website of Soccer Australia.)
The incompetence seems to go on and on and on. Attempts at reform seems to fail again and again. I have no idea what is happening is happening, why the inmates are running the asylum, or have been for years. Nor do I particularly care. Its a national joke.
But this guy does. He is full of hope. He sees a new beginning just around the corner.
I hope his hopes are not dashed. He seems to be passionate for the game.
What I read here is a bit puzzling. It says that:
'The public has a need for sporting heroes as well, and every generation seems to anoint a new god. "There's always one," Jolly said. "There was Nicklaus and Palmer, there was Michael Jordan for a long time, now it's Woods and Schumacher. In 10 years it will be somebody else."'
How come. I have no need for a sporting hero. Maybe Michael Schumacher is a a hero for Tim Blair because he likes fast, stylish cars and admires Schumacher's extraordinary skill.
But a need for a hero? Why? Is it because we need to look up to someone? To model oneself on that person? To identify with them? To be inspired by the hero.
Hardly. Take Leyton Hewitt as a hero. Can you imagine anything worse? With Hewitt its a simple back and white view of Leyton against the world that is modelled on the parodic Rocky V1 of a patriotic Rock versus the Soviet cyborg.
This is sport as war. You can admire Hewitt as the kid who made good on the global stage, but he needs to to be taken down a peg---just like the Australian cricket team. It is a world in which you hate the media, call officials spastics, abuses black linesman and has little responsibility to the game that has made him wealthy. He's full of hatred.
Yuk. Lets hope Andre Agassi takes out Wimbledon, Hewitt is beaten in the first round by an unknown qualifier and the courts throw out his claim for damages.
Due to the lack of internet connection these last three days. due to problems at Iprimus, I have started to scan the business pages looking for what's what in the teleco industry. I see that Iprimus (with a capital investment of 300 million) is in the second tier of the telecos after Testra and Optus. It is breaking even.
Well that's better than being loss-making, collapsed or in administration.----as most of the other second tier telcos.
Still it is highly unlikely that Iprimus will surive the shakeout in the industry that will see consolidation. That consolidation witll result in the dominance of Telstra and Optus plus---just maybe---another player.
Don't you love the market talk. Its all about the survival of the fittest. Judging by whats been happening lately I can expect more disconnection in the future.
I've spend some time cruising the wine districts these last two weeks. Expansion is everywhere---- in the Clare Valley, Langhorne Creek and the Barossa---- and it is all based on River Murray water. More and more vineyards are going in.
It had the feel of a boom time coming. Yet the historical reality is more akin to this----boom and bust.
From what I could see it is the big boys moving in. They are after quick profits----- high-volume, low priced wines--- and they appear to indifferent to the increasing salinity levels. As Philip White, the wine critic, observes:
"Winemakers tend to blame the cotton and rice growers for salinity, particularly in the Murray, but their record here is really bad. The aquifers of McLaren Vale, Polish Valley, Padthaway, Langhorne Creek, to an increasing degree, the Barossa Valley and even Coonawarra is not healthy, they are all very badly damaged by winemaking."
It won't be long before you can taste the salt in the wine.
The expansionists are not there for the long haul. They have no concern about developing a regional identity or sustainability. Its quick profits. But such businesses are not sustainable in the long run. Philip White again:
"In the last 30 years we had a really good opportunity to be the world's best dry grain viticulturists, instead of that we chose to be the world's best irrigators, and we have ridiculous figures where you know, it's up to a 1000 tonnes of water to make one tonne of cheap cask wine which is sold for less than the price of bottled water. That is not sustainable and if I was a shareholder from whichever country, I'd be very, very concerned about the future of that business."
From what I saw there is a question mark over the industry in South Australia. In 2001 it was Normans in trouble. In 2003 it is Southcorp.
Still no internet access. This the third day of the server being down. Iprimus keeps on saying the engineers have fixed the problem (last night) only to backtrack (this morning). It is is impossible to gain access to tech support. Voice mail says the phones are busy and you are cut off.
So you are left disconnected from the cyber world.
Here's a good line. "Sydney is a great place to live, to work, to visit."
It was made by Lucy Turnbull the new Lord Mayor Sydney over lunch with Maxine McKew.
