In the company of wolves

The Rogue's Salute

2011-08-05T21:11:00.001Z

The Invisible Circus event at the Bristol Harbourside Festival

Acts and Facts of Gendered Violence

2011-07-19T08:48:00.001Z

The notion that women are very often their own worst enemy is a common line of fire aimed at feminists. This line is not wrong necessarily, as this article in yesterday’s Independent, about female sex traffickers, illustrates. But my bugbear is with how these acts of cruelty committed by women against women are almost ‘rarefied’: as if their acts are somehow worse than men’s acts against women because they are committed against their own sex – a type of behaviour considered somehow ‘unnatural’, and a supposed spanner in the works of the (mis)perceived feminist agenda for solidarity among women. This ‘rarefication’ can be seen as an attempt to ‘let men off the hook’, by positioning women as a sex uniquely cruel to their own.

Which is of course bullshit.

Less than 24 hours before the Independent’s article, I read an equally depressing article in the Guardian about the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war employed by men, against men. The examples used were acts that had taken place in Congo and Uganda, but the article implies this practice may be far more commonplace in countries experiencing conflict than anyone has hitherto supposed.

Rape is a direct act of sexual violence, where the weapon very clearly is the penis. Sex trafficking is an indirect act of sexual violence – the power player is female but (as the women are traded by women predominantly for the convenience of men) the weapon is still the penis. In other words, the weapon (the phallus represented by the penis) can be wielded by women as well as by men, but the long and short of it is (no pun intended… ok that’s a lie), the weapon remains the penis.

In the Independent’s article, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes:

“We feminists, with our neat critiques of male dominance, are pathologically unable to deal with the fact that females… can and do viciously hurt their own sex. Who dares within the sisterhood to revise the assumptions on which so much of that belief system rests? If we say that women must not be judged as harshly as men when they destroy those who are vulnerable, or that a woman must have the right to be as evil as a man, what kind of world is that? Perhaps I am coming round to the view that no, women shouldn't behave as badly as bad men, and when they do, they should be judged more harshly.”

As much as I’m grateful to the article for highlighting this little known and crucial aspect of sex trafficking, Alibhai-Brown’s perception of feminism is outmoded. The injustice and discrimination humans face from one another are so layered and diverse that attempts to create forces of unity out of one sex or the other is unhelpful, largely pointless and even backwards. For example, plenty of men call themselves feminists these days. But Alibhai-Brown’s version of feminism as a ‘sisterhood’ would exclude these men from being feminism’s allies on account of their being the wrong sex. This is, of course, sexual discrimination.

Ideas about ‘sisterhoods’ are naïve. It is a ‘Stage 1’ format of feminism that may well still have uses in countries that still face fundamental segregation between the sexes, but in the West, its uses have been exhausted and efforts to re-employ it usually have the opposite outcome, effectively holding women back.

Women commit acts of violence against one another for many reasons: because women, like men, hate women; because just as men sometimes behave like women, so women sometimes behave like men; because humans, regardless of sex, engage in pursuits of power, domination and control that far surpass any flimsy connections of vague biological similarity.

As a response to the ‘horror’ any revelations about women’s cruelty to other women can invoke in people, it seems necessary to point out that there is an elephant in the room when it comes to one sex’s unique ability to commit acts of violence against their own sex:

The elephant is war.

Perhaps this will change, but for the moment, despite the rapidly increasing numbers of women fighting on the frontline, the armies of every country are overwhelmingly the domain of men, and with only a few exceptions, the governments that declare these wars are predominantly the domain of men as well. War is a collective, relentless, concentrated, merciless, limitless assault committed by armies of men against armies of other men. (Yes, of course, women are also victims of war, but they are not the primary target. The aim of war is to punish, disassemble and decimate the bodies of men.)

The variant of weapon used in these assaults range from machine guns, rifles, handguns and rockets to knives, bayonets, spears, machetes and arrows. Women may fight in wars, but the phallus remains the weapon.*

The phallus doesn’t care who falls victim to it – men or women. In this aspect, the phallus is un-gendered. As to which sex commits the greatest acts of violence; that accolade will always go to whoever holds the largest phallus in any given situation… In other words, to whoever is the Greatest Dick.

*This is not to imply that all men, simply by having the misfortune to be anatomically connected to a penis, are somehow ‘naturally’ inclined towards violence. Not at all. Just as women should not be slaves to their bodies or guided by a perceived biological destiny, so men also should be free from biological determinism. IMHO the penis needs a new image. I’m thinking of starting a movement called Penises for Peace… Would that work?

The Many Moons of the Multiverse

2011-06-01T18:44:00.002Z

The key to the message of Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ video is in the prologue. It’s all there, her intent quite clearly stated – much more so than in the actual song: it’s the introduction and the video itself that reveals the artist’s purpose and philosophy. And it’s this particular video that has made it clear to me why Lady Gaga stands for what she does within the gay community, in a deeper, more intellectual way than just her vocal public support for gay rights.

She states her ideas fairly clearly in fact, but I’ll extrapolate, just in case…

The video opens with a female SF/cyborg/goddess image, apparently ready to give birth, along with the explanation that “This is the Manifesto of Mother Monster.” In 1991 theorist Donna Haraway wrote a document called The Cyborg Manifesto. It was headed by a not-dissimilar cyborg goddess image and the essay explained, in words, very similar ideas to those Lady Gaga explores visually in ‘Born This Way’. I would happily bet you a kilo of gourmet jellybeans that Gaga has read Haraway! (The Cyborg Manifesto is available free online and it’s great – Fact! Click on the pic below.)

So, the Mother Monster’s own manifesto goes like this: “on a Government Owned Alien Territory (GOAT) in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place.” The image changes from the goddess in labour to a series of images representing this galactic birth. These graphically abject images are accompanied by the declaration that this “birth was not finite. It was infinite.” Instead of dividing in half, “the wombs numbered, and the mitosis of the future began”.

Translating from Gaga language, I think this means: the babies of this Mother Monster would be born, not to one of two sexes – male or female – but to any number of sexes, any number of genders, and any number of sexualities. In Gaga language, a new race of mini human monsters will be born that is “a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom.” Conventional birth is rendered a reductive thing of the past, and sexual identification and persuasion becomes a limitless possibility, a total freedom.

But it’s not all happily-ever-after on GOAT, because “on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.” Evil, in ‘Born This Way’, is conventional birth as we know it. This other human newborn – ‘Evil’ – is “split in two” – into the traditionally recognisable male and female.

It’s interesting how this process is depicted in Gaga language as a violent event, the process of birth “rotating in agony between two ultimate forces.” The idea that the traditional gendering process is, at least on a symbolic level, an act of societal violence, is often raised in feminist and queer dialogue: emphasising the cataclysmic severance caused by slicing the human into two irreconcilable sexes, reduced to a sum of their biological parts, and forced towards prescriptive codes of sexual behaviour. (And I’m sure it’s no coincidence that this sequence of the video uses violent phallic machinegun images. Sub-text: the classic gendering process is a phallocentric one.)

Theory doesn’t get much more subversive than this: to challenge our traditional practice of gendering babies from birth is to challenge the very fundamental core of human identity and its identification processes. The idea that gender might be more complex than the mere division into two sexes is definitely not news to most feminists or queer-theorists, but it is an idea that has rarely made it beyond the walls of academic institutions. Although Lady Gaga is not the first artist to try these ideas out on the public imagination, she is certainly among a rare breed.

Lady Gaga is the queer-theorist’s perfect pop icon: she not only chooses queer ideas as the subject matter of her songs and videos, she presents these queer ideas to the pop mainstream: retaining the subversive nature of the message, but making the complex ideas (relatively) digestible.

That Lady Gaga is able to do this is partly due to her iconic look, and she knows it too. Pop culture has always reserved a sacred place for the classic blonde white female icon: Britney, Kylie and Madonna have all wielded similar power. By exploiting this power, Lady Gaga can reach a wider audience than a non-blonde, non-white female. For example, nothing like the same attention has gone to Janelle Monáe, who approaches her music with similar subversive intention: her video, ‘Many Moons’, explores very similar ideas and came before 'Born This Way'. And (IMHO) is much more musically interesting than Lady Gaga’s mainstream pop. But anyways, hohum… It’s only the smallest quibble, and I’m more than happy to let “the pendulum of choice begin its dance”!

Israel in May

2011-05-27T15:10:00.001Z

Israel May 2011, a set on Flickr.

Visiting the folks, either side of Jordan, sort of...

Jordan: Petra and Wadi Rum

2011-05-23T17:14:00.001Z

Jordan 2011, a set on Flickr.

No sign of snow or volcanic ash, so we finally got a 'holiday'... of a sorts.

The Father's Bones (Warning: Spoilers!)

2011-05-05T06:12:00.004Z

Winter’s Bone is a story full of men, but no fathers. There are uncles and brothers, grandfathers and husbands, there are soldiers and boyfriends, sons and policemen. But there are no fathers.

There was a father – just the one – but he is missing – he is only ever an absence from the very beginning – a floating name without a body – and he is wanted for crimes he has not accounted for – or not to the state and the law of the state anyway. Indeed, where power is concerned, the state is far down the pecking order: its judicial system can barely touch this tribal law’s blood-enforced perimeter fences, and its army is a distant, elite entity out of the reach of these wild, savage humans.

The bone forest where this tribe live is a place where traditional patriarchy has been overthrown; The Father killed, his reign finished. Into his absence descends an unstable, unpredictable and dangerous bid for power, a fight between the brothers and the sonless grandfathers, and the boyfriends and the fatherless sons. But whatever crown the winner will take, it can never be the title of The Father – made clear when Teardrop, the uncle of the main protagonist, Ree, refuses to take up The Dead Father’s banjo when she offers it to him. The Father’s rule has been too completely undermined for it to ever again be a viable position of power.

If Winter’s Bone were a less complex tale, then the final shot of Ree on the steps, the children in her care on either side – her quest to save her home finally successful – would suggest her as an alternative Tribal Head – a queen in place of the fallen king, his own daughter no less, and so a natural successor? But her triumph, though an immeasurably huge task to achieve, was ultimately small in the context of her wider wintery world. For in fact the only power Ree ever sought was to secure a home for her family. She is not interested in the power struggle everyone around her is in engaged in, she has no desire to reign over any other part of the relentlessly hostile world she has been forced to live in. That world she has gladly left to the wilder ones to fight over its bones.

The world of Winter's Bone makes that of The Road look like a walk in the park.

Dream Babies

2011-05-03T18:28:00.000Z

I dreamt last night that we had a baby – a little boy called Maayan. He was only a baby for a couple of minutes though, and then suddenly he was a toddler. He had dark brown hair, a round face, and wore a brown and orange tracksuit. He didn’t look anything like either of us. But he was ours. I looked at him, and wondered, secretly, if I didn’t want him.

I took him on a bus. During the journey, he let go of my hand and ran full pelt down the aisle of the bus towards the doors. When he reached them, they opened for him. I charged down the aisle after him, pushing people out of the way. I grabbed him only at the last minute and held onto him, gasping. It was only then, in that moment, that I knew I did love him, more than I could ever have expressed. But the realisation that I loved him was followed almost instantly by remembering that I didn’t really have a baby, that he wasn’t really mine after all, that he’d be gone soon.*

Perhaps in dreams babies don’t represent new life, but the loss of something. I remember that other times I’ve dreamt I’d had a baby, I was left with the same morose feelings of loss, of grief, not just on waking but during the dream itself. When childless people dream of having a baby, regardless of their feelings about, or desire for parenthood, the baby born in a dream is inevitably lost on waking: your hands are filled (with another whole person, who doesn’t exist – yet) and then emptied again. The possibility or confirmation of love is lost just at the moment that it’s recognised for who or what it is.

*Or maybe that’s what all parents feel when they look at their children.

Queen Elizabeth National Park 2011

2011-04-26T10:07:00.001Z

Queen Elizabeth National Park 2011, a set on Flickr.

Some of Uganda's much famed 'pearls'...

Another Morning

2011-04-21T08:24:00.000Z

Before me the hillside, a mess of different greens and the straight edges of orange roofs, stands out in relief against the paper-flat sky, which is darkly washed-out. Its stillness is deceptive. I know that behind that thin unmoving screen a storm hides, waiting. But for what? The very edges of the leaves on the trees quiver, ever so slightly.

When the storm comes, it brings the sky down with it.

During the rain, standing close by, under shelter, listening to the sound of water crash through the trees, smacking the mud that shoulders the downpour in pools between ridges, I find myself wondering: were we meant to be here? It might be that we are an obstacle – to be overcome or ignored – standing in the way of the ecosystem doing its thing. As if we were an unhappy accident – a bastard species created because someone, somewhere, messed up.

On and On

2011-03-27T11:36:00.005Z

Yeah, that's it winter, get the hell out of here, you cold-hearted waster. You're no longer welcome round these parts. I don't want to see you darkening my doorstep for at least another 8 months.

Norwegian Wood

2011-03-25T20:30:00.017Z

Once in a while a book comes into your life that seems to change everything. Once in a while a book makes you wonder why you bothered wasting your time reading all the other hundreds of books in your collection. Once in a while, a book delivers you such a monumental lesson in writing that you’re left doubting whether you’re qualified even to copy down a recipe, let alone attempt to write a novel. It has happened before; it will happen again; and it just happened to me this month with Norwegian Wood. (What the hell have I been doing all my life??)

While I was reading the book, we were moving into our first home. Everything changed. I emerged from a wood and life has been thrown wide open; though it feels at the same time calm and startlingly clear.

Critics have said that Norwegian Wood’s two main characters, Naoko and Watanabe, make a fetish of death. To some extent it’s true, but I don’t think it’s a precise enough analysis. Their sexual acts do not seek out death; quite the opposite: all the characters – not only Naoko and Watanabe – use the physical connection of intercourse as a means to hold onto life. For the duration of the act, one body connects to the life inside the other. Arguably, only in sex do we know for sure we are alive. That’s why Naoko can’t have sex. Her death drive is too strong. Her refusal of sex means that if she fetishizes death, then she does so asexually. Watanabe chooses life and so he and Naoko cannot have sex, because death is not a mutual desire. Death is their shared history – the only thing about life and themselves they truly know – and not specifically a sexualised fetish - not a desire pursued through sex.

There were more obvious themes in Norwegian Wood that are frequently found in all kinds of other texts: (this might be presumptuous, as it’s the only book I’ve read of Murakami’s and I’m not familiar enough with Japanese literary traditions to be making such presumptions, but what the hell – here goes): I’m assuming, on some level, indicated largely by the setting of the student uprising and the cusps of both the year 1969 and the characters’ birthdays changing them from teens to twenty-somethings, that Naoko represents an older Japan – melancholic, pure, classical, rural, passive, reflective, inert. Whereas Midori is the burgeoning modern Japan – independent, assured, urban, quirky, sharp, impure, sexual. It also seems safe to assume that the two main female characters represent childhood and adulthood, (as well as death and life). In literary terms, childhood must be severed in order for the present (taking place in a figurative, transitional no-place – the wood, again) to proceed into the future, and the subject into adulthood. The wood (and its random, incongruous coordinates – Norway!) represents the liminal nowhere between the two – the transitional wilderness.

There is also of course, in this ambiguous wood, and referenced throughout the text, the oft-visited dilemma of the impossibility of a shared language, or equal union, between the two sexes, between the self and other, and our life-sentence of solitude – confined to one of two sexes. Literature is, literally, obsessed with this crisis – to the point that it can get boring. But not in Norwegian Wood. Murakami’s writing has a depth that makes this fixation with our incessant and yet inevitably futile attempts to bridge a perceived chasm between the sexes seem an almost shallow concern. In Norwegian Wood the sexual act is only the beginning: sex is a gateway to understanding, a device that keeps our hearts beating, and the release catch that allows us to express ourselves in letters and in words, in looks and in books.

TOAST

2011-03-06T20:11:00.002Z

Notes To Self:

2011-03-03T14:11:00.001Z

For World Book Day 2011

I propose a toast...

2011-02-28T22:16:00.001Z

I've been veering dangerously close to out-and-out panic due to chronic (and unusual) lack of inspiration. But this clip saved my (free-range, non-electrocuted) bacon today. Here's to you, Joan.

Black Swan Theory Part II

2011-01-30T17:19:00.002Z

By sheer coincidence, I stumbled across this today:

The Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar employs fairy-tale symbols to deconstruct myths of Iranian femininity in her Swan Rider series. Nice!

