Last night I went to the opening event of this year's Manchester International Festival, a double bill of Bang On A Can performing a new Steve Reich composition and Kraftwerk giving the most entertaining display by four static Germans I've seen since Bayern's 82 European Cup Final defence.
A hot and sticky evening in a poorly ventilated velodrome was kicked off with Reich's 20-minute piece "2x5" which, as you'd expect from a classical composer trying to write rock music, sounded like a rock band trying to play classical. A logjam of a prog jam if ever there was one, which failed to impress me. Still, spirits were briefly lifted during the interval by the sight of the never underdressed Sebastian Horsley in a cream daysuit.
Kraftwerk's set was split into three sections. First they played the better known material such as "Man-Machine," "The Model" and "Autobahn" in front of their standard video backdrop and peaked (Col De Beswick?) with "Tour De France" as four members of Team GB pedalled in formation round the Velodrome track between the fans in the seats and the band on stage. The cyclists probably got the biggest cheers of the night and as exciting as it looked, it was a little predictable. I'd have been much more impressed if they'd sent four Herbies hurtling round the track during "Autobahn" but I'm guessing there might have been safety issues preventing this from being possible.
The midsection, which allowed Ralf and the boys a chance to catch their breath after their arduous button pushing, saw them replaced for "The Robots" by four robots who were literally more animated than the real thing (though not The Real Thing due to a deficiency in the leg department).
Kraftwerk returned in person for the last section in their matrix-green glow-in-the-dark suits to play "Computerworld," "Radioactivity" and "Vitamin" in front of a screen projecting 3-D graphics for which the audience had been given the appropriate (and event specific) glasses on entry to the auditorium. They finished the magnificent spectacle (ahem) with their traditional walk-off song, "Music Non Stop."
I can't see how the festival can top this unless they can convince Lou Reed to do his show on a pogo-stick whilst Laurie Anderson rides laserbeams to Leeds.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Here Comes Another One
January 2010.
This posthumous collection of interviews and occasional papers given by Castoriadis between 1974 and 1997 is a lively, direct introduction to the thinking of a writer who never abandoned his radically critical stance. It provides a clear, handy resume of his political ideas, in advance of their times and profoundly relevant to today's world. For this political thinker and longtime militant (co-founder with Claude Lefort of the revolutionary group "Socialisme ou Barbarie"), economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, two endless interrogations - how to understand the world and life in society - were intertwined with his own life and combats. An important chapter discusses the history of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (1949-1967); in it, Castoriadis presents the views he defended, in that group, on a number of subjects: a critique of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of society and of the workers' movement, and the primacy of individual and collective autonomy. Another chapter presents the concept, central to his thinking, of 'imaginary significations' as what make a society 'cohere'. Castoriadis constantly returns to the question of democracy as the never-finished, deliberate creation by the people of societal institutions, analyzing its past and its future in the Western world. He scathingly criticizes 'representative' democracy and develops a conception of direct democracy extending to all spheres of social life. He wonders about the chances of achieving freedom and autonomy - those requisites of true democracy - in a world of endless, meaningless accumulation of material goods, where the mechanisms for governing society have disintegrated, the relationship with nature is reduced to one of destructive domination, and, above all, the population has withdrawn from the public sphere: a world dominated by hobbies and lobbies - 'a society adrift'.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Think of Me When You Write
Nadine Jarvis's carbon copies, pencils made from cremated human remains. The perfect disposal option for the terminally ill academic/illustrator in your life.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
It's Friday. Lest We Forget.
Cashier No.9 - When Jackie Shone
R.I.P Jackie Swindells. Alty's Legendary No.9
(Check out the goals in 65/66.Dixie Dean? Pah!)
Power Play
Two posts on power and the social imaginary by Cassiodorus at Daily Kos, one a book review of Richard Peet's book The Geography of Power, the other an outline of the concept of the social imaginary and an explanation why it needs to be changed.
Revolution does not mean torrents of blood, the taking of the Winter Palace, and so on. Revolution means a radical transformation of society's institutions. In this sense, I certainly am a revolutionary. But for there to be revolution in this sense, profound changes must take place in the psychosocial organization of Western man, in his attitude toward life, in short, in his imaginary. The idea that the sole goal of life is to produce and to consume more—an idea that is both absurd and degrading—must be abandoned; the capitalist imaginary of pseudorational pseudomastery, of unlimited expansion, must be abandoned. That is something only men and women can do. A single individual, or one organization, can, at best, only prepare, criticize, incite, sketch out possible orientations.From here.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Weapon of the Weak
From the ever-reliable Harper's magazine, a beautifully written proposal presented by two Princeton academics for submission to war profiteers Lockheed Martin, entitled "Irony in the National Defense."
Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and “secret speech,” irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal–derived truth serums, “brain fingerprinting,” etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony.