As they say in politics she say that wouldn't she.
I would question live. It would be if you had lots of money and lived on the Harbour. Life would be sweet and good. You could then forget all about Sydney town being an unsustainable mode of life.
As Lucy Turnball says herself:
"Rule No 1 is making the physical environment safe and friendly. Rule No 2 is creating the sort of social infrastructure that will enhance the city."
And rule no 3 making the city sustainable?
This is a state in which the Carr Labor Government has consistently acted to curtail the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, which incorporated ecological and social considerations, increased the powers of local governments and give citizens the right to object to developments. It has eroded this act has a result of the developmentalist ethos that has ben fuelled and masked by neo-liberalism.
This a developmentalism ethos that is hostile to the right of citizens to object againt specific licence and lease applications, let alone challenge the merit of particular approvals before independent tribunals. You cannot say no to economic development, not even to ensure environmental protection through good planning in Sydney town.
The server has been down. IPrimus has got problems. They seem to have many. So I end up paying for a service that I don't have.
It all means that there has been no weblogging from home. There is no connection to the world outside inner city pad.
I never had the connection once. I sat at home and wrote books. Now I'm lost without the connection. Distraught.
'Tis a sign of addiction is it not?
My response confirmed everything Suzanne suspected. I've lost it. Life is not worth living with weblogging. The boy needs to see a psychiatrist to get some balance back in his life. Or something to that effect.
The new City Council under Mayor Harbison has nailed its reforms to the more cars in the city agenda. Under the new urban regime proposals to close off Victoria Square to cars have been defeated; the city now markets itself as place to shop in opposition to the suburbs by building more car parks to attract more cars. And law and order will deal with the homeless and street kids. Its a traditional regime of economic development and growth with its mentality of more development is better and the city as a growth machine.
Bits of the old middle class progressive or quality of life regime do remain. Developers are moving ahead with projects to attract more people to live in the city and they are talking about the revival of real communities by owner occupiers. Nothing about sustainable communities. However, the vision of a world-leading urban design that will preserve the heritage area and create a vibrant, liveable city has been replaced by a return to living in the 70s. Cars cars and more cars. Its dumb growth.
The conception of Victoria Square as a usable public space with a civic focus has given way to it remaining a roundabout so that cars can drive through the city. Adelaide as a people-oriented city has been put aside yet again.
What you don't hear being taken seriously is Adelaide as a sustainable city There is little interest in improving air quality, protecting its water resources and water shed, recycling storm water etc. Smart eco-growth is an alien concept. Sustainability alienates the business community in the CBD.
I saw an advert for a lightweight, powerful Toshiba notebook with wireless capacity this morning whilst glancing through The Weekend Australian's Magazine.
It appealed to those who want to be "well equipped and well connected without being weighed down or tied." Clearly an advert for a liquid modern with little in the way of communal ties.
Of course the advert was addressed those highly mobile executives who want to travel light but who do not want to leave anything behind. You know the guys who drive BMW 4 wheel drives to the shack to spend the weekend cruising the waters in their boat during the summer; or to Mt Buffalo to go skiing in winter.
We ordinary souls can but desire and dream.
One of the most entrenched ways of looking at cities is through the suburban/urban divide. From the upper middle suburban perspective, the urban commercial environment in which I now live is seen to be ugly, dirty and immoral whilst suburbia is deemed to be wholesome, clean and beautiful. The urban is a garish, neon nightmare----a graffitied environment associated with juvenile gangs, homelessness, urban poverty, alienation, crime and lawlessness and racial minorities.
On the other hand, from the perspective of those living in an urban environment, the urban is associated with art and culture (galleries, music bookshops etc). The suburbs are cultural deserts peopled by narrow-minded bigots who drive imported European cars and are imprisoned by their fear and anxiety at rapid economic and cultural change.
By and large the city is still seen as a place to work but not live. The urban is the ugly real whilst the garden suburban is the ideal. We do not have an ideal urban form in Australia. The European high culture ideal of urban life (Classic, Renaissance, Baroque) has no impact in Australia. The North Terrace precinct ---gallery, musem, university)---between the commercial and the parkland has been killed by the car.