Black Swan Theory

2011-01-29T19:04:00.003Z

The Ballet and The Body

Black Swan isn’t a film about ballet. It’s a film about identity under threat, and the subsequent descent into madness that’s inextricably linked with the female body. It is, first and foremost, a retelling of the story ‘Swan Lake’. The ballet aspect is useful to Aronofsky because it insists upon an extreme, exaggerated body: dance naturally turns the body into ‘spectacle’ – removing it from reality and placing it instantly into the realms of fantasy. Once removed from the realm of the real, the audience is naturally more receptive to any further layers of the fantastic layered upon the film by the director.

Aronofsky is exploring two extremes of the human body. At one end of the line is the inflated male – the pumped up extreme ‘Masculine’ of The Wrestler. At the other end is the sucked in, vacuum-packed female, all excesses squeezed out – the ‘Feminine’ at its thinnest and most extreme, in Black Swan.

All the dark internal juices that have been squeezed out of the central character, Nina, are unleashed on her external world: once outside the body, they are out of her control. All that (sexual) darkness, that amoral 'id' seeking immediate gratification, cannot be contained within her overly ‘perfected’ body. Once released, it comes back to haunt her, hellbent on exacting its revenge upon the body that would not make room for it.

The Double

In Black Swan Aronofsky merges ideas of the mirror image with ideas about Dostoevsky’s ‘The Double’ – a cited influence. Nina sees around her what she thinks are versions of herself – darker, more sexual doppelgangers. She knows she must become those versions in order to play the role of the black swan, in addition to the role of the white swan, in her ballet company’s forthcoming recital of ‘Swan Lake’.

Aronofsky exploits the theme of ‘the double’ to its fullest, for the versions and doubles Nina sees are not always her spitting-image. Sometimes they look like who she might become in the future: the now redundant prima ballerina, Beth.

Sometimes they are another future self – the de-sexed self she will turn into if the white, pure, swan wins out over the black: her mother.

Sometimes the visions are of her closest adversary – the self she most desires (to be): the fresh new upstart, Lily.

And sometimes those versions are there in her own reflection in the mirror, looking back at her – the replica, the image, threatening to become more real than the flesh-and-blood original.

The Mirrors

Mirrors are expected to provide reassurance: they show us who we are – that we are separate beings, whole and intact. In art and film, mirrors display proof of identity and individual agency: according to Lacan, your reflection in the mirror shapes your ego – your independent ‘I’. This is why the mirror is a favourite device of psychological thrillers, because tampering with the mirror image will fundamentally distort and disturb a person’s sense of self.

If the reflection cannot be relied upon, then neither can the subject looking into it. If the image the subject sees is untrustworthy, then so is the subject’s own sense of self.

Black Swan makes full use of the disturbances the mirror can cause: Black Swan’s mirrors fragment, distort, play tricks on, lie to, shatter, and ultimately stab, Nina. In fact it is, very literally, the mirror that kills her.

Swan Lake

The original fairy tale tells of a wicked magician called Von Rothbart, who conjures/fathers (depending on the version) the black swan, Odile, and sends her off to seduce Prince Siegfried. In true fairy-tale-logic, his seduction will secure the black swan’s triumph and supremacy, and the white swan’s hopeless impotence and inevitable demise.

The classic ‘Swan Lake’ ballet hides the ballet director behind the scenes – s/he is the invisible puppeteer. But Aronofsky’s retelling of the tale in Black Swan places the director, Leroy, centre-stage – he is a character in his own play. Doing so makes it clear that Leroy himself is also an embodiment of those two same opposing forces: he is both the white pure prince and the black impure magician, and the dancers playing those roles are simply projections of the contrasting aspects of Leroy’s own character.

Differing from the classic ‘Swan Lake’, in Aronofsky’s version, no battle takes place between Siegfried and Von Rothburt: Leroy seems to have found a peace between the two sides within him and so they are not at war – a luxury denied Nina. Traditionally, sexuality in the male body rarely leads to madness. Sex is an acceptable, expected, characteristic of masculinity. By contrast, in the female body, sexuality is frequently portrayed as a dangerous, destructive element; and its containment an ongoing struggle.

In most art forms, sexual knowledge in a woman leads either to madness, death or to premature ageing: the penalty for letting the black swan win over the white is to be rendered ‘old’ at 39.

For it would seem no young woman can possibly know herself and remain sane/young/virginal. The minute Nina touches herself, it is as if with a magic wand, because it ends instantly the suspended innocence so meticulously preserved by her mother.

In fairy tales, there is no grey. If white is touched by black, the stain is permanent and immovable. Virginity once lost is irretrievable. The hymen/white veil is the frail crinoline lace masking the infinite, unfathomable abyss.

Once broken, innocence is lost to the void, and ambiguity, disorder and darkness leaks out. Its escape means the body is driven either to madness, to the prison of sexless, sterilised motherhood, or to death.

This descent ensues with terrifying speed: one minute beautiful swan, and the next, abandoned, forgotten, unattractive and old. In no time at all, Nina could wind up beautiful but insane and confined to the madhouse/hospital, or a dried-up mother/hag confined to her attic/NY apartment. Or dead.

And so the battle that takes place in Black Swan does so between the two conflicting sides of Nina. The ‘peace’ (or 'perfection', in Nina's language) that seems to exist indefinitely in the body of Leroy, apparently lasts somewhere around 10 seconds in Nina’s. The woman that encompasses both whiteness and darkness, purity and carnal knowledge, has a lifespan shorter than a fruit fly. For that brief ecstatic moment in time, Nina finds the perfection* she claims to have dedicated her life to seeking. I hope it was worth it.

Brilliantly executed, acted, and danced as Aronofsky’s Black Swan is – beautiful, breathtaking, and blissfully bizarre – it in fact offers little in the way of originality. Its contemporary, slick thrills and injection of hot lesbian sex masks an age-old, barely updated tale of the dangers associated with female sexual self-discovery. Matthew Bourne had something new to say about ‘Swan Lake’, but Aronofsky is less daring. The small alterations to the paradigmatic story are not subversive enough to make Black Swan any development on the classic ‘Swan Lake’. Underneath the blazing melodrama – and the impressively brazen excess of it all – Black Swan is the same old fairy tale in which the same old presentation of femininity performs the same old dying swan routine.

* Life doesn’t just imitate art – sometimes it changes it. Sometimes it even rewrites the endings of stories. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the depressed heroine eventually chooses life – an ending that was to be undermined by the fact that its equally depressed author later chose, for herself, death. In Black Swan, I would argue something similar has happened. In defiance of Aronofsky’s punitive ending – the infertile female body driven to its death by the torment of sex dangled like a carrot-on-a-stick by the figurative male Other – that same body (Portman’s!) was resurrected: it chose sex, fertility, and filled out thanks to a healthy diet and a baby, having successfully seduced the real male Other. So you know where you can go stick your mirror-shard, Aronofsky!

Best Albums of 2010 (IMHO)

2010-12-15T11:49:00.000Z

My submission to The Hype Machine's call for 2010 Best Album lists:

No.1 Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago (Feb 2010)

Shearwater doesn’t get anything like the attention it deserves. This is my (admittedly meagre) contribution to righting that heinous wrong. For Shearwater make positively regal music – majestic, epic, breathtaking. They couldn’t be more aptly named, for their sound succeeds in its intent to be 'environmental'. This is music with weather, with physical geography: hail, ice, steely skies, cold caves, dark oceans. There are layers enough in these songs to equal the Earth’s. Shearwater is a tribe, with a Viking-like percussionist who provides the gripping and relentless driving force behind the urgent, controlled frenzies of tracks such as Black Eyes and Corridors. And is the source of the restrained, yet no less insistent, heartbeat to quieter songs, like Hidden Lakes and Missing Islands. It would seem Shearwater isn’t a band that is easy to give as a gift; they have to be discovered; and they are my top discovery of 2010.

Highlights: at a push, Hidden Lakes and An Insular Life, but they’re all fantabulous.

No.2 John Grant – Queen of Denmark (April 2010)

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? John Grant is brilliant. Delivered all the way through with blistering directness, Queen of Denmark is sometimes mournful, sometimes acerbically funny, immeasurably inventive musically, and always deeply moving. Yet with so much (well deserved) praise being heaped upon Grant from so many directions, he risks losing his grip on the underdog position he has re-appropriated and eventually learnt finally to harness to his advantage. It is an identity that lies at the throbbing heart of his song-writing. I don’t know how he would manage without it, and so I’ve sought to do my part to alleviate this danger and secure his bridesmaid position by denying him the top-spot and placing him second. I think this is what he would want!

Highlights: Marz, Queen of Denmark

John Grant from Bella Union on Vimeo.

No.3 Jesca Hoop – Hunting My Dress (Feb 2010)

No one makes folk look or sound cooler than Jesca Hoop. Some of the tropes might be familiar: wounded kings, November moons, canyons, mountains and setting suns. But the roles of angels and warriors, pitted against caged birds and mothers are no facile perpetuation of tired devices. Hoop’s lyrics empower under-served characters of folk tradition. Indeed the last thing Hunting My Dress can be described as is ‘tired’. The energy throughout is exhilarating, expressed particularly in the electro-folk rhythms that positively pulse through tracks like Tulip. The entire album is infused with an edgy, off-kilter, yet spellbinding tribal intensity that continually mesmerises. Hunting My Dress is either pure class or pure voodoo.

Highlights: The Kingdom, Tulip

Jesca Hoop "The Kingdom" from Vanguard Records on Vimeo.

No.4 The Wraiths – Welcome, Stranger, To This Place (March 2010)

I thought I hated poetry. I was sure of it. But that was before I heard The Wraiths. John Keats and Emily Dickinson especially, among other historic poets – particularly the Romantics – owe The Wraiths a debt of gratitude. These dead poets are not merely resuscitated in 'Welcome, Stranger,' they are wrenched into life: toppling the headstone, grabbing your shirt collar with earth-soiled insistent fingers, throwing you into a chair and demanding your attention with a fist slammed on the table. The poems have been infused with an electrifying light that creates such sparkling luminosity, every song glows in the dark.

NB. This band is so lacking in exposure - I know about them because they are Bristol-based, and so local to me that I’ve seen Mog, the main vocalist, working shifts at the gift-shop down the road.

Highlights: I Know A Meadow, Bright Star

Bright Star by jenglo

No.5 Midlake – The Courage of Others (Feb 2010)

They’ll never be exactly ‘cool’, but I don’t give two Midlake-esque owl hoots. They make music that melts my brain into a sort of woody tree-sap and causes my heart to beat like the wings of fruit bats. Well, that’s my experience anyway. Such is the power of musical association – whether created by the choice of instruments, or particular chord structures, or the vocals that have more quivers than a company of archers, or simply by the lyrics – that it’s impossible to listen to Midlake without imagining log cabins and deer hidden in thickets. Their music is truly organic, not in the dull yoghurt sense, but in the way that it ‘grows’ on you: a first listen plants seeds that then expand into denser forests with every listen.

Highlights: Acts of Man, Children of the Grounds

No.6 Anaïs Mitchell – Hadestown (April 2010)

I appreciate musicians who take risks and refuse to dumb down their artistic ambitions for fear of being labelled ‘pretentious’. Like Janelle Monáe, Mitchell has lofty aspirations and this folk-opera, retelling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is every bit as ambitious as The ArchAndroid. The result could have been alienating, inaccessible, but instead it is a joyful, irreverent celebration of folk’s grubbiest, ‘real’-est roots. The journey we take with Orpheus to the underworld glides through layers of jazz, blues, soul and folk. Each song of 'Hadestown' creates a demonic place straight out of Carnivàle, each layer providing a platform for circus spectacles and Vaudevillian freak-shows. The descent to the underworld gets gradually headier, woozier, more claustrophobic, as if the songs themselves are drunk. All the while, the siren-like voices draw the listener into watery worlds where the dead dance and sing in a place so dark the safety of the surface is no longer in sight.

Highlights: Why We Build The Wall, Doubt Comes In

No.7 Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid (July 2010)

Rather like John Grant, Monáe doesn’t need me to big her up, and there’s little I can add to the effusive praise deservedly channelled her way. And rather like my relationship with The Wraiths, I could go on about how little connection I’ve traditionally made with hip-hop, funk or R&B. But better critics than I have already explained how she explodes the confines of genre to demand attention from those who usually inhabit seemingly incompatible musical spaces. So instead, I’ll just explain why I, personally, love Monáe. Putting aside (if that’s even possible) her electrifying energy, and charisma so infectious, so beyond normal human limits, you’d likely not survive being trapped in a confined space with her, I love her because she is a cyborg. She sings from shifting, uncontainable identities that prove as slippery and un-nameable as her style: black feminism, automaton agency (the rights of robotics), queerness, all get a voice that form the narratives of her songs. Styles range from old-skool Disney-esque soundtracks, through guitar-indie, to the slickest dancehall, and all sung with the classiest, silkiest vocals, as smooth as her moves and as clear as her intellectual intent.

Highlights: Cold War, BaBopByeYa

No.8 Revere – Hey! Selim (Sept 2010)

Revere do melodrama; whether through the medium of indie-rock, gypsy folk, piano pop, or electric prog, they are the prophets of tragedies to come, storytellers for the end of days. They are the eight horses of the apocalypse. Apparently four wasn’t enough for them. This is music for hand-wringers and carpet-pacers; in other words, me. In 'Hey! Selim', Revere has created a soundtrack for the headspace of worriers’: urgent, over-wrought, searing vocals drill out tensely elegant melodies to highly-strung lyrics. Perhaps I won't mind The End of Everything if this is how beautiful it will sound.

Highlights: We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, The Escape Artist

No.9 The Rumour Said Fire – The Arrogant (possibly Oct 2010)

Like a gift from the Nordic gods, this album just sort of arrived in my itunes at the beginning of the week. I had been struggling to commit to a 9^th album. It was a tussle between Sufjan Stevens, First Aid Kit and Stornoway, but none of them seemed keen enough for the title, and then suddenly, like a shimmering shower of Northern Lights, I stumbled across this gorgeous choral creature. I can’t honestly remember how it came to be with me. It’s so new I’m struggling to find out anything about the band. What with them being from Denmark, and my Danish being limited to the word for ‘squirrel’ (it’s ejern, incidentally), I’ve not got very far. And since I’ve only played the album a handful of times, I’m not even sure what to say about it yet. It might be argued this is a somewhat impertinent inclusion, but all I can say is that its warm, irresistible gorgeousness won me over immediately – its acceptance into my heart was instant and rare –and I had no choice but to overlook its somewhat uncooperative elusiveness and tardy, impromptu arrival.

Highlights: not sure yet.

No.10 – and this year’s guilty pleasure – Marina & The Diamonds – The Family Jewels (Feb 2010)

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Surely I’m not supposed to like this as much as I do. I've fallen victim to another musician with infectious energy. Added to that is clever, astute, tongue-in-cheek honesty and analysis directed both inwards at herself, as well as outwards at the culture and industry Marina Diamandis steamrollered her way into, driven by a compulsion for fame she thematically dissects in many of her songs, ridiculing and celebrating in turn. This is a dangerous strategy, since it toys with her audience and one false step could lead to derision, but through an underlying shrewdness and partly thanks, I’d imagine, to that aforementioned charisma, Diamandis pulls it off with slick aplomb. This is smart, crafted pop, delivered with a hint of punk and as much attitude as can be crammed into an apparently inexhaustible supply of outrageous shoulder pads. Marina Diamandis is who Lily Allen wishes she was, but most definitely isn’t.

Highlights: Mowgli’s Road, Oh No!

Marina And The Diamonds - Shampain por T_Thunder no Videolog.tv.

The real reason why werewolves and vampires are bad for your health:

2010-11-29T23:10:00.001Z

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I gave myself a crash course in the Twilight Saga - saw all three films in the space of a fortnight.

The plus sides: it’s visually stunning. A lot of the soundtrack is pitch perfect. The overall ‘look’ of the films avoids the hackneyed imagery of emo black-obsessed goths in favour of an approach sympathetic to the native/ancient origin legends of vampire/werewolf mythology. I found this refreshing.

See, I can be nice.