The rest, annoyingly, is available to subscribers only. Get your own copy.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Hamiltonballs
"They couldn't be more evenly matched: Brazil have won six, Italy have won five, and two have been drawn in their previous 13 meetings."
"Sports" commentator George Hamilton on RTE 2 last night before the kick-off.
Kicking Off
Does anybody else think it daft that FIFA insist that the final group games in tournaments such as yesterday's Confederation Cup are played at the same time, even down to synchronising the first-half kick-offs, when they then go and let the second-halves kick off 5 minutes apart? If it had been Brazil-Italy that had been delayed they could easily have fudged a result between them but, somewhat fortunately, it was US v Egypt and both had to go for it.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Counago & Spaves Caption Competition No. 3
Ok, maybe our ever-popular caption competition isn't as popular as I'd imagined, but let's see how you do with this one:
Answers in Comments box please.
Because an Army Marches on Its Stomach
The always-inspiring O: The Oprah Magazine profiles Slim Peace.
In the most unlikely of weight loss groups, 14 women—Israelis and Palestinians—drop pounds, lose inches, and together gain immeasurable humanity.
. . .
Slim Peace (is) a program started by Yael Luttwak, a 36-year-old American filmmaker who is also a citizen of Israel and now lives in London. Using the common denominator of weight—and women's near-universal anguish over it—as a way to bridge deep political, cultural, and religious divides, the project's sixth group will meet for ten two-hour sessions. The idea came to Luttwak about nine years ago when historic peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians completely collapsed. At the time she had managed to drop a few pounds through Weight Watchers and remembers thinking, "Ariel Sharon is very overweight, and Arafat is not thin either. If they lost weight together, maybe they'd be in a better mood and make better decisions."
Not so much a roadblock to peace as a gastric band.
The substantial leftovers are here.
If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .
. . . You're sure of a big surprise: Dolphins hunting among the trees.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Dig That Groove
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Gerrard Winstanley, he of Digger fame. A lecture to commemorate this event by John Gurney, author of Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution, is available here.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Mind over Matter
Simon Critchley has just started to explain Why Heidegger Matters over at the Guardian.
This shouldn't take a minute.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
One for the Beach
In Rag and Bone: A Journey among the World's Holy Dead, Peter Manseau embarks on a global odyssey in search of the "dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends" belonging to saints and other sacred figures. The book could have been ghoulish, but Manseau's irreverent approach and enthusiasm keep the tone surprisingly light. He examines the curious dissemination of pieces of saints around the globe, meets a cast of fellow enthusiasts and explores the fringes of devotion. Most notable is the pious Portuguese woman who, in a fit of ecstacy, is said to have bitten off the little toe of St. Francis Xavier, whose damaged cadaver lures Manseau to the Roman Catholic enclave of Goa, India: "To look at the foot now -- with at least three digits missing -- is to wonder if she got away with an even bigger bite."
Laughing Stock
A candidate in the local elections for the Slane Electoral Area of Meath County Council was arrested outside a polling station in his home area of Stamullen on polling day and taken before Drogheda Court to face charges dating from 2001.
The case against James Carey (26) of Preston Hill, Stamullen, was called at the court on Friday morning.
A medical certificate was presented to explain his absence but Judge Flann Brennan said that he was not satisfied with the certificate and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Just after 3pm, Carey was brought into court by Gardai. He stood as an independent in the Meath County Council elections last Friday, polling 734 first preferences before being eliminated on the seventh count in the Slane Electoral Area.
Last month he was arrested and brought before the court at which time the case was adjourned until last Friday. He is accused of assaulting two people, causing them harm; dangerous driving, unauthorised possession of a firearm and reckless discharge of a firearm. The offences are alleged to have happened at Gormanston or Stamullen in February 2001.
. . .
Garda Inspector Pat Marry said he would like to refute any allegation that Carey’s arrest had been contrived. He said the medical certificate presented had shown “total contempt” for the court. The certificate was for one day only.
The accused said that if his arrest had not been contrived, why had he so openly canvassed his home area for the last year.
He had knocked on 10,000 doors. “I’m the chairperson of the Stamullen Comunity Alert Committee which was organised with Sergeant Dooley. In God’s name, I couldn’t be more visible. Why the timing? I’m not refuting this charge, I’m refuting the timing. It is a laughing stock.”
The rest is here.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Resilience
In the May/June issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "Environmental Futurist" Jamais Cascio identifies the qualities that organizations and societies require in order to survive crises:
* Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.
* Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue.
* Decentralization: Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.
* Collaboration: We're all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.
* Transparency: Don't hide your systems—transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.
* Fail gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won't make things worse than they are already.
* Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they're not working the way you expected; don't count on things remaining stable.
* Foresight: You can't predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare.
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