The city is choked by the car driven by people from the suburbs. This is a city ruled by the car. It has little conception of what it means to be a sustainable city.
This is via the always excellent Boynton. The destruction of cultural heritage was always one of the characteristics of Sydney town that I most intensely disliked about the global city. The tearing down to make way for the new signifies a cultural identity of contantly tearing themselves free of the past. The present is all that matters. The past is tradition that must be wiped away.
Adelaide, in contrast, is very strong on preserving the cultural heritage of the innercity. My previous abode, the electronic cottage, was built circa 1890s, in the south-east corner of Adelaide. One of the great pleaures of this form of inner city living was sitting on the verandah in the sun having lunch, reading, or sharing a glass of wine. However, the way we used the verandah was an exception in the street. Most people live inside the houseand so their existence has become very privatised. Gone is the interaction between the street and the verandah that was so popular with the working class who lived in the innercity up to the 1960s.
My 1890s electronic cottage has a heritage order on it. That means changes to the street frontage of the cottage are subsidised by the Adelaide City Council, if the renovations return the character of the cottage of the 1890s as defined by the cultural historians. You can do what you like out the back by way of renovations.
This heritage order counters or puts a break on tearing down the old to make way for the new in the name of "prestigious redevelopment", which is often little more than an another name for over-priced, ticky tacky middle-class slums. They call them units or sometimes townhouses, and they often build them as if they are prisons.
The old image of Adelaide as the City of Churches, so favoured by those living in the global city of Sydney, should be redescribed as the cultural heritage city. It has a regional cultural identity that is quite different from the old image of churches, religion, wowerism and puritanism; it is the reassertion of regional difference----- the beginnings of a new regionalism. The negative representation of regionalism (backward and provincal) by those who celebate globalization is an indication of the hegemonic tendencies of a postmodern Sydney that targets public space as a private good.
Every now and again I have argued for the tragic perspective into Australian life. The latest was the downfall of the Governor General. There has always been a resounding silence to this proposal. Tragedy avoids the hate sessions.
So it is good to see tragedy being used here with respect to destructive relationships between aborigines and white settlers in Tasmania. It offers a way around the closed circle of the current debates once the research errors of Reynolds, Ryan et al, have been corrected.
Let me quote what is said:
"The awful truth of tragedy is suppressed in the present debate.Tragedy is not injustice. It is, as starkly revealed in Sophocles's Antigone, the conflict of right with right – specifically, in the play, the legitimate claims of Creon the civil power as set against Antigone's ardent loyalty to holy and unwritten laws.
THE play is a dramatic representation of the tragic facts of collision and reconciliation. Public law and order and familial love and duty are both presented as good and integral aspects of a moral society.
But, in the play, both forces are pushed to their extremes by the opposing parties so that they negate one another....To say that the tragedy of Tasmania's Aborigines is better understood by reading Sophocles' "privileged words on paper" does not belittle the suffering. Rather, it makes the horror more real because it confronts us with a chilling possibility – what happened was an inevitability. No one can be blamed."
Greek tragedy offers a way of acknowledging the horror, holding onto the historical shudder and making ethical sense of what happened.
What ever happened to The Git? Does anybody know? His weblog from Tasmania is very interesting.
Holes in cyberspace the problem? Networks fall apart?
The Git has been found in the Huon Valley building a steel house. The webpage. The Daily Diatribe.The landscape photographs of Marguerite
The networks hold.
Amanda Devine hates trees. The very idea of planning development to green the city is seen to be totalitarianism run riot. The aesthetic is for a city of high rise with no trees and unrestricted views of beauty for those who can afford it.
The break with nature has to be complete. A better world is not a greener more sustainable world.
Strategic planning and managing urban development to make a liveable city is all control and regulation. Its the free market that will produce better cities.
So says Amanda.
Poor men. They are doing it so tough these days. You have to feel so sorry for them. Their "out-of home leisure" time is decreasing and they are no longer fancy free as they once were.
We men can no longer just slip down to the local for a quick beer after dinner with ya mates, have a chat about Tim Blair, then duck around to the local brothel for some sexual relief before trotting back home to pick up the fast car and have a quick burn down the freeway with ya mates in the small hours of the morning.