…And now for the teeth:

I was never a fan, and yet throughout the Twilight saga, I was barely repressing the urge to cry, “but where is Buffy??” What has post-feminism done to girl power? Where is it? Gone is the kung-fu fighter with attitude, the quick-witted, shrewd, vamp impaler. All (lamely) hail the return of the Maid Without; the wilting rose, the shrinking violet, the limp inhaler.

Twilight’s ‘heroine’, Bella, spends her days moping, mooching, brooding, staring wistfully out of windows at autumnal trees/her naval, sleeping, fainting, getting picked up, carried around and passed about between the werewolves and vampires, put down again, and driven about in/on various vehicles: car/vampire/motorbike/wolf. She is helpless and completely in the hands of the men/monsters competing for her love.

So it’s all about Trust, is it? It would seem Trust is the Big Issue that Twilight thinks it's exploring. For despite their incomparable strength and power, and despite the potentially fatal danger they pose to her, Bella willingly hands over her feelings, her body, to Edward and Jacob, because she trusts them. She is given the opportunity to walk away, by both Edward and Jacob, but she chooses not to. The reality is, she does this not because she trusts them, but because she hates herself. Bella’s dialogue is filled with her self-derision – all that she considers her imperfections and faults. Like the budding masochist she is, she welcomes pain, she deserves it, especially if it's at the hands (or mouths) of the men she loves. Presumably also the idea is to suggest that, yes, Edward is flawed – he craves blood – but, look, Bella is flawed too: she’s an insecure teenager who feels like she doesn’t fit in. It’s almost the same thing.

Except it isn’t.

Not only because it obviously isn’t, but also because Edward isn’t really flawed at all. Only if he were human would he be flawed. But he’s not human. He’s immortal and he’s the perfect killer. The only way in which Edward and Bella are comparable is in how much they hate themselves.

Bella is a rubbish role model for teenage girls. Even putting aside her vapid flimsy character, she is espousing death for the love of a boy over the choice of life, adulthood, sex, hope and belief in her potential as a subject with agency and a future. She advocates teenage suicide. Her weapon of choice is a vampire’s teeth. In the world of Twilight – demonstrated not only by Bella, but also by Emily, the disfigured girlfriend of a werewolf – girls are shaped and defined by the boys they love and their futures are directed by their chosen partner’s needs: Bella relentlessly asks Edward to ‘change’ her (from human to vampire, since he can’t ‘change’ himself ((– how convenient!)), and Emily’s scars are as a result of her boyfriend, Sam, “imprinting on” her. (And she must continue to live with that threat of violence if she wishes to stay with him.)

This part of the film, though treated as an incidental side story, does much to reveal Twilight’s warped social coding. As a result of Sam’s inability to control his werewolf powers, Emily nearly had half her face ripped off. You’d have thought, or hoped, that these days, that would have been a pretty definitive end to that particular romance – at least in a film targeted at teenagers – or that the relationship would have been presented as untenable and without a future. There might be a court injunction, even some jail time? How about some Perpetrator Counselling? Isn’t someone at least going to get grounded?? No, no, no, quite the contrary. Emily is still living with her abuser. Yes, that’s right, Sam and Emily are still together. But this is ok, in Twilight World, because they wuv each other. Emily has stuck by her abuser, “because he didn’t mean it”, “because he promised never to do it again”, ‘because she wuvves him’!

More specific to Twilight Language, Sam has ‘imprinted on’ her. For an explanation of ‘imprinting’, (which is as sinister as it sounds), I’ll hand over to Jacob:

(It’s so complex it requires Swedish subtitles.)

But the gender portrayals in Twilight aren’t only unhealthy for girls, they don’t do boys any favours either. Because Edward and Jacob are essentially ‘good boys’. They are hardworking, courageous and when they’re not terrorising the neighbourhood they partake in otherwise perfectly wholesome extracurricular activities: Edward paints and plays baseball and Jacob fixes bikes and likes going to the cinema. But, you see, they are also at the very same time extremely dangerous predators with a carnal lust for blood/flesh, who have volatile control over their strengths and powers. The (barely) underlying message = boys might appear nice on the surface but every one of them, including the seemingly nice ones, is a potential violator/abuser/predator/killer. The power they have to protect is the same power that may inflict the violence that creates the need for protection in the first place.

Oh, and I agree with the critics who pronounced Twilight pro-chastity. The message in the films is most definitely, ‘the only safe sex is no sex.’

Perhaps in the end the thing I found most depressing about Twilight overall though, is that I just couldn’t quite buy into all the pouty over-wrought (and over-acted) teenage angst. This is probably solely down to the unsettling realisation that I am most definitely too old for these films. (And yet it feels like only yesterday I was stuck up Dawson’s Creek without a paddle.)

Choke.

Oh, and also a personal quibble: pious principals aside, why on earth does Bella choose bloodless, red-eyed, washed-out, effeminate white boy, Edward, over hot-blooded, dark, exotically sexual, warrior-like, Jacob?? Like, h-e-l-l-o-o-o?? Wolverine Jacob could so take a great big lupine bite out of Edward’s pasty vampire butt!

General Overall Conclusion: exercise extreme caution when dating werewolves and vampires. Stick to men. Or women. And preferably ones with a pulse.

We're falling already...

2010-09-26T22:24:00.002Z

I've decided it's officially autumn.

Head Home - Midlake by jenglo

A ghost in your own life

2010-09-05T20:09:00.021Z

Yesterday we returned to ‘Backpackers’ – the hostel in Kampala where the two of us met way back in November 1998,* when I looked a bit like this: (and yes, that I was allowed to teach French to a group of 80 young Ugandans is possibly the greatest travesty to strike the country since Idi Amin...)

And he looked a bit like this:

Neither of us has been there, or indeed to Uganda, since that time twelve years ago. It’s a strange course that has brought us back. As it's the place in the world we were both independently drawn to, and where we then met each other, and where we again find ourselves, I can’t help but wonder if the country has always somehow existed in our subconscious minds, waiting for us to recognise it and then find a way to return. (A bit like when six of the characters from Lost finally get off the island after spending about three series trying desperately to do so, only to realise in series four that that their realities back home feel false now, that they belonged out of time and out of place, that they were destined to be lost, and that by whatever means available they must spend the rest of the series finding a way to return so that they can get on with series five back where they belong, on the island).**

Also like Lost, there’s something nightmarish about the return to places that hold special, personal meaning. There are too many uncontrollable factors. It’s as if you can’t trust the ground you’re walking on: it feels unstable, as if in walking in on your own history you have broken some laws of time and space and have destabilized reality. Or the ground itself is real enough, but it’s you who are unreliable. You are a ghost – a ghost from the future – watching yourself in the past, with no ability to speak, no ability to change the destiny that has already unfolded behind you, no means with which to warn or arm yourself.

The entrance into Backpackers had been moved, though the sign itself was the same one. The grounds felt denser, the bushes thicker, the trees taller. The main building that had stood in open ground was almost completely shrouded in trees. This made it dingier than I remember inside. So much internal re-structuring had taken place that at first I thought the entire building had been demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

Then I gradually began to recognise the shapes of the building’s outlines, and to understand how parts had been relocated. Bits and pieces started to make sense. It’s like this fragment of your own past is a maze with moving walls. You stand on the original land, but you have to move things around and push them out of the way in order to get your bearings.

Eventually, between us, we worked out that the bar is now where the reception used to be, that there are more dormitories and where the bar and terrace once were there is now additional private accommodation. But considering the amount of work that must have been done to it in recent years, the whole place looked seedier and shabbier than I remember it.

One thing that hadn’t changed much was the clientele: batches of eighteen-year-old boys just out of school dominating the bar and pool area, high on themselves and the weed they buy off the local Rastas that always did haunt the place. Apparently Backpackers still depends heavily upon these scruffy, rangy, inflated and space-consuming egos to stay standing on its own scruffy (bare) feet.

I’m glad we went, but I don’t intend to go again. I hadn’t expected it to be so strangely painful. After all, I met my future husband there. I read his palm seated on a bench on the terrace and later we sat on its wall and discussed Star Wars. His English wasn’t very good. The banda where he sliced us pineapple with his leatherman is still there; one thing that was almost entirely unchanged.

There are tents on the same ground where I sat in his tent and played him this song (a song we were to play at our wedding) on a cassette on my Sony Walkman (in 1998 I didn’t have an email address and hadn’t even progressed to CD walkmans. The past really is another country!).

Björk - Isobel
Uploaded by Bjork. - See the latest featured music videos.

I suppose feeling sad is a natural response to the whole passage of time/nostalgia thing, but I think there was more to it. I think it was probably because that time was difficult for me: at eighteen-years-old, it proved one of the hardest periods in my life so far. I felt I’d been misled and deceived into something that was nothing like what I’d expected. I was angry, I didn’t fit in at all, and without any maturity or life experience to call on, I dealt with it all very badly.

At the same time, shooting through that general semi-fixed state of unhappiness, from a totally unforeseen and un-looked-for direction, like some kind of wild-haired, dark, exotic meteor, crashed a wily Israeli, and with him came meaning, purpose: the reason I was meant to be in Uganda at that particular moment, in that particular place. I imagine a two-tone piece of fabric: a dark, matt base, shot through with metallic, electric thread. The threads are separate – they are their own bounded entities – but they exist simultaneously, interwoven, inextricable from one another. The overall colour and effect created, the two-tone, is the result of the combination, of the crash.

I think it was also the realisation that you can take ownership of so little in this life. We walk around a place we inhabit, wherever it is, we make it home and in doing so we think of it as ours. Certainly the boys swaggering round the pool table, being all floppy-haired and bare-footed all over everywhere, were behaving as if they owned the place. Just as they did twelve years ago. Just as they will twelve years from now, if the place still exists then. But we can’t own spaces and we don’t own history. We certainly don’t own memory - it is not a place - just an illusion of a place - and if you return to a memory, to a place of significant meaning, you must accept relinquishment of ownership over that memory, because you will never be able to experience it in quite the same way again.

And you realise that, in turn, place owes you nothing. Your history is your own problem, and not the responsibility of the place it happened in. All that meaning, all that significance that you applied to that place was done only by you and means nothing to anyone or anything else. It means nothing to the place itself, nothing at all to the people who inhabit that space now and call it theirs and are, right this minute, busy making their own memories, and it means nothing in the broader scheme of things - it means nothing to the universe. Perhaps this seems like stating the obvious, but being directly confronted by it still comes as a shock. It leaves you wondering if all this meaning and purpose we grapple with finding in, and for, our lives is itself meaningless; an indulgent pastime of humans. Perhaps the narratives we make out of our lives are nothing more than elaborate, complex disguises we weave across an indifferent void – the opposite of meaning – like a beautiful, dense tapestry hung to veil a drafty crack in a wall.

Following along behind us with a dustpan and brush, the past is busy sweeping up our trail of footprints, busy undoing everything we thought we’d set in stone. For while you aren’t looking, time changes the composition of the environment in which your memory took place, it moves its walls, shifts its boundaries, and rearranges the furniture, never again to be what it was. Your past then exists only in your mind.

*Little Known and Possibly Surprising Fact About Us: my husband also met his previous girlfriend – the one he was still with when he met me – at Backpackers in Kampala a few years previous. This is absolutely true.
**I know, I know, Lost ended 4 months ago. It’s time to move on. But it’s hard, you know, it’s just so hard…

Onwards to the Past

2010-08-24T00:40:00.002Z

I'm going on a journey. It starts today, and when it ends tomorrow, I will be where I was 12 years ago.

Pearl's Dreams

2010-08-19T23:21:00.008Z

This blog post was initially going to be about something completely different, but as the month is running away from me very fast and I’m short of time as it is, this is going to have to do until I’ve got the chance to write something with at least a hint of depth.

Meanwhile…

I watched Terrence Malick’s ‘Badlands’ again recently and it suddenly occurred to me that there may be references to the film in the Bat For Lashes’ song ‘Prescilla’, since Prescilla is the fictional name Sissy Spacek’s character, Holly, gives herself when she and her homicidal boyfriend go on the run.

Disordered, distorted and anarchic visions of homemaking and domesticity run through both the film and the music video for ‘Prescilla’.

Prescilla from Bat for Lashes on Vimeo.

This then led me to wonder whether Natasha Khan has a soft spot for Sissy Spacek films, since I was always sure that in the lyrics of the same song Khan sings the line, “her name is Carrie”. Although I’m not alone in thinking this, it turns out most lyric sites disagree and seem certain she’s singing “Karen”.

Either way, I’d say an irrefutable film reference made in the song is ‘Prescilla: Queen of the Desert’ (1994) - repeated lines implore Prescilla to “run away, queen of the highway”.

So, anyway, the point, really – if there is one – is that BfL’s songs and especially their music videos are not merely littered with film references, they are a veritable patchworked collage of film references!

So I decided to have a go at finding as many of them as I could in the time I’ve got (or before I could no longer justify such gratuitous self-indulgence when I should definitely be doing other things).

Daniel from Bat for Lashes on Vimeo.

The most obvious one is ‘Daniel’ – obvious because the song’s release rocketed Bat for Lashes into pop-starry-ness and its film reference point was so explicit and so well documented by fans, as the following video demonstrates:

Daniel from Jay Cruz on Vimeo.

Also from their newest album, Two Suns (2009), is the music video for the single, ‘Sleep Alone’, which figures Khan in a red mac: girls in red coats is so prolific a motif that there are more film references than I can possibly mention.

Sleep Alone from Bat for Lashes on Vimeo.

In this particular case, however, and largely because the red cloak in question is clearly waterproof, I’d suggest the main reference is ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973), but it could just as easily allude to other iconic red coats: the girl in 'Schindler’s List' for example, and there’s my blog’s namesake too – arguably the original founder of the red-cloaked female figure.

As a territorial early fan, however, I’ll take this opportunity to state that Bat for Lashes had clearly been making its visual hints and planting its cinema clues way before 'Daniel'.

It was immediately evident to me in ‘What’s a Girl to Do?’ – their first single release from Fur and Gold (2006) – that the music video for it was positively oozing with Donnie Darko-ness.

My dad spotted the same video’s allusions to Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Week End’ (1967) and Khan herself has sited David Lynch as a general influence throughout her music. The crashed car in ‘What’s a Girl to Do’ could be the crashed car in ‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001). But I’d say Lynch’s influence is more obviously apparent in ‘Pearl’s Dream’.

Pearl's Dream from Bat for Lashes on Vimeo.

For me, ‘Pearl’s Dream’ has the most interesting and subtle film reference of all BfL’s music videos, as Khan herself explains in the documentary about the making of Two Suns.

In addition to the Lynch influence, is Khan’s notion that Pearl is the grown up version of the child character in Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’ (1955). In particular, Khan cites the river song scene in the film as the spark that ignited the idea, and I’d suggest that this scene is the cinema moment core to all BfL’s creative visions:

The scene epitomises key themes that run throughout BfL’s videos and indeed lead them to all their other filmic influences: the strangeness of nature, the expansive, unpopulated landscapes indifferent to lone human intrusions, providing neither help nor hindrance to human characters, all of whom straddle innocence and evil, and the blurred defining lines between the strange environments of reality and the strange environments of dreams. Infusing Malick’s indifferent landscapes, amoral deserts, and the dangerous, ambiguous transitional nature of roadsides and river banks, is the equally amoral, blank-canvas of childhood Khan sings about – a childhood that is being led down, chased down, or drawn along, rivers and roads, by dark human forces: usually men: men in cars, men on horseback, men with guns.

Khan’s worlds, cinema’s worlds, are alluring, beautiful, dangerous places. They experience growing up as a journey that happens at ghastly, terrifying speeds and with darkly dangerous and unforgiving consequences should the vehicle of choice be derailed. BfL utilizes cinema as a realised form of dream, which processes and explores the fantasy within the real.

I want to go to Mars

2010-07-11T15:17:00.004Z

Ooh, I've discovered a new trick. Embedding music in posts. Excellent. Hopefully it's legal. Hmm. No, I'm sure it's all fine. La la la.

Good, I'm glad about this. If I have any 'literary philosophy' when it comes to writing - or the 'art of' - then it's that the conventional shape of the 'book' as we know it is going to have to do two things (at least) in order to retain the cultural artefactual status it has enjoyed for so long.

One, is for the format of books to incorporate, or engage with, the varying mediums through which text is disseminated these days, especially online: through blogs, social networking and video tubes especially.

Two, is for the content of the text itself to experiment with 'immersion' as opposed to, or in addition to, the traditional practice of 'reading'.

Listening to music, watching video clips and streaming, reading and writing blogs, are all fragmentable tasks: they can be done in conjunction with other online activities, and be interjected and directly connected to these other tasks. In contrast, reading paperbacks is an off-line activity, disconnected from the online world in which every single other form of text is readily available, creatively and diversely presented, and in constant busy communication with other textual forms. Books are getting well and truly left out.

Of course there are eBooks and there's no doubt these will play a large role in the necessary changing shape of books, BUT I propose that simply transferring the text to a screen won't be enough. There will need to be new dimensions to books that convince us of their continuing place in the modern world - that they still have something relevant to contribute.

So what does this have to do with Marz by John Grant? The song makes arbitrary words mean something because the tune that carries the words means something. Without the emotive melody, they'd just be empty words.

In case you haven't heard, (you may need to sit down for this, because I have some bad news), apparently The Novel Is Dead (the first artifact to die more than once??): I'd normally probably ramble on about needing to change definitions rather than just abandoning a useful word that's been used to describe certain fictions yaddah yaddah, but on this occasion I'm going to humour such grandiloquence and tentatively suggest the paper-form book has indeed run its course and, in and of itself, is no longer able to say anything new - not because of its content, but because of its form. These days, with the way we consume different forms of text online, content cannot be divorced from the medium through which it is delivered. The medium contributes to the meaning.

And so, at their most simplistic, I think future eBooks will need to include links, videos, music and art: both the content and form of the text will need to engage with online mediums and ideas about intertextuality: the words will need to be carried by melodies and reach out of the page to touch other online texts. If the novel is dead (and it's a big if), then it's because its carrier, the paper-form book, has run out of steam; is old, decrepit and exhausted. While the cantankerous old novel looks back at its glory days - at what it once was - when paperbacks were celebrated for their innovative accessibility and the part they played in disseminating the novel - everyone else is looking forward or looking up, into space and at the stars, at what might be accessible now.

Find more artists like John Grant at Myspace Music

Another week, another goodbye

2010-06-22T17:03:00.003Z

"I eternally see his figure eternally vanishing...

Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering."

-- (me taking liberties with) John Keats, 1820

My (not particularly succinct or even all that poetic) Ode to Lost

2010-06-02T17:34:00.024Z

*Spoilers* (for anyone who’s been living in a cave)

I can only imagine the blogosphere is saturated with anything and everything Lost-related at the moment, but for what it’s worth, here is my littlest tribute to Lost; a sort of obituary if you like: a would-be ode, (if I could’ve made it more concise and at least attempted some lyricism)… accompanied by an explanation as to why I accepted the finale and didn’t find it the let-down that many experienced.

I first saw Lost at the beginning of 2005 when we were living in Angola. The entire first series played out on South Africa’s MNET satellite channels before anyone in the UK had even caught a whiff of a smoke monster. At the time, I was the only foreign woman living in a small community of foreign ‘development’ workers: a team of about forty agriculturalists, engineers and construction workers, in a tiny town in deepest rural Angola. The town and its 15 surrounding villages constituted an island amid a wild ocean of bush-land, wide swollen rivers and impassable mountains. No one I knew, either there or abroad, had heard of Lost. And I’d been living out there so long it had begun to feel like, soon, no one would have heard of me either. It can’t be any great surprise then that Lost spoke to me instantly. It must be the fastest addiction I’d ever acquired. I was addicted from the first 3 seconds of the first episode. No, earlier than that. I was addicted from the first time I saw the trailer. The point is, I can remember the first trailer.

All year round, nights start early in Angola, so it was always dark by the time Lost showed on Saturday evenings. Electricity came from generators, so at night the hotel would sit in a small pool of pale light. Around it Angola extended into darkness, often stormy: the night-sky alive with debris from trees, or so still as to seem electrically charged. For forty-five minutes I’d sit on the edge of the bed and plug into a concentrated visual cocktail combining a hyper-real and fantasised version of the reality I was living in (or so it felt), with an unsettlingly insightful exploration of what felt like (or what was made to feel like – as the sensation isn’t mine alone, but turns out to have been shared by a great many viewers) my own imagination.

It’s the latter point that’s key, I think, to why I loved Lost – and to why Lost was loved by so many. The environment I, personally, found myself living in certainly set an uncannily close-to-the-bone context for the series, and greatly enhanced the experience, but I’d have loved Lost wherever we’d been.

The mysteries of the island, its anonymity, ambiguous nature and dislocated, unknown positioning figured almost literally for the show’s connection with, and exploration of, the unconscious, within imaginary realms hitherto unexplored by TV. Lost was a place television had never been – the first show entered living rooms like it was equally as surprised to be there as we were surprised to see it.

Its unusual subject matter - a strange island and its castaway inhabitants – and genre-blending - part sci-fi, part supernatural thriller, part swashbuckling adventure story – was not the only surprise. It was the instinctive recognition of the island as symbol, not only of the human condition, but figuring for the planet and for life itself, and this powerful and instant symbol’s lack of representation on television prior to Lost, that came as almost as big a surprise to its audience as anything the island threw at its long-suffering survivors.

For the island was a place instantly familiar and simultaneously alien and horrifying. The island was populated by everything we know about existence and the 'human condition' – represented and played out by the human characters, who figured for our 'localised', internal struggles: love, sex, power, violence, death.

Injected into that with graphic visualisations – forming, essentially, non-human ‘characters' – was everything we don’t know about existence, human and otherwise – represented by the smoke monster, the whispers, the incongruous creatures, the numbers and their significance and, fundamentally, the nature and central light and internal forces of the island itself. All this figured for environmental, external, existential questions and dilemmas: why we are here, what is our purpose, does time exist, what is the nature of the universe, how long have we got, what else is out there, what happens next?

It’s for this reason, I think, I did not feel let down by the finale. Surely it is unreasonable to expect a TV show to solve the latter: to demand of it answers to the unknown economies of existence, as opposed to the ‘mysteries’ of the human condition, which we are better equipped to unravel (at least through the medium of a TV drama).

It’s only human to demand existential answers, and to be outraged when someone deliberately poses a question – (or produces a polar bear out of nowhere, or decides a button must be pressed every 108 minutes) – that the same someone doesn't then propose an answer to, or a reason for, and that we can’t possibly fathom for ourselves. But it’s also because we are only human that I accepted the series writers’ choice not to address all these unanswerable questions and to focus on the characters’ journeys, and to close the show with personal, emotional resolution. Much of what was raised in the series that concerned humanness – love, sex, power, violence, death and our coming to terms with it – was resolved in the finale. There was closure on a human level, and an understanding and resolution for these very human economies:– even if not for its audience, there were answers for the characters. I did not expect the show to alter the nature of existence, to re-write time, to re-order the universe.

And yet, and yet, having said all that, the flipside of this is that in holding up its hands in surrender to the enormity of the challenge Lost had set itself, in admitting defeat in the face of the tremendous expectations it could not entirely deliver on, Lost did make some kind of breakthrough philosophically, even if it was effected imperfectly, chaotically and with infuriating, fundamental flaws.

In the midst of its own confusion and the elaborate messes it wove for itself, simply in its efforts to try to do so many things, Lost touched on the uncanny, on symbolic order and on the realms of the unconscious like no other show I've ever seen.

Simply in making the enormous effort; simply in trying to ask big questions, and to ask them differently, simply in trying to find meaning in exploring the apparent randomness and sequences of incongruities that mark human existence, Lost deserves praise and not derision for not entirely fulfilling its philosophical potential. For somehow despite the way, or maybe even because of way, the show then largely abandoned the challenges and questions it had set for itself, in favour of tackling instead the more manageable emotional and psychological journeys of its main characters, the finale of Lost somehow did in fact succeed, to some degree, in altering the way the world looks, the way life might be experienced, and what the nature of life and death might be. In the end, it did provide a fragile, faint blueprint for determining Lost's Bigger Picture. For me, it was the effort that counted – the ambition that drove the series breathlessly onwards – so that much of the work had already been done, extensive ground covered, before the show’s writers turned to its reliable characters to create closure and resolution that their previous efforts, attempts and ambitions could not quite deliver on.

Is there a message in this?

Erm…

Well… In terms of the show, I’d say the key to not finding the finale of Lost disappointing is in lowering your expectations of what the Bigger Picture might be: rather like The Prisoner (1967) and Twin Peaks (1990), if a show is going to tackle life, the universe and the nature of human existence, don’t ask of the show what you can’t ask of life. You’re going to be taken on an existential safari of the unconscious, where you get to look and point and stare in wonderment and fear. You’re not going to be shown a Secret Government Dossier revealing The Truth about Everything Ever, laid out in clear concise bullet points.

And in terms of determining meaning from the show and how it might signify in reality, I’d say perhaps the lesson is that the only tools we have at our disposal for even attempting to understand existence and the secrets of the universe – why are we here, what is our purpose, what happens next – is through addressing and focussing on what we can go someway to understanding: each other – humans: love, sex, power, violence, and maybe even to some extent, death.

The languages of love, sex, power, violence and death are the only tools at our disposal. When it comes to articulating 'the universe' these languages and the varying formations of them we create through connection and communication with one another, will have to do. They’re all we have. With these things at least we have a chance to understand our human condition, to express it and to find personal resolution: ‘to remember and let go.’

On a much, much more basic level, there are a few very good reasons why Lost ‘worked’ overall as a series: it was exceptionally well written, magnificently acted, it struck a sublime balance between light and dark, could be brilliantly comic, painfully tense, genuinely frightening, and searing in its emotional intensity. It was enveloped in a wonderful score, and delivered tight, sharp, crafted storytelling episode upon episode. Without this rock solid foundation, (no island-pun intended) Lost would never have been able to even consider broaching bigger questions or aiming for grander goals.

Aside from the why-the-hell-weren’t-Michael-and-Walt-allowed-the-same-closure-as-the-others question (which of course we all know had more to do with the show's creators falling for that old trap of casting a 10-year-old and underestimating how long the show was going to run for etc. etc. than it did with the course of the storytelling), I suppose my only real point of contention would be the decision to open and close the series through one character and his journey and to privilege it over the others.

Jack is fantastic, but one of the things that made Lost special was not only its use of multiple central characters, but the sheer numbers of those very central characters. I can’t remember a drama series (that wasn’t a soap opera) that followed the story through the eyes of so many protagonists and successfully made every single one of them whole, important and worthy of its audience’s emotional investment: of course, Jack, Sawyer, Kate and John Locke were at the core, but with Sayid, Hurley, Claire, Ben, Charlie and Desmond so close in rank, and then Juliet, Sun, Jin, Michael, Jacob, Richard, Daniel, Myles, Boone and Shannon in turn so close to them, any dividing lines between protagonists and ensemble were continually and relentlessly blurred so that for large portions of every series, I regularly forgot which are the characters who are probably supposed to be at the centre of this story about an island.

To learn at the last breath that at the centre of this spiralling whirlpool was essentially Jack and only Jack, and that the implied crux of Jack’s journey – the conflict he must resolve – is his relationship with his father, (though treated with a stately, subtle elegance) was disappointing. Jack, after everything, is the prodigal son who must find his own way back to the flock, guided by his Christian Shephard father. (Oh look, a tank-sized biblical metaphor. I’ve never seen one of those before! …Oh well, never mind. Though in any other show I’d have found it irksome.)

I can forgive this decision to privilege the well-worn Grand Narrative of the Father-Son discourse and The Return of the Father and The Father as God and Redeemer blah blah blah, because the meandering, diverse road taken to make that journey in Lost is so off-the-wall, so experimental, unparalleled and so interested in the Feminine, that the picture of the world Lost created was not ruined by the familiar face waiting at the show’s destination. For me though, Kate’s story was as integral to the whole narrative as Jack’s. She was inextricably bound up in him, and his story in hers, she had 'father' issues easily equal to his, and so it’s a shame that she wasn't treated with equal central significance.

And yet, I can forgive the Lost finale all its sins for the profoundly moving synchronisation of its final sequence. Watching Jack die twice, simultaneously - once with all his friends around him – painlessly – and once entirely alone (save for Vincent the dog) – and in pain - the first managing to be both horribly sad, as well as a relief – the second, both painfully frightening, desperately distressing, as well as somehow also hopeful – is one of the most moving, deeply unsettling and emotionally satisfying pieces of television I’ve ever seen.

It’s the first time I can remember a TV series asking me to consider the nature of death and how to prepare for its coming (what I would argue was really at the heart of the show – the counter to the island’s life-giving light). It’s certainly the first time I experienced genuine grief at a show’s end. And after a six-year commitment to it that involved viewings in three different continents and at least six different towns/cities, pulling off an ending that could even come close to satisfying that level of emotional involvement – no, it had to do more than that, it had to satisfy and then find a justifiable and appropriate way to sever that emotional involvement – is no mean feat. But the creators did it so strongly, so elegantly, I might in time be able simply to remember, and let go.

In The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone

2010-05-08T17:15:00.014Z

Fed up with politics? Need some food for thought (well more like a snack) while lost in our current political limbo? Here, have some angel cake:

In perpetual motion, travelling between time and worlds, Dr Who makes perfect limbo viewing. Now – pre-emptive disclaimer – (‘cos real Dr Who fans are hardcore and scary – I should know, I dated one) – I’m not a regular Dr Who viewer, so I’m not sure if the realm of the symbolic is commonly explored territory(!), but I remember the weeping angel monsters from David Tennant’s shift (though the episode mainly featured Carey Mulligan, if I’m not mistaken) and these particular monsters caught my attention then, partly due to their being a bit outside of the usual Dr Who box, (I couldn’t quite squeeze in a tardis pun there, though not for want of trying), but also I think partly due to their symbolic potential.

As a result, the weeping angels have become my favourite Dr Who monsters. Here’s why:

All the real trouble of the two episodes starts when Amy Pond “stared at an angel… (When) she looked into the eyes of an angel for too long.”

In the first of the two episodes, the Doctor must work out how a weeping stone angel captured on film manages to escape the film reel to cross the screen and enter the room in which the film is being played (‘Ring’-style).

In the second of the two episodes, the Doctor must work out how his companion, Amy Pond, who witnessed the angel’s escape from the video, has been now embodied by the angel. The Doctor works out that the explanation for both these events is the same: “The image of an angel is an angel.”

It’s like Baudrillard meets Irigaray!

No, really, it is, look:

The Image is an Angel:

First of all, we’re being asked to consider the authenticity of images. The Doctor thinks, “The image of an angel is an angel”. He’s suggesting that simulacrum (the replication of something that has lost its point of origin) can figure for the thing itself: that an image can become the thing itself. The image of the angel transforms into being by crossing the television screen. It’s this process – the transformation of an image into being and meaning by transgressing the screen – that causes Baudrillard such consternation. To him, society’s acceptance of images in place of the real represents a loss of meaning – an endorsement of shallowness and superficiality:

"[T]hat which was previously mentally projected, which was lived as a metaphor in the terrestrial habitat is from now on projected entirely without metaphor, into the absolute space of simulation" (Baudrillard 1988).

(But as far as I’m concerned, Baudrillard is missing something. For me, simulacra doesn't diminish meaning, it simply changes it. Its potential is for transformation, not termination. So eat that Baudrillard!)

Don’t Blink:

The second thing has to do with the Doctor’s combative approach to the angels’ attempted assault on the humans. He demands that, though everyone must look unblinking at the angels, in order to stop them advancing, (the angels can only move when you blink), no one must look directly into the eyes of the angels.

In the Doctor’s words, “As long as their eyes are open they [the angels] can climb inside.” This is because – at least in the language of the symbolic order – not only are eyes like windows, they are at the same time like mirrors (see Lacan) and like screens (see Baudrillard): sometimes we can see through them (the window), sometimes we see only our own image reflected in them (the mirror), and sometimes what’s reflected in them is not an accurate image of ourselves, but an idealised, fantastical desired version of ourselves (the screen). Direct eye contact brings the human no return of self, because the weeping angels’ eyes are stone – neither window, mirror or screen – and so eye contact allows the angel unhindered access into the human mind via the windows of the human eyes.

Amy Pond opened her eyes and engaged the angel’s in order for the angel to enter in, and so permitting it to inhabit her mind. Now the angel looks out through the same window, but from the inside. It means the angel is imminently poised to take over Amy Pond’s body, because Amy has taken the place of the video recorder: she is the recorder and container of the image, and her eyes are the screen through which the angel can now emerge, travelling back across the screen, back into the realm of the real, but this time with a real body (Amy’s) and its own agency and meaning; because the image of an angel is an angel.