Bettina Arndt thinks the women have got the men on a very short lease. No more sex, drugs and rock'n roll. Men are tied down to the family and they are staggering under the weight of family responsibilities whilst working much longer hours. Rarely are they allowed off the lease so they can roam the urban environment as they once did. The glory days of the lifestyle recommended by Tim Blair, fast cars sex and guns are well gone. The women are just not allowing the men to have the unrestricted leisure necessary for their libido says Bettina.
Poor men. No doubt their being home-bound cleaning the floors, changing the nappies and doing the cooking has all to do with feminism
Wasn't it not so long ago that feminists were being attacked by conservative women for their prejudices against motherhood and putting their careers above family?
In this weeks The continuing crisis column in The Bulletin Tim Blair writes:
"Is the ABC biased? You tell me. If you're a lefty, you'll say no. If you're a conservative, you'll say yes. Which essentially establishes that, yes, the ABC is biased."
I just love the black and white division of the world. It is so nice and tidy. Everything is in its place and properly ordered.
Some lefties can say yes. The ABC is biased. It is left liberal.
But why spoil a good quip. It's the style that matters.
I watched a DVD of Scott Hicks' film of David Guterson's novel Snow Falling On Cedars on Sunday Night. Scott had spent some time in Adelaide and went to Flinders University. I had seen the earlier film Shine and thought it a very courageous piece of work.
Though Snow Falling on Cedars is excellent in terms of form, narrative and cinematography, it was the historical consciousness that grabbed my attention:---the heavy hand of history. This was one of the few films I'd seen where everyday life was overlaid with layers and layers of history---the war, Japanese internment, childhood romances, exploitaiton and racial relations. The present was this history. The present social bonds of this seafaring community was shaped by the layers and layers of interpretations of their past. They lived in a circle of interpretations.
My response was very different to this or this or this.
Although the film talked about letting the past go and stepping into the past the present was shaped, informed by history. Our very communal being is historical through and through. So much for the possessive rational economic individual standing alone in their private sphere, responding to price movements and the competitive behaviour of other agents and seeking utility.
The aesthetic highlights what is forgotten by utilitarian economics: the significance of the realm of sentiments, affections, prejudices and bodily habits that cohere to form a social order. Economics, by ignoring the historical affective life of community and culture that we live everyday, constructs its theoretical systems on fictions that it redescribes as mathematical axioms.
This strikes me as nostalgia. Things worked back then. We understood romance, passion, dating and flirting. Nowadays we've lost the touch. It's a cold, heartless, lonely world where all the common meanings have hollowed out and nobody knows what anything means anymore. Freedom from tradition gives way to anxiety and insecurity.
Maybe it has something to do with this? More a case of the old ties and meanings decaying in a postmodern world of circulating messages. We have to use our skills to create provisional ties that enable us to get through the chaotic darkness of an everyday life now modelled on shoppping.
Time for reality television to fill the gap.
I have only just come across Spike Magazine this very minute. And it has a weblog splinters
I've started unpacking some of my books. One that I came across is Heidegger's On the Way to Language. In an essay called 'The Way to Language' he writes:
"We are, then, within language and with language before all else. A way to language is not needed."
Heidegger then moves on to consider the way to language. It is the first sentence that would strike many people as absurd. Why? Because it is assumed that language is an instrument, a tool that we use to toss words (tokens) over to someone else when we want to communicate. Living within language? Crazy. We act as though we are the shaper and master of language not as if language is the master of us.
It did not strike Jonathan Delacour as absurd. He says that he "was absolutely entranced, and I suppose I still am, by the beauty of this idea: that we live within language..."
I came across this text courtesy of Jeff at This Public Address.
Its a description of what do you get when you mix a yeoman US farmer with a classicist and social conservatism. It is a warlike conservatism that maintains that the USA needs a strong dose of ancient Greece's warrior culture. The text in the Boston Globe says that Victor Davis:
"Hanson wields a few simple ideas with blunt force. Western culture, in his view, emanates from ancient Greece and prizes consensual government, private markets, self-criticism, and rational inquiry. Where such values are found, political, economic, and military preeminence follow. The non-Western world lags behind the West because it does not share in the Greek cultural legacy, having opted instead for despotism, theocracy, illiberal markets, and the plain old laziness that has men whiling away afternoons playing backgammon in the cafes of the Middle East."