So when the Doctor looks into Amy’s eyes, he does not see Amy through a window, or himself reflected in a mirror, but an angel on a screen inside Amy – a screen the angel is about to cross:

“As long as their eyes are open they can climb inside… Now there’s an angel in her [Amy’s] mind… There’s a screen inside your mind and the angel is climbing out.”

What the Doctor sees inside Amy is not his projected fantasy (either of himself or of Amy) about to take on illegitimate and undeserving agency, as Baudrillard might assert, but the image on the screen showing signs of life, the simulacra speaking, the image taking agency for itself. Unfortunately for Amy, the life of the projecting angel is to be at the cost of her own, revealing the root of the human’s – and perhaps Baudrillard’s – fear of the image and of un-human/post-human agency: - that life for them will spell death for us.

Don’t Shoot the Messengers:

Lastly, there is the symbolic choice of the angel as monster. This is an interesting subversion, because angels are more commonly recognised as benign messengers, as harbingers of the divine, as go-betweens enabling god to communicate with humans (see Irigaray); the very antithesis of the monstrous. But in Dr Who the messengers have turned self-serving: they have their own agenda. No longer passive channels of communication, they have taken agency for themselves and come to the humans with messages of their own.

According to Irigaray, angels “circulate as mediators of that which has not yet happened . . . Endlessly re-opening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history . . . . Angels destroy the monstrous” (Irigaray 1993).

“What Irigaray is alluding to is a time when the divine will be known to us, will be incarnated in us, and mediation by an angel will no longer be necessary” (Tilghman 2009). In other words, angels-as-intermediaries is a temporary state: their potential is greater and fuller than this. So that when the time comes for transcendence (“that which has not yet happened”), or a similarly momentous event, they will change. In this episode of Dr Who the end of time is coming, the universe is spilling into the world (or time is spilling into the universe, or somebody’s spilled something into something else… Ok, so I was bit hazy on the details of that part…) through a crack in Amy Pond’s bedroom wall. But the angels have not come to warn the humans, as Irigaray might assume they would, or to surrender themselves to a union between divinity and humanity. Quite the reverse; they are concerned only with saving themselves, and the imminent ruination of time/the universe (after it would seem they have indeed been successful in “re-opening the enclosure of the universe”) has transformed the angels into ‘being’ – into monstrous being, to be precise.

Could it be then that when “that which has not yet happened” does in fact happen, angels will indeed realise their potential for agency, not by destroying the monstrous, but by becoming the monstrous? With their role as messengers and harbingers redundant, what does Irigaray think will happen? That they’ll just roll over and die quietly: surely every entity fights to preserve its being? Or are angels immune to evolution? If angels did come to “herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning” (Irigaray 1984), there is yet no way for Irigaray to be sure what will happen the morning after. And if the fate of most of the characters in those two episodes is anything to go by, waking up ‘blinking’ into a new dawn will result in an almost instant death in the arms of an angel.

Who the f**k is Alice?

2010-04-03T20:21:00.008Z

If Wonderland had only manifested itself once Alice had fallen through the vaginal rabbit hole then we might in fact share Alice’s conviction that her time in Wonderland is all a part of her dream. But Wonderland is Carroll’s and now Burton’s creation, as is Alice, and their creation spills either side of the hole. Wonderland begins with the start of the film and ends when the credits role, and is not confined to an underworld as such, and so we find we don't believe Alice when she repeatedly declares that this is all a dream: not because we know Wonderland to be real, but because we know she’s right about one thing – this is a dream – but wrong about the other: this dream is not hers.

“Why is it you’re always too small or too tall?” the Mad Hatter asks Alice. It's because Alice is not only a character in the story, she is an 'event'. Or rather, her body and its persistent growing and shrinking is an event: one that recurs throughout the story. Its unruliness, its disorder, Alice’s lack of control over it – in fact, the lack of control any character has over Alice’s body – is of major concern, revisited in the story from many angles – literally, graphically.

We see, graphically, in the excess and disorder of Alice’s body, how this adventure in Wonderland must be someone else’s dream: for it’s observed from the outside, not experienced from the inside, and therefore she can never be The Alice; she can never be herself. As she is frequently accused of being by the other characters, this Alice is an unwitting, accidental impostor in Carroll’s and Burton’s dream of a female – a girl-turning-woman – who they have called Alice. She is larger than life, she is exaggerated, fantastical – she bursts through the confines of the usual female body. Then in turn she is small and infantile, vulnerable, small enough to clamber over men’s faces. We have seen this girl/woman many times before: she is the fetishised figure of the feminine.

As a ‘figure’, a ‘motif’, an ‘event’, Alice is denied any form of agency usually enjoyed by the protagonist of a story, because she is always more object than subject. She cannot be The Alice, whoever that might be, because her body, her beauty, does not belong to her. Alice is the property of everyone who watches her, (so that includes us), setting her on a faulty, fraudulent quest from the outset, because there is no way for her ever to belong to herself and no possibility of her retrieving the “muchness” the Hatter has accused her of losing. She cannot lose something she never had in the first place.

So who is Alice? No one knows, and nor are they likely to while film-makers – especially those with claims upon the realms of the uncanny – regurgitate tired, over-used themes and figures and indulge themselves in equally tired, over-used myths about the madness and anarchy of ‘the feminine’.

Oh and guess what? There’s a monster in need of castration. And what could be fit for that task, I wonder? Oh let me think: could it be a sword? Yes? Well that’s handy because there just so happens to be one lying around. Somebody (the caterpillar? Or the White Witch?) says to Alice: “The Vorpal Sword knows what it wants; you just have to hold onto it.” Now there’s an instructive euphemism for any young woman.

*Spoiler alert*: And so, after much fannying around, Alice cuts off the head of the monster, thus vanquishing the sexual queen – and “evil” – and reinstating the virginal queen – and “goodness” – so that all may live happily unmolested throughout "Wonderland". Banality triumphs – well, it sort of limply drops its swords and slumps about looking relieved – and someone does a silly dance. Oh how delightful and all so unexpected. (Yawn).

Burton explores the extraordinary, or so I’m sure he’d like to think, but no floppy-eared, squished-caterpillar of a “feminist” reworking can save Burton’s Wonderland from the ordinary. As a finale, we are meant to believe that a re-imagined business-woman Alice happily hops off to colonise the new world, opening trade routes as she goes. I wouldn’t buy it: not for all the tea in China.

It’ll take more than a blue-screen-ful of exaggeratedly gnarled tree-roots or grandiose waterfalls to disguise this very ordinary world. And no amount of red paint on white roses is going to fool us into believing that this is The Alice. The Alice in Wonderland of Carroll and Burton is just a bit too much of a muchness.

A bit of brazen self-promotion (well it is my birthday!)

2010-01-19T17:43:00.009Z

First for UNICEF, then for Aldeia Nova, Eran has been in and out of Angola since 2001. I joined him in 2004 and lived and worked with him there for 2 1/2 years. If we had any agenda at all in the writing of this book, it was to avoid a dry re-telling of Angola's troubled history, or to over-indulge in a depiction of our own experiences there, or to dwell on the poverty and calamities that excite CNN and Western news sources. What we hoped to do instead was convey something of the lives of Angolans and the life of Angola which, though shaped of course by its history and calamities, exist with a fullness, richness and vitality that neither of these things can ever fully describe or do justice to.

"After the Portuguese’ departure, and even after all the years of civil war, an immovable legacy remained inside the buildings and within the architecture and the aesthetic shapes of towns, cities and villages.

For every living Portuguese body that fled before the civil war, and for every Angolan body that fled during it, there remains a stone-dry shell of a house, parched and indignant, with a longevity the flesh and breath that the colonizers could never compete with, even though, between them and the Angolans, it was they who designed and built them.

Defiant, the gravestones around the houses and churches marking the bodies that never made it out of the country, seem as if they are clinging to what they once had but have lost, settling for the little piece of almost-eternity they have managed to hold onto.

In the eerie quiet, in the rustle of draughts and shifting shadows of the empty or re-occupied shells of the houses, it is almost as if, through the memories - or spirits - contained within them, those buildings are speaking for themselves."

"A few years before the ubiquitous transition to digital photography took place, four baby girls were born, only weeks apart, in a place called Cela, a district which, although it has its own centre, incorporates Wako-Kungo. The world these babies were born into would have been bullet-ridden and war-weary, with villages cut off and soldiers gradually returning to their homes from the bush. These four girls were born beneath a heavy sky. During the rainy season, the trees in the forests around their homes bowed and swayed beneath the weight of it.

All through the war’s finale storms raged: thunderous rain showers punished the earth, launching electric staffs into the ground and exploding the mud into dust, while the valleys around them defiantly blazed with gunfire.

But then summer broke through the rains and when the last drops settled in the crevices of large leaves and burst over the banks of rivers, flooding the land on both sides, and the lightening withdrew, and the heavy clouds parted letting thin, breathy, blue skies through, the war finally died. Somewhere overhead, through these deceptively serene skies, an aeroplane that was destined never to land wrote its goodbye message in its vapour trail, and when it crashed it took the war with it."

(Waterstones, Blackwell's, Amazon and Sylph Editions)

...Because Christmas crept up on us with uncanny stealth this year...

2009-12-24T18:22:00.002Z

...For everyone we forgot to send a card to...

November

2009-11-25T14:48:00.005Z

“One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.”

I’m dedicating this month to my blog’s namesake. What with the internal and external storms, it seemed fitting.

“Step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are unkind as plague.”

Biblical floods in the north, typhoons in the far east: climate change is causing the forest to stir. There are other climate changes this autumn: something about a sudden, unexpected twenty-day cycle squeezes the oxygen out of the air. It replaces blood with lead. The ensuing battle is between the environment and reason. No doubt the breakout of peace will come with the blue crystal clarity of December, but I’m not sure who or what will win.

“The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.”

Welcome to the Carnyville

2009-10-27T20:20:00.015Z

“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” the Joker-esque host declares.

‘Here’ is the old fire station and police station, complete with use of old cellblocks, on Silver Street, Bristol.

‘It’ is the Invisible Circus, the Bristol-based arts-community collective of street performers and circus acts. They bring the cabaret and the carnival; they all share origins in Victoriana and Vaudeville, and they all offer up the neo-burlesque and the gothic. And it is this collective which most definitely ‘happens’ to the once formal, regimental space, in a frenzy and thunder of chaotic performance, choreographed fire, fiery dance and aerial antics on a series of nights never to be repeated.

The air, the atmosphere, the evocation, alters between rooms and between tracks. In the cavernous fire station, rope artists wind themselves around colour-striped blackness, suspended only arm’s length above their audience, and in its back rooms, a photographer stages mock-peep-show-esque portraits.

Within the ground floor cells and offices of the police station, fortunes are told, costumes designed and funeral arrangements made.

All the while, above them, on the cellblock balconies protruding overhead, prisoners are led between flame-wielding poi dancers, and welders shower the crowds below with sparks.

In the forecourt itself, the gothic is infused with the romantic as a light misty rain descends out from the skirts of two ghosts treading the walls of the police station at 90 degrees.

The mood returns to the anarchic when an insane trapeze artists throws herself into impossible knots heart-stoppingly far above the crowd.

But while everyone’s attention is on the activity happening in the night sky high above their heads, Pan’s creatures of the underworld are free to roam undetected, manhandling and molesting their unsuspecting victims and generally making nuisances of themselves.

Carnyville was meant to be a series of irreverent, re-appropriative, creatively explosive, audacious, romantic, and even dangerous nights.

But in the wet misty rain that filled the space and distorted the light collecting in the open spaces between the old cellblocks and the fire station, it’s the ethereal memory of the ghosts which still prevails, as if their descent down the building’s face towards us was a defiant, emotive escape from the building's past. It was this ‘haunting’ which lasted longest.

“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” might be the opening declaration of the Carnyville, but for some reason this is a very ‘Bristol’ event, and I’ve never heard of the like happening anywhere else.

Technorati Tags:
bristol, carnyville, silver street, invisible circus, carnival, cabaret, trapeze, general debauchery

The Human Race

2009-09-14T21:06:00.002Z

According to Dr. Bowen-Simpkins, one in 3000 are born with an intersex disorder. I read an article once that claimed the number was much higher than this.

What is happening to Caster Semenya – the scrutiny, the violence of the exposé, the brutality of the jokes, the outrage on all sides – is what happens when society is forced to confront a truth its entire construction is based upon denying: that there are more than two genders, that humanity cannot be so simply divided, severed, in half.

Gender division gives power structures something to stand over. When someone tries to run headlong into it, or run across its tightly regulated boundaries, and then dare to celebrate their victory in doing so, they must be mercilessly exposed, revealed to the masses, denounced as an anomaly, a deviance from the norm: unverified and illegitimate. Would anyone have asked any questions, or cast any doubt over her identity, if Caster Semenya had not been winning her races?

She can run, but she mustn’t win, because the winner must be the Human and everyone knows that humans are only male or female. In the human race as we understand it, Semenya can only lose.

(All credit to South Africa for rallying to her side).

Technorati Tags:
gender, caster semenya, south africa, human, human race

Identity in crisis

2009-08-31T19:57:00.002Z

Is an identity crisis a confusion about the nature of one’s identity, or the nature of identity itself? A confusion over which characteristics that construct an identity are real or true, or the realisation that identity is a word to describe the collation of these characteristics: characteristics that would float otherwise unattached? In other words, a realisation that nothing but a word holds all these characteristics together?

Does an identity crisis happen upon the understanding that, rather like a tree falling silently if unobserved, without people around us to ascribe us certain characteristics – ‘you are this and you are that’ – we have nothing left with which to scrape an identity together? I suppose that everyone must realise at some point in their lives that we do not get to define ourselves.

The UK rape conviction rate is a Postcode Lottery...

2009-07-11T18:44:00.002Z

...and the Bristol area is amongst the lowest in the country.

The Guardian's figures show that in the 70s the rape conviction rate for the UK was 33%.
Today it is 5.1%... and lower than that if you live in Bristol.

How conflict divides gender

2009-05-23T13:01:00.002Z

I receive mails from a world-wide network of activists, and I've been meaning to post an email I received from one member of the group for some time. This is it... Better late than never:

A personal commentary by a life-long women's advocate and activist.

Kathy Sloan
West Hartford, Connecticut
USA

Each new day seems to bring with it another unthinkable atrocity against the women and girls of Afghanistan. The roster of infamy reads like something out of the Nazi terror: a law passed and signed by the president sanctioning marital rape, acid thrown in the faces of girls walking to school, women forced to make themselves invisible with suffocating head to toe covering that puts the yellow stars of David Jews were forced to wear to shame. Never has misogyny been so blatant or so blatantly repellent.

This year is the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights. When ever-growing numbers of women in Afghanistan are literally setting themselves on fire due to the utter degradation of their very personhood while the international community allows this to go on, the Declaration is mocked and proven hollow. During the “Burning Times” of the 1400s through 1700s in Europe and the United States, when thousands of women were burned at the stake for “witchcraft,” agonizing immolation was administered by the state. In the 21st century in Afghanistan, patriarchal misogyny has regressed to the point where the state no longer needs to carry out femicide; ubiquitous and relentless terror, abuse and destruction of female lives accomplish the same goal through suicide.

Where are we as a global community when the biological existence of female identity becomes synonymous with “evil,” an essence so threatening, so repellent that it justifies exploitation, commodification, violence and the ultimate “punishment” – murder?

Nations go to war over possession of natural resources, rivalries and greed. “Wars” are declared on “terror” and “drugs” but where is the “war” on violence, abuse and degradation of women? Every country on the planet engages in human trafficking of women and girls for use as sex slaves – where is the “war” on this lethal trafficking? From the sexual commodification of females in Western culture to its ultimate expression as blatant loathing of females in Afghanistan, where is the outrage, where is the call to war? Where is the soul of humanity that demands we not allow, condone, participate in, or passively accept the abuse of females every day, every hour, every minute? The despairing women of Afghanistan demand an answer.

Another Week That Was

2009-05-11T22:55:00.001Z

This was surprisingly accurate too:

The Week That Was

2009-05-04T09:30:00.001Z

Last week's calendar pic:

I couldn't have put it better myself!

the baby bust

2008-10-14T10:28:00.000Z

It’s about time I wrote something. Otherwise my blog is going to go mouldy…

…So I’ve dragged this article out of a remote bookmark file and dusted it off…

…It’s all about the rapidly declining birth-rate in Western Europe – how and why women are not having babies. It’s a decline so vertiginous that new terminology has had to be invented to describe it. What was previously referred to as ‘very low level’ fertility, a rate set at 1.3 children per family and which used to be the lowest recorded fertility rate, has been undermined by some places in Europe, so that now there is ‘lowest-low’ level fertility applied to places where the birth-rate has, for the first time, dropped below 1.3.

I like this article. It basically dismisses the conservative/religious “told you so” attacks on the availability of contraception, the ease of abortion and our apparently shallow, selfish, secular lifestyles and suggests instead that it is, to a large extent, conservatism that is in fact responsible for suppressing the baby numbers.

Research has revealed that within Europe there is another divide between birth-rates: a South/North divide. Apparently records reveal that more babies are being born in the north of Western Europe than in the south of Western Europe. Superficially, this shouldn’t make sense. In the southern countries of Italy, Greece and Spain, traditional family structures still endure. Despite levels of education comparing equitably with their northern sisters, women still tend to forgo careers for housewifery, while their husbands go out to work. Generally, you’d predict then that it would be in these traditional family frameworks that the most babies were being born. However, the opposite is true: far fewer babies are being born in Italy, Spain and Greece than in northern Western European countries.

In contrast, in the north, in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, the average couple both work fulltime jobs, and yet, somehow, women are finding the time to have more babies than in the south.

Social and cultural surveys have revealed that in traditional family frameworks, in Italy and Greece for example, men who work while their wives and girlfriends stay at home, are much less likely to help with the housework or assist with the practical elements of raising their children. This has had a tendency to put women off having more children once they’ve had one and then subsequently discovered they have to do everything themselves. What a surprise. This isn’t rocket science, is it!

So you can probably guess, without reading the rest of the article, why women seem keener to have babies in Denmark and Sweden where – guess what? – men are much more likely to help their wives and girlfriends, who are also holding down fulltime jobs, with domestic chores and childcare. It would seem raising a family, as a collaborative and equal partnership between two people, is a much more appealing prospect for a woman than effectively running a household and family alone.

What interests me though, and what isn’t really questioned in the article or anywhere else it seems, is what else can be read into this beyond the logistics? I’m glad that the article lays to rest the usual religious hysteria about modern attitudes to life with very practical answers to the question of our diminishing European demographic. But it doesn’t ask if there is anything else besides the practicalities. We are socialised to believe that women have a maternal instinct that kicks in at some point in life to induce the drive to reproduce. If this drive is as inherent and instinctive, as we have been socialised to believe, then logistics and practicalities should not, alone, be able to have such a widespread and devastating affect upon it.

Logistics involves processes of rationalising: the situation is evaluated and deemed unsuitable for reproduction and child-rearing. But the maternal instinct is not a rationalising negotiation… it’s an instinct… that’s the point! It’s supposed to be integral to being human. It’s supposed to be an essentially defining characteristic of being a female human. It’s this drive that’s supposed to undermine reasoning in order to ensure the survival of the species, no matter what – no matter what the economic situation, or the cultural climate, or whether your husband is helping out around the house or not – isn’t it?

If women are evaluating, reasoning, rationalising the decision to have babies or not, what has happened to the so-called maternal instinct? Is there one? Has it gone?... Did it ever really exist??

My 50p’s-worth is this: when the social, economic, cultural climate is right, or when there is no choice – when contraception is unavailable (or illegal) or cultural expectations heap value onto childbirth – then the “maternal instinct” suddenly blooms into being, masquerading as innate, internal ‘nature’. But without these expectations and pressures, without the cultural or religious pressures, when the social climate is wrong (e.g. when the father of your children chooses the pub over bedtime stories), or in an environment where there is so much else going on for women (and men) – where there is the freedom of a life that is not dependent upon supposed biological functions – then the “maternal instinct” mysteriously disappears.

I cannot believe that the maternal instinct is inherent at birth. I can only believe that it is socialised into existence – that it comes from outside and is then absorbed, and not the other way around – with the presence of certain social and cultural factors. The human drive to reproduce is less biological, more manmade. And I would argue that the survival of the species has its conditions – that perhaps it discerns between quality and quantity… The smatterings of only children playing by themselves in playgrounds will have plenty of time and space to reflect upon this…

Technorati Tags:
baby bust, baby boom, new york times, happy families, gender, demographic crisis, europe

the bishops' tale

2008-07-09T17:12:00.001Z

It amazed me how three men – one presenter, one liberal pro-female-bishops (Dean of Southwark) and one conservative anti-female-bishops (Bishop of Fulham) – could sit in the BBC Radio 4 studio (on Monday morning) and discuss the legitimacy of ordaining women as bishops and never once observe that they were discussing the lives and future prospects of a particular demographic of women, without any representative from that demographic, or indeed any woman, present at all!

In fact, the Bishop of Fulham did at one point accuse the Dean of Southwark of attempting to silence and repress the voice of the conservative traditionalists. Well what about the voices of the people this whole debate actually centres on? Where were they? If anyone is being silenced, it’s the women who want to become bishops. You can hear their debate (and not hear the prospective female bishops debate!) here, if you scroll down to 0810. (Actually, at 0709, there is a 4-minute piece from a woman dean ((as opposed to the 11 minutes given to the male bishop and dean an hour later!)))

Not that any of this surprises me. Various parties of men sit around and discuss the rights and freedoms of women all the time: in parliament, in justice systems, in brothels… in any structured social system where the hierarchy is male dominated. For the church, of course, especially the Catholic Church, this is one of their favourite pastimes!

John Bell on the radio today said something like: ‘the church has been concerned with playing catch-up with the rest of society… but if it only understood the role women play in community and society, it wouldn’t be having to catch up with society; it would be leading it’. You can hear it properly here.

I don’t want the church, or any other organised religion, leading society, but it’s staggering that any large body of people, especially in the West, can really, genuinely, still be arguing – eight years into the so-called New Millenia – that there is any doubt surrounding the equal legitimacy of women to do any humanly-constructed activity if they so want to. It’s absolutely amazing. And it was reassuring to hear at least one Christian voice of reason.

And what is equally amazing is how little notice the rest of secular society takes of the church’s internal bickering. We pass them off as obsolete, inoffensive and non-threatening. They have their own (not so) little world that they operate in and they leave the rest of us alone. Except they don’t. And they are not inoffensive. Aside from its religious significance, a Bishop position is professional, paid employment. Sexual discrimination is supposed to be illegal in this country… and yet, the Church still finds immunity.

And they are not obsolete. How do you think the 24-week abortion act suddenly got pushed into the public, and parliamentary, arena once again? Guess who the advocates for the changing of the law to a lower limit were… Catholic cabinet ministers who’d been requisitioned by conservative Christian activists with parliamentary connections.

Considering the demise of organised Christianity in this country, what remains is a fairly hardcore conservative force to be reckoned with! Fortunately, reason prevailed in both the abortion act and the Synod’s decision to ordain women bishops. It just amazes me that either should need debating in the first place.

Technorati Tags:
john bell, bbc radio 4, women bishops, female bishops, abortion act, conservative christianity, gender, sexual discrimination, church, synod, brothel, parliament, rook takes bishop checkmate

my house-moving tsunami...

2008-06-01T14:48:00.000Z

Apologies for how woefully neglected my blog is at the moment - especially considering the sudden, unexpected (and very welcome!) surge in visitors to it!! How typical - just when I can't capitalize on it!

(Oh well, I've never been particularly good with 'capital' anyway...!)

The problem is, my life, once again, looks a lot like this:

As soon as it doesn't look like this anymore, I will get back to my blog properly... and probably find there's no one left here waiting...

The beginning of an end to maternal essentialism? I sincerely hope so...

2008-04-10T08:34:00.000Z

Thomas Beatie is a pregnant trans-gender man from Oregon. There's been a fair bit of media coverage: most of it skeptical, some of it downright prejudiced and inflammatory.

The Guardian remarks on how the "common reaction is to wonder how someone can identify themselves as male and yet embrace pregnancy" and suggests that this is in fact "like saying you can't be a woman and have a career". There has indeed always been this widespread social assumption that equality has only to do with women attaining the same opportunities and privileges as men, and never about men attaining the same opportunities as women. When it happens, society balks!

As the F-Word puts it so well:

"Of course, the reason that the story has gotten so much attention is because Beatie doubly upsets the expectations of a society that is still quite rigid about gender conformity. If transitioning from male to female, or female to male, is still hard for some to accept, then folks who fall somewhere in between, or, as seems to be the case here, are not threatened by forays across the gender divide, totally confound. The concept that Beatie doesn’t feel like being pregnant threatens his identity as a man seems to be difficult to understand for those who are still not entirely comfortable even with those who break down gender roles, such as a female boss, a stay at home dad, etc, let alone challenge the concept of gender as a simple binary divided by an impenetrable wall".

In any socially collective way, we rarely get beyond the quite scandalously over-simplified gender binary that exists between us. Due to its apparently intrinsic and unshakable hold on society, most ground covered on issues of equality works with this divide rather than making any attempt to subvert or transgress it.

Pregnant men do subvert and transgress it, and it's a rare and beautiful thing.

When pressed for reasons why such an occurrence is so offensive, even professionals were struggling for articulate, sensible reasons. Most medical concerns centre around the testosterone treatment taken by Beatie to become male. According to Lisa Masterson, a Los Angeles obstetrician, excessive testosterone "can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby." But this can happen anyway, quite naturally, in more 'regular' births.

And most social concerns centre around the bullying the child might face at school having been born to its father. Bullying is always a favourite tool utilised by conservatives against any moves towards more unconventional parenting: it's been used against everything from single parenting, to adoptive parenting, to gay/lesbian parenting, and even to home schooling and special needs. It is not an argument - it is a non-argument - because the sad fact of the matter is, children get bullied for everything and anything and nothing - from being overweight to wearing the wrong kind of footwear. There's no logic in bullying, and it cannot be preempted. It's just a convenient, authoritative-sounding tool that is always effective in turning public opinion in support of conservative values. Kerrick Lucker, a gay activist at the University of California, gets much closer to the point when he says that "the only unusual challenges these kids face come from members of the public who see gender ambiguity as a great wrong". The bullying, this suggests, is traceable to a very adult public.

Anything that ever suggests a transgression of the old, tired gender binaries inevitably sees a creaky wheeling-out of those hideously reductive and inherently prejudiced arguments about what is considered 'Natural'.

For some reason, regardless of their moral behaviour or lifestyles, any normatively male and female couple have more right to have a baby than a gay/lesbian/trans gender couple who have had to fight everything from social and legal convention to intrusive state surveillance, and often hefty financial pay-outs, to conceive a child or adopt one. Yet reason must surely suggest, as Lucker goes on to point out, that "generally speaking, a man whose desire for a child is strong enough to overcome the obstacles that transgender men must face in bearing one is likely to be an extremely caring father".

As Beatie so eloquently puts it himself: "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire". How long is it going to take us to realise that we are human before we are gendered?

Technorati Tags:
thomas beatie, trans gender, gender, gender roles, gender normativity, pregnant men, being male and female is not an automatic right to parenthood, nature is a social convention not an unquestionable fact, biology is fluid, anatomy is changeable

a sticky web

2008-03-20T08:56:00.001Z

The New York Times asks why, if so few women work in the computer technology industry, do so many more teenage girls use the internet than teenage boys? They ask the question but are tentative in offering any answers. The reason for that is, as they say, because...

"Teasing out why girls are prolific Web content creators usually leads to speculation and generalization. Although girls have outperformed boys in reading and writing for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, this does not automatically translate into a collective yen to blog or sign up for a MySpace page".

There have always been generalisations down sex and gender lines on this topic, because girls' prevalence online has been long noted, even back in the days before the giant social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Beebo: more girls had 'homepages' than boys, and a big deal was made about the name, 'homepage', and how girls' apparent 'nesting' inclinations have translated into digital homemaking. It is possible, I suppose, as female children are, generally-speaking, brought up on a diet of dolls-houses and Fisher Price kitchen sets, and so extending domestic idealisation into a digital home would be a natural extension of childhood practices. But if this is true, then it's quite disturbing.

Internet enthusiasts and propaganda espousing the possibilities of the internet have always emphasised its 'freeing' potential:- promising a place of escape, from 'reality', from routine daily life, and from virtually all conventional societal roles; including, of course, gender roles. But if what the 16-year-old website contributer interviewed in the article says about why girls are more active online is true, and “girls like to help with other people’s problems or questions, [in order to be] kind of, like, motherly, to everybody" then this vision is in trouble.

If her view is shared, then not only are all female babies born instant mothers (in other words, destined always, inevitably, without question, for motherhood, and never allowed to be anything other, even in childhood), but all online social networking does, or is for, is to perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes. We are all still men and women online - men and mothers - men and sex objects - and we have not deviated from any of the normalised models of gender. The web is a trap... its net is tightening...

I would like to believe this isn't the case. I have never believed it before. Perhaps I have what is now an old fashioned 90s view of what forms of liberation the internet could offer society: I believed identities could shift and merge and transform in cyberspace. But when I was looking for images for this post and, inspired by the title the New York Times had given its article's subjects, I googled 'cyber girl', all I was presented with was page upon page of porn. According to the majority of web content creators, 'cyber girls' are not girls who blog, or network, or write content, or create web pages, 'cyber girls' are sexualised images of women you can access digitally. And that's all. So much for gender liberation in cyberspace!

(I picked a tame one!)

Apart from the small image taken from the New York Times article itself, these are the only non-pornographic 'cyber girl' images I found:

Technorati Tags:
fisher price freedom, myspace, beebo, facebook, cyber girls, new york times, sticky web, phishing net, gender, online identities, RIP my so high hopes for gender equality in cyberspace

when pop princesses pop

2008-03-13T10:35:00.001Z

With the return of Britney’s father to ‘take legal control of her life’, the Guardian raises this question:

"Is it likely that a father would have dared proceed in the same way with an adult son and received such ready acquiescence from the courts and a good part of the media? No fathers have appeared to take legal charge of the countless male pill-popping pop stars whose language and behaviour are less than clean and who live out some of the wildest dreams of the adult children we all sometimes are. But women, it seems, like their Victorian great-grandmothers, still need to be taken in hand and charged with madness".

So her father has been officially and legally promoted to Custodian, Controller, Creator, oh sorry, I mean, ‘Conservator’. Britney has been without a patriarch. Clearly that has been the problem all along! Her descent into madness, the loss of her children, and the journey into wilderness, all happened because she has been deprived the solid guidance of strong man – apparently her disparate catalogue of boyfriends/husbands were not man enough… perhaps because they took her away from the father. He, it would seem, has already been forgiven for whatever part he played in pushing his offspring towards the stardom that ensured the possibility of her demise. That doesn’t matter now, because it has been decided by the Law of the State that she needs him once more. We can all breathe a sigh of relief now because the Father has Returned to take his daughter in hand (along with her assets – the financial ones, that is – well… we’d hope!).

There are stages towards a societal diagnosis of madness: the first is to slip from a squeaky clean, squeaky cute, virginal mouseketeer...

...into a slightly slutty young woman.

The second is to become a mother and then seem to have no clue what to do with the babies once you have them. How dare any woman – especially one in the public eye – defile the iconic Sanctity of Motherhood – the Sacred Mother cannot also be seen to be a slut.

She must be in control of herself, in control of her body, in control of her hetero-monogamous relationship with one, controlled, male, and in control of her role as mother of her children. Britney is in a wilderness created by an utter lack of control. When a much-(and intensively)-watched female celebrity breaks all the rules, we, her spectators and judges, feel righteously vilified in reaching our verdicts, making our diagnoses, and then documenting them in Heat magazine: our reliable weekly archive of female-celebrity malaise, demise and maladies… Ever attentive to the first signs of so-called madness… Lying in wait for the ones who clearly need reigning in… It’s a public service! I’m sure Amy Winehouse would think so…

Technorati Tags:
pop princess, britney spears, amy winehouse, why doesn't pete doherty's dad come to collect him, men must be having a good time, women must be mad, boys will be boys, girls will be insane, the woman in white is back to black, the return of the father, custodian, conservatorship

equal representation, not sexual division

2008-03-02T10:12:00.000Z

David Cameron has pledged to give a third of jobs in his first government to women. Positive discrimination has never been particularly popular. It's sometimes been deemed anti-, not pro-, equality. The Tory MP for Shipley, said: 'If you believe in true equality, which I do, then it should be irrelevant what somebody's gender should be'.