Apparently White House hawks are listening. It makes sense to them. US supremacy has come from a uniquely effective military culture thanks to inherited Greek values.
Read Hanson and you'll know how your local neo-con ticks.
Jeff over at This Public Address has some great images of Margaret Bourke White's Russian photographs from her 1931 Eyes on Russia.
From the window of my study I can look down on the street below..It is often full of street kids hanging out in a deserted house just down the road from a youth crisis care centre. Violence and aggression is the normal reponse topt he waord around them. The street has the feel of the war zone. The deserted house is continually trashed.
From what I can gather many of the street kids used to be part of,or belong to the crisis care centre, but they are no longer. They have been ejected, presumably because their behaviour transgressed the norms of the centre. The centre now has no responsibility for them. It is only concerned with what happens within its walls.
And the kids?
The kids (14-18) are now outside the welfare net, living on the street, presumably making making money from drugs and prostitution for their booze sniffing and American-style street clothes. The centre becomes a magnet for more and more kids and so they come into conflict with the residents who are encouraged to move into the inner city by the Adelaide City Council.
Instead of welfare services being provided for these street kids they are left to fend for themselves. We have a law and order response by the police. So the trajectory is clear. The more violent of the boys will have a career path of becoming criminals whilst the girls will become pregnant and have a career of prostitutes.
This is the inner city. The emergency community services cannot cope. The State Government does not provide enough funding for the volunteer charity organizations. Its media image is being tough on crime. It plays well in the suburbs.
I tried to obtain a DVD of Wag the Dog last night from my local software/video shop in the city. No luck at all. So I got The Matrix instead. Why? Everyone is talking about the sequel, THE MATRIX RELOADED. See here
It only took Suzanne and I a couple of hours to figure out how the DVD player worked--it was our first foray but too many glasses of wine is our excuse for the Ludditism. I realized I'd seen the late bits of the Matrix on free-to-air television before, and not really clicked to what I was seeing. No b doubnt it was the time when I used to surf the tv. channels in an attempt to experience television as one big media flow -----life as a chaotic and nihilistic flux of images.
The Matrix was an interesting film even though I gave up before the ending and took the poodles for a walk--it was well after midnight. The dogs wanted to check out their friends at the local brothels and to hunt a few possums in Whitmore Square.
I liked the key idea. That world, with its office buildings and restaurants and teeming populace, was, like its book, a hollowed-out illusion, a virtual universe filled with computer code, a simulacrum of ordinary life. We are then taught or educated to see the world for what it actually is----a nihilistic matrix in which the machines now rule human beings. It was all very Baudrillard-----well, the simulacrum bit. I can see where Slavoj Zizek picked the idea of the desert of the real.
The Matrx would be a central part of postmodern cinema studies in the university--along with Blade runner. It has a big appeal as it is seen as brainy sci-fi film with a tough cool street edge.
It was also very American--an action movie in which a bunch of independent and macho cowboys in a hovercraft liberated the world from the bad guys. The action movie was overlaid with great costumes, excellent computer graphics and wall-to-wall sound. But I did get bored with the cowboy/action narrative even if did proceed at a good pace. Despite the cyborg dimension, in which part of the inputs and outputs from the computer are plugged directly in the brain’s sensory motor-system, and the salvation themes, it got a bit tiresome by the end----hence my walk down the street with the poodles.
Thinking about the film today I can see that it is tailor made for academic philosophers. A key theme is about living in the world of illusion rather than reality. The philosophers are immediately reminded of Descartes, the evil demon and private inner experiences, and off they go into the origins of modern philosophy with long detours into analytic philosophy's concerns about brains in a vat. The film has been forgotten.
Yet the illusion reality theme works quite well without the need to return to Descates. You only have to think about the political spin that comes out of Washington, Canberra and London about the war with Iraq to understand that. We are living in a world constructed by the national security state. A world of illusion has been created where everything is now read through the signs of terorism.