Yes, indeed, it should be irrelevant what somebody's gender is... But if gender is an irrelevant factor of employment, why then are there so few women in parliament?? (I read somewhere last year that there are more people called David in the Tory Party than women!) Clearly gender is not irrelevant.

There is this hysteria surrounding positive discrimination that always follows this argument: positive discrimination will result in people gaining positions they are not qualified for; while those more qualified miss out. It is just another demonstration of prejudice to assume that any women applying for parliamentary places are less qualified than their male contemporaries and less deserving of the post. The point of raising the issue of unbalanced gender representation in parliament and other areas of politics is to expose how discrimination has prevented equally qualified women from gaining the same recognition and prestige as men. They have missed out not because they are less qualified, but because they are women. Cameron is intending to try to counter this by employing them because they are women.

But some of his logic is worrying: he wants more female politicians so that they can 'influence decisions affecting women's lives', devising policies 'that matter to female voters.' Women do not necessarily support female politicians, and to hand over policies deemed as 'women's issues' to women parliamentarians could effectively exclude them from authority on other subjects. If male politicians are dis-involved in so-called 'women's issues', then female politicians may be dis-involved from non-women's-issues.

Separating politics in this way can orchestrate the separation of society into male and female: women have their 'women's issues' which are dealt with by female politicians. Men have their issues dealt with by male politicians. I will not be haremised in this way. Of course there must be equal representation of men and women in parliament (if there has to be a government at all, which is perhaps the real question), but not so as they can preside over a divided society. They must co-operate equally, so that we can be a society of humans, and not forever, dis-unitedly , gendered.

Technorati Tags:
david cameron, tory party, power is the problem, and government isn't the answer, equal representation, women in parliament

Fashion Fascism

2008-02-22T17:30:00.002Z

Recently the fashion catwalks have been walked by markedly skinnier men. If I was writing about female models, this wouldn’t be news! The apparent need for emaciated women in modelling has long been documented.

But traditionally, throughout the history of modelling, men have been allowed to keep their recognisably masculine form. In contrast, women are expected to be over average in height, under average in weight and more or less devoid of any notable breasts, buttocks, and hips:- the 3 usual signifiers of the female human form. Yes, male models have to look good – fit, healthy, more muscular etc. – and they definitely cannot be overweight. But they’ve never been required to be underweight.

In a New York Times article about the new skinny male models, one such model said that fashion designers “are looking for some kind of androgyne”. But what kind? For me, this poses 5 main questions:

1. Why is androgynous synonymous with skinny?
2. Why is fashion insistent upon skinniness, and somehow in conversation with the androgyne?
3. Why (with a few notable exceptions, such as David Bowie, for example) has it been mostly up to women, until now, to provide the androgyne model, and not men?
4. How has it been, that in the heteronormative set up or performance of modelling and fashion (especially on adverts) there is, instead of a model of Man and Woman, the model of Man and Androgyne?
5. Why has all that changed now and man has been merged into the expanded boundaries of the androgyne?

1) This is by no means a comprehensive response! This is only what I think! Briefly, the Human Body model—the figure of the human that you’ll see in medical/biology books, history books about Primitive “Man” and evolution—the human figure that you’ll see on traffic lights and road signs—is a male body. This is the normative body—the normalised body—the body without a distinctive sex. Any alterations to that body—the addition of breasts and hips especially—change that normalised, standardised, sexless body into a female body. It’s the addition of extra flesh that changes the body from an indistinct (male) body into a sexed (female) body. Therefore, in order to achieve sexlessness—something closer to the androgynous body—flesh (and as much of it as possible) must be removed (or a degree of recognisable ‘maleness’ added to female bodies, and vice versa).

2) Quite honestly—I don’t know! Answers on a postcard (or in the comments box) please! Just to surmise that fashion hates women, or fashion hates the body, isn’t enough. Why does it hate them? Doesn’t it depend upon them? And if fashion is art—or a form of—shouldn’t it be celebrating the diversity, the endless possibilities, presented by the human physical form? Instead of constantly wheeling out exactly the same figure on a perpetual catwalk-conveyor-belt? Perhaps it’s arguable that because fashion must fight for its right to be considered serious art, in an effort to present itself—to clearly project itself into social visibility and awareness—it must be able to, literally, stand alone: in effect, standing out and away from the human body presenting (and enabling) the art. So then the human must be invisible (or maybe indecipherable)—the art must be all that is seen—the human, almost non-existent. If the body is to be this skinny, then it was surely inevitable that it would turn to the androgyne for the modelling of its clothes.

3) If the androgynous body has always been closer to the male human’s than the female’s, wouldn’t it have made more sense for the man to provide it when needed, rather than fashion insisting upon an inexhaustible supply of androgynous-looking women? Like all these questions, answering this properly really requires lengthy analysis and research. This particular question especially needs a thorough look at the history of fashion and the point at which focus on women’s fashion overtook the focus on men’s (when both had been originally equal—especially during the Regency period), and how this has combined with the obsession with the androgynous body (briefly explained above) to form an industry reliant upon a relentless factory-line of dressed up (or dressed down!) androgynous female (living) mannequins.

Equation: contemporary fashion is more excited by women’s fashion than men’s + for fashion to be an art, the enabler must be seen to be unseen = female androgynes.

4) In other words, why have men been allowed to be men, while women are not allowed to be women—and what affect has this had on heteronormative performance when the man’s partner on the catwalk (or the advert or photo shoot) is a female-ish androgyne and not an actual woman? An answer to the first: the man, in the absence of breasts, large buttocks and hips, is closer to the androgynous body in his “natural” male form than the woman, and is therefore allowed to keep his extra flesh, as it doesn’t deviate from the androgynous form as much as the woman’s extra flesh does. An answer to the second: In my opinion: clearly defining the male body, while under-defining (undermining) and diminishing the female body serves to exert, underline, project and visibly bolster the male body. So his product (fashion, hair products, aftershave etc.) appeals to men because the model’s masculinity is established—its exaggerated certainty stamped on the picture—in comparison with the fading, diminished female. So his product, or her product, appeals to women because the model’s faded, diminished presence creates a space onto which women can project their own bodies, in order to get close to the ideal(ised) male body and, if not become the object of his attention and gaze, then become the foil to his sexuality that affirms her own: she is positively female against his positively male!

5) Now the big question: why has all this apparently changed? It could be this: our society has turned its attention once more to male fashion, perhaps for the first time in decades: it now takes an equal interest in the fashions and other aesthetics of men as it has of women; thus requiring the diminishment of the male body in order for male fashion to stand alone in art form. The intensified focus on men’s fashion, its exaggeration and exploration, and the layering of clothing onto the juxtaposition of a diminishing figure, is shaving off the flesh of men as it has shaved off the flesh of women.

I’d like to think it was for this reason: the female-ised androgyne has been so long alone, so long required to take sexual fulfilment from a body that is wrong in shape and form for her, so mismatched and unequal in relations, a body that is more than her, that her mating call of romantic longing has been answered; and a sexual partner been made-to-measure—prêt-à-porter—and is ready to wear!

Technorati Tags:
fashion hates bodies, fashionism, fashion fascism, skinny male models, the products of the body, androgynous, the art of skin and bones

a little lament for Kenya

2008-02-10T16:09:00.000Z

I suppose I took it for granted - the one place where everything would be fine - the country in Africa with the best chance of succeeding - that would succeed. I'm completely dismayed and I don't really know how to express it, because it's not 'mine' - it's not for me to feel dismayed - it's only the memories which are mine:

I saw my first shooting star in Kenya: the night we arrived at the coast - a few miles south of Mombasa - through the leaves of palm trees, slicing through a sky that was an ocean of Indian ink. I was 15.

I remember Kenya in 1997, when I was 17. It was our second visit; during a summer of student riots. I found Jack again, on the beach, where I'd met him two years before.

We drove to his house in one of the fringe townships of Mombasa. His house was one room in a single-storey concrete block of a building, with shared squat-toilets at the end of the hall. I couldn't see anything outside the window except other blocks just like this one (or in worse condition), separated by bamboo and palms and little straggly patches of jungle.

A friend arrived with fish and chips in newspaper - a moment of surreal incongruity! - and told us there was rioting in town and it was spreading through the streets. Admittedly, all the hotels had warned their guests not to leave the grounds. Most had locked their gates. Every foreign tourist had been 'tagged' with a hospital-style hotel armband. I'd left the hotel because I thought knowing a Kenyan and being 17 automatically guaranteed immunity to injury and death!

But the tag spelled trouble for Jack - if the police found us. And the riots were bringing both trouble, and the police (one and the same thing!), closer. His friend brought the car right up to the entrance, over the dust and mud, and I climbed into the backseat and lay down. Between them, they steered the car out of the township and onto the main coastal road from Mombasa and didn't turn on the engine until they were sure we were well away. Only from my position lying flat along the backseat did I notice that the car didn't apparently have any gear stick!

By the time we got back to the hotel it was dark. The gates were locked and guarded. Jack and I left the car and walked into the forest surrounding the hotel.

We followed the walls until we found a place we were sure was unguarded. He gave me a leg up, I hauled myself up onto the wall and dropped down the other side. The resort was silent - an uncomfortably conflicting utopia of manicured lawns and landscaped gardens. I ran over the darkened lawns, onto the lighted pathways, and into my room.

Naivasha and Lake Nakuru: at least 80 people have been killed in conflicts between tribes, in a place of outstanding natural beauty. The area looks positively Utopian.

For anyone who's read The Beach, the price of utopia is usually somebody else's suffering. During one of the nights we stayed by Lake Nakuru there was an almighty dog fight on the porch of the lodge where we were sleeping. They only ceased when something crept through the trees in front of the lodge, and all the dogs turned to growl at it, united.

A short boat trip took me and my family across the lake to an island. We were told it was entirely predator free and we could roam around at will and see giraffes and zebra. That was where a 15-foot python shot out of the earth and into the sky with the velocity and noise of an oil or gas explosion, less than two feet from where I was standing. Naturally my first instinct was to stand around and take photos! When we returned to the boat and spoke to the boatman, he revised his previous assurance by saying that the island was entirely predator free except for the python!

A bit more than a year later, Nakuru was also the place I returned to for 'training' with the AVs for my 'gap' year (mis)adventure!

But these were only my adventures. I took my adventures from Kenya and apart from the tourist money - which Kenya is now suffering massive depletions of - I had nothing worth giving. I made promises I couldn't keep, I had exotic adventures with other people's real lives, I walked naively into situations I didn't (couldn't) understand.

I have no place there - no right to a claim on anything but my own experiences and memories - and so am in no place to judge. But I can't help but feel sorrow for a country that gave me so much and is now turning in on itself. I despair of manipulative politicians using its people's ethnic allegiances to turn its own country into something dangerous and tragic.

I don't even know where Jack Malidzo is anymore...

Technorati Tags:
kenya, nakuru, naivasha, jack malidzo, african misadventures, the exploits I'm not proud of

Burton's blond moments

2008-02-02T20:32:00.001Z

Clearly Tim Burton, like Hitchcock (among others), has a thing about blonds and makes them mean something in film. He is not the only one. As far as I can tell, filmmakers are only taking meanings applied to certain colours by society and exaggerating them on screen. Hitchcock's blonds were always more ambiguous (representing Hitchcock's version of the nature of innocence – its manipulative and seductive powers - rather than representing a conventional understanding of innocence itself), but Burton is generally less subtle.

Admittedly, the polarization between light and dark – blondness and darkness – in Burton’s characters is not always so simply divided. The struggle between light and dark that takes place between the two female characters over the body of a male in Sweeney Todd is subtler in Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow.

In Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow the blond females embody something closer to the Hitchcockian model of the inherently seductive temptress who will surely bring about the hero's demise, and the struggle takes place internally, in the interior of the relationship between each respective Johnny Depp character and his blond muse.

But more often than not, the model in Burton films is simpler: Blond = good girl (or guy), innocence and vulnerability. Brunette = morally ambiguous and complex (if not outright bad) girl (or guy). Which woman does the hero of Planet of the Apes end up with? The complex, intelligent, fierce, physically challenging and ambiguous ape? The embodied union of brain and bestiality? Or the submissive, helpless, imbecilic, and almost completely voiceless blond woman? The embodiment of emptiness and nothingness? How could it be the first, when such a union between a man and woman could threaten our society's oh so comfortable social order?

(I thought that film was endlessly disappointing - can you tell??)

In Sweeney Todd, the archetypes are divided into pairs: there is the blond (innocent, pure, vulnerable) couple: Anthony and Johanna. And there is the dark (ambiguous, morally questionable, dangerous) couple: Mrs Lovett and Sweeney Todd.

There is a battle for survival going on between the two, and there is a battle for Sweeney going on between the (non)forces of Blondness (embodied by Johanna and her mother - they are interchangeable - hardly a whole character each) and the forces of Darkness (Mrs Lovett). In the end, the Aryan model reigns supreme through passivity. Usually it does not have to do anything: darkness will inevitably bring about its own destruction. The colour-coded conclusion? In Cinema Land, the survival and preservation of purity is both inevitable and desirable. It is eternally worth fighting for.

So, they're just films. This is just movie language. Does any of it really matter? Do I just have something against blonds?? Of course not. The problem is that colour-coding and its significance in the social unconscious may not have an impact on daily life with the people we know, but once you make an image, and you create a story around that image, and use that image for a particular purpose or to convey a particular message, you load that image with meaning. The colours of that image are an incredibly powerful way to control a message and manipulate the spectator. That's when the image and its colours affect what we think on a daily, social level.

The most obvious recent example of this away from cinema, in my mind, is the Madeleine McCann case. That image of her that is everywhere: its intention to convey the very embodiment of innocence and vulnerability. But the very fact that there is an agenda behind the presentation of the image makes that image anything but innocent. It is deliberately playing on the associations we make between blondness and innocence. Would this child have had such a global media circus surrounding her if it had been a young black girl in that picture, or if she’d even been just a little less blond?

Should we really be continuing to colour-code human attributes and characteristics with such banality, lack of imagination or sense of social responsibility? I'd have hoped that, by now, there was really no more need to bang on about choosing representations of humanity that deviated from the usual (black and white) suspects. But it would seem that filmmakers could do with some reminding.

Technorati Tags:
innocence, johnny depp, tim burton, hitchcock, blond moments, sleepy hollow, edward scissorhands, planet of the apes, sweeney todd, colour coding purity

96% Chimp! How different can the sexes of humans really be?

2008-01-29T09:51:00.000Z

It might seem a bit irrational that reports such as this should get on my nerves so much, considering how, on the surface, they appear to support gender equality (from the angle of equality through acknowledged 'differences' between the sexes) by espousing the worth of 'women's skills' and 'special talents' and their value in all aspects of society.

There seems to be a lot of this kind of so-called research and surveys about at the moment - ranging from retrograde and damaging to more encouraging and at least well-meaning. This one published yesterday does, admittedly, fall into the latter category. But I have problems with this kind of approach to gender 'difference'. First of all, the sheer amount of current material on this particular angle - especially found, it would seem, in analysis of gender in a business or corporate context - that seems to be doing the rounds of all levels of press at the moment makes me instantly suspicious! What is the agenda? Because when one angle is promoted and presented with such zeal, and to the exclusion of other arguments, there is always an agenda!

It could be that, in fact, gender equality is the agenda, but if it is, I think it's frequently misdirected, misinformed, seriously over-generalising the genders and, at times, potentially reactionary and damaging. All of these reports which divide human skills and attributes into male and female categories perpetuate the confines of these categories, refuse mobilisation between them, and continue the value systems that favour the supposedly special skills of men over the supposedly special skills of women, however well intentioned these reports and surveys are at attempting to balance those values:- intending to convince society of the equal value these attributes and skills hold in it - and how vital they all are to it.

I appreciate the intention because socialisation has meant that sensitivity/long-term planning/multi-tasking etc. have been the apparently specific skills of women, while focus/short-term goal achieving/aggression have been the specific skills of men. So, in so much as society is currently divided in this way, there is definitely a place for the raised profile and praise of 'feminine' skills. However, I absolutely do not support or feel gratitude towards 'research' and reports that bang on about how these attributes and skills are biologically pre-determined from conception.

Women and feminists have long tried to promote the value of 'feminine' traits and any progress in this direction has been painfully slow throughout history. There is nothing 'new' about trying to promote the supposedly special skills of women. Jane Austen had a go, Virginia Woolf had a go, among many many others. While we insist upon separating out human attributes between men and women, in a society where dominance (whoever embodies it) is always eventually bowed to and adhered to, the so-called traits of men will be valued over the so-called traits of women. And so both sexes will aspire to one, suppress the other, and men who show sensitivity and vulnerability will be considered weak and women who show aggression and self-confidence will be considered suspicious and 'unwomanly' (see article on Hillary Clinton 2 posts down...). This is not remotely helpful for gender equality.

When you consider that we're only 4% away from being chimpanzees you can start to understand just how grossly exaggerated studies of human biological differences really are. Humans, genetically, are 99.9% the same! So why on earth are we so obsessed with that 0.1% difference? Whatever differences there are biologically between the sexes they only become markedly different through the process of socialisation from infancy to adulthood that takes that 0.1% and inflates it beyond all reason. It is the world we live in - not the hormones we receive in the womb - that determine what characteristics, skills and traits we will display in human society. It is challenging society's understanding of what it is to be a gendered human, and not perpetuating constructed and socially manufactured models for each sex, that can bring about real gender equality.

Technorati Tags:
gender, gender equality, 96% chimp, the slippery banana skin of biological essentialism

what the F?

2008-01-26T12:54:00.000Z

'A Creative Revolution' is hosting the Canadian F-Word Blog Awards and one generous soul has seen fit to nominate me in the Best International Feminist Blog category! Wahoo!... Erm... I'd better write some more blog posts then and try to actually earn such an honour...

Technorati Tags:
canadian f-word blog awards, a creative revolution

the stork truth

2008-01-17T14:33:00.000Z

I don't have much to write about at the moment. Can you tell??

a race between the Others

2008-01-09T12:17:00.000Z

The Times columnist David Aaronovitch set up the Democrats' primacy battle as 'a race between the black man and the woman', concluding that America is 'more misogynist than racist'. It has been almost impossible - at least for me - to ignore this (what seems to me) obvious term of reference, but I'd decided not to comment on it before as I wasn't sure how simple the apparently polarised set-up really was, and for fear of sounding too much like I'm mongering for a 'victim culture' argument.

But as BBC Radio 4 brought it up themselves, as of course Aaronovitch has in his column, I felt justified in having thought about the situation in the same way. Is there is a genuine debate to be had on it?

I had definitely noticed ways in which Hillary Clinton's sex is drawn attention to - the ways in which she is measured for supposed levels of 'femininity' - or what 'kind' of woman she is - and criticized for showing too much or too little emotion - (because for some reason the level of emotion shown by a woman is notable, in a way it's rarely even mentioned in relation to male candidates competing for positions of power - Condoleeza Rice is another at whom criticisms concerning 'emotion' are levelled, not to mention crude allusions to her sex/sexuality).

Who Hillary Clinton is as a woman seems to matter more than who Barack Obama is as a man, and she is satirized with her sex as the root of the satire in a way that Obama's colour or race could (quite rightly!) never ever be satirized.

In other words, in today's society it's completely unacceptable to mock a person's ethnicity, but it's still perfectly acceptable to mock a person's sex. The favourite comparitive image for women aspiring to positions of power is the 'Ice Queen' or the 'Ice Witch' (of Narnia fame!), and Clinton has been no exception. Another Times columnist described Clinton's reaction to watching votes slip away from her to be like 'the Ice Queen watching winter melt into spring'!

Personally, I'm very tired of this analogy. Indeed, it's a very tired analogy! But if it's not an allusion to witches or bitches, some other similar analogy would be drawn up in its place, because the problem is within social psychology: the psychology that unconsciously aligns women with 'unfemininity' and even 'badness' or 'evil' if they in any way deviate from socialized secondary positions of submission to men. In the psychology of women as well as men, power = male, and so if a woman displays characteristics of, or aspirations towards, power, she strikes a discord in our psyches:- she doesn't make sense, there must be something wrong with her.

I only had to click on the 4th link listed after googling 'Hillary Clinton' to find something which commented on her gender and her presentation as a woman, above any discussion about her suitability as a primacy candidate. Click on the pic:

As Aaronovitch says, the qualities of self-control and authority that a woman needs to demonstrate in order to be considered as a serious candidate for a position of power are exactly the qualities that she will be criticized for, and label her 'unfeminine'.

This paradox of positioning - that she cannot win if she doesn't show her ability to be assertive and strong, and yet if she does, she risks being disliked for her show of supposed 'unfeminine' characteristics and so will probably not win that way either - reveal how virtually impossible it is for a woman to reach that very top spot. No doubt at all that Obama has to overcome racist prejudice to win his position, but he does not embody a political paradox the way Clinton does.

Despite my belief that both misogyny and racism are obstacles in the way of both men and women reaching positions of power, in this particular debate even I am a bit wary: that a female candidate and black male candidate are now the two front-runners for the Democrats' leadership can only reflect positively on American society. This whole situation is unprecedented, and whoever wins will have made history. Also, it would be extremely unfair, not to mention ridiculous, to polarize and divide everybody up into racists if they vote for Clinton and sexists if they vote for Obama! And this was what kept me from mentioning it until now. But nevertheless, having a race for power between a black male representative and a white female representative does effectively illustrate the psychology behind the ways we choose our figures of leadership, and this alone, however much the prejudices are exaggerated, is a useful window into societal behaviours.

Technorati Tags:
misogyny, racism, power politics, hillary clinton, condoleeza rice, barack obama, a race between the others

too old for St Trinian's

2008-01-04T11:46:00.000Z

I can't remember the last time I felt so old at the cinema. Even the demographic of the audience at the Harry Potter films was older! It was supposed to be a 12, but I'd say the average age was about 9...

...I don't know what I expected really. The spirit of anarchy in the film was uplifting, but there was nothing much new going on - nothing that hadn't already been done with greater effect and greater controversy in the original films. And the corporate machines which surround all these kind of mainstream films (of which the originals weren't a part), marketing them to within an inch of their lives, somewhat devalues and contradicts the film's celebration of anarchy.

In the 60s and 70s girls behaving badly was new and shocking.

Today, there's nothing at all new or shocking about girls behaving badly.

Then there was the stereotyping of the girls into different categories (Emos, Posh Totty ((read wannabe-WAGS)), Geeks, and a few other misguided cliches). There's nothing more repressive than stereotyping - few practices are more effective at trapping people (men as well as women) into restrictive and prescriptive gender roles, reliant upon the perpetual (high)maintenance of certain behaviour that doesn't allow for deviance or deviation. I thought St Trinian's was supposed to be all about deviance! So much for anarchy...

I suppose I went to see it out of curiosity and the assurance that anything with Russell Brand in had to have an edge to it. Apparently I was wrong. It had about as much edge as a blancmange.

Technorati Tags:
st trinian's, posh totty, emos, russell brand, anarchy, geeks, harry potter, wannabe-WAGS, media mulch

the Christmas Package

2007-12-23T20:10:00.000Z

Since it seems we're always going to commodify Christmas - (wrap it up and put it on sale) - then I can't help but feel some appreciation for those who put some effort into it. It's nice to know that if we're going to worship the spirit of the Christmas Present, it doesn't have to happen in a church of 6-foot bold red writing and plastic Santas, surrounded by a congregation of patronising Iceland tourists in crummy hats.

Merry Christmas (with bells on!)

NB Facebook doesn't transfer youtube videos for some reason, so you'll have to open this blog itself to see them...

Technorati Tags:
christmas, christmas adverts, christmas commercials, mum has definitely NOT gone to iceland

Combination 14

2007-12-22T17:36:00.001Z

Combination 14
Originally uploaded by Ricohmatic

Flickring 'contraband'...

Praxis

2007-12-21T16:20:00.001Z

Praxis 2
Originally uploaded by Tiefbauamt

Flickring 'Praxis'...

halva

2007-12-20T13:46:00.001Z

halva
Originally uploaded by miss pupik

vessels

2007-12-19T11:44:00.001Z

vessels #2
Originally uploaded by dartar

Flickring 'semilunar'...

Katzenwäsche - a lick and a promise

2007-12-18T13:13:00.001Z

Katzenwäsche -a lick and a promise
Originally uploaded by lichtmaedel

Flickring "a lick and a promise" - Flickr has everything! Love it.

Desert Desserts

2007-12-17T15:55:00.000Z

When she crawled from her tent Sephy saw that something had happened to the campsite during the night. It wasn’t in disarray exactly, but the fire’s ashes had been trampled and there was a trail of food leading from the open ice-box, out between two of the tents, and off into the sloping tawny sands of the desert. Sephy followed the trail with her eyes, watching its drunken weave, until it disappeared between two outcroppings of rock.

“Hyenas”, said a voice. Sephy, still on all-fours, turned in its direction and looked back at Aden through the dishevelled strands of her hair. He was leant against the jeep with one arm resting on its roof. With the other hand he was feeding his smirk with a piece of bread. “They came when we were all asleep and gave the place a lick and a promise. I heard them snuffling and shuffling about”, he gave a snort in demonstration, contorting his otherwise handsome face into something quite repulsive, “and then I saw their shadows slide across the side of my tent as they loped off leaving a trail of our breakfast, lunch and dinner! Didn’t you hear them?"

Instead of a reply Sephy shook her head, but rather than indicate that she hadn’t heard, the shake turned into a kind of bestial shudder, which propelled her out of the tent and onto her feet. The day was warm, but dull and sunless. Yesterday’s semilunar moon was still visible: a prominent, blanched half-disc in the sky that looked like it was balanced on Aden’s head.

“So is there anything at all left to eat?” Sephy asked him. The heads of Helen and Afro emerged from inside Aden’s tent, and Sykes came out from behind a rock with a toothbrush wedged into her foamy mouth.

“Only the halva,” he replied. “But it’s all dried out because someone left the ice-box open. I guess it was too sweet for the hyenas.”

“Or too disgusting”, retorted Sephy, treading on the hem of her combats as she struggled to stay upright whilst pulling on her hiking boots.

“Oy!” barked Aden suddenly, snapping upright from the car. “If you think halva’s disgusting, then you’re little better than those soulless creatures. It’s a praxis of mortal men to eat halva when there’s nothing else. Halva is made of the desert’s sweetened dust! It’s a desert dessert!” Aden roared at his own joke.

“That’d be right!” Sephy muttered.

“What’s your problem, Sephy? This stuff was contraband once, you know,” he said, holding out what Sephy could now see was a chewed and sorry-looking piece of halva, and not bread at all. “So sapid were its dusty delights that it was used by goddesses for the seduction of their heroes. The gods thought it encouraged depravity amongst mortals, so it was cast from the heavens out of the universe. But just look where it landed: here in the desert. And, what d’you know, a moment of serendipity that sent the hyenas to us as a sign of the gods’ reproach and now we are forced to eat halva!

“Are you mantic, Sephy?” he continued, trying to tease her now, to lighten his own mood. But he wasn’t succeeding and frankly she found the insinuation insulting, since it was much more likely he’d summoned the hyenas himself, in order to bring about his own downfall, which he’d revel in before blaming it all on Sephy and the rest of his little female entourage.

She looked about for support from the others, but none of them could face Aden’s temper tantrums and so they were busying themselves about camp, clearing up the mess, or intently studying their reflections in pocket-mirrors, furiously pretending they weren’t listening. Helen and Afro were crouched together in the nearby stream washing last night’s pots, looking at Aden and Sephy in sideways, conspiratorial glances through the hooded lids of eyes and saucepans.

Sephy gave an exasperated sigh. “No, I’m not, Aden. But what I can foresee is that your self-installation as zeitgeist of our time will only secure your demise, since once you’ve claimed your part of the whole—your little signed piece of history—that’s it then, you’re off—void, obsolete—so long, goodbye! And if that happens, don’t imagine for a minute that I’ll mourn your gloriously tragic passing. No. It’ll mean I don’t have to eat your rotten halva and that, I assure you, could only induce in me a state of pure ataraxia!”

Technorati Tags:
answers.com, creative challenge, desert desserts, sapid, ataraxia, mantic, praxis, serendipity, semilunar, halva, lick and a promise, zeitgeist, contraband

Land Girls

2007-12-12T10:41:00.001Z

Land Girls
Originally uploaded by Patrick John Quinn

Flickring 'Land Girls'...

the land army vs the lyrical army...

2007-12-11T20:11:00.000Z

On the same day that the first woman to be convicted under the Terrorism Act 2000 was sentenced, the "Land Girls", who worked on British farms to supply food to the army during World War II, received a commendation recognising their efforts. This struck a discordant note, hearing the stories back-to-back, I don't know why. I suppose because one marked attempts by a woman to attack our society, while the other marked attempts by women to defend it.

In fact, if you want to make a narrative from the coincidence, you could say that the latter's efforts led, in time, to the former's discontent. The Land Girls fed the army that won a war and carved up a planet the way it, and its Western allies, desired it - to suit their interests - and leading to the aggressive foreign policies that have so riled so many Islamic nations. And in history's customary way of tangling time and looping up narratives (history is never controllably linear...) an old thread got knotted into the newest in the story on exactly the same day last week.

Technorati Tags:
lyrical terrorist, land girls, history catching up with us, freedom of expression

1975 Svalbard 100 kroner Stamp

2007-12-06T09:56:00.001Z

1975 Svalbard 100 kroner Stamp
Originally uploaded by thecameo

Flickring 'His Dark Materials'...

much ado about Nothing... but Dust

2007-12-02T17:38:00.000Z

It never fails to amuse me when Americans ban British children’s books and it wasn’t a great surprise to hear that The Golden Compass film has been banned in a number of US states. Not only are the Catholics claiming it’s anti-Catholic (which it probably is), but other Christian groups are claiming it’s anti-Christian full-stop.

Donna Freitas writes that the Pullman series is quite the opposite. She suggests that Pullman re-appropriates the holy trinity for the feminine and proposes the existence of god (through Dust), rather than of God. I’d have thought the notion that the book kills the concept of God, rather than the idea of god, and that it opposes the institutionalising, and the cult, of religion rather than the dissolution of belief, was fairly obvious, but I guess for a number of orthodox Christians who can’t quite see over their cassocks, let alone at some truths that might lie in the depths of a children’s story, this could seem a real and tangible threat to their comfortable hierarchies. What I think the series kills is a man’s right to stand in for an abstract concept he cannot begin to understand and yet claims to act and speak on behalf of, casting judgements, and imposing such orders as the banning of a children’s film, in the name of!

(Click on the pics for both articles by Freitas)

Technorati Tags:
the feminine in the divine, the female holy spirit, northern lights, his dark materials, the golden compasses, christians getting their cassocks in a knot, catholics lose their God to god

Eurydice

2007-11-30T13:33:00.001Z

Eurydice
Originally uploaded by arafel3873

I'm just enjoying this too much! I promise to stop after this one...!

Orpheus & Eurydice

2007-11-29T10:28:00.001Z

Orpheus & Eurydice
Originally uploaded by DARKspawn

Lego does the Classics!
Are there no limits to lego??

orpheus and eurydice

2007-11-28T10:02:00.001Z

orpheus and eurydice
Originally uploaded by lillianna

Flickring Eurydice...

Orpheus' feminine unconscious

2007-11-27T12:54:00.000Z

Eurydice is in a coffin with portal-windows tucked into a dark crevice of Leeds Art Gallery.

Hers is an underworld configured by skeletal telephone pylons and twisted, gnarled branches of dead trees, at the bottom of an almost-black ocean.

Before entering its depths, Orpheus—dapper in his 50s Hollywood-Hero loose white shirt—open at the neck of course—sings his operatic melancholy to Eurydice from his fog-lined, creaking, Titanic-esque ship at the brink, on the edge, of the underworld.

She hears him through a mourning veil, but is pressed back onto a sea-bed by the faceless figure of death…

What with all the tide/sea/moon imagery and an almost literal evocation of the feminine mystique, this art installation is a French Feminists' idea of heaven... or hell?

Technorati Tags:
leeds art gallery, feminine mystique, french feminism, eurydice, quay brothers, orpheus

citronics

2007-11-21T10:37:00.001Z

citronics
Originally uploaded by jerome.dupipe

What happens when you flickr "interconnectivity"...!