Hannah, Kevin, Amy and Alicia.

April 17, 2013

In The Following the Oracle of Bacon brings us one degree of separation closer to our career as a writer in New York City. Mostly these careers were retiring to the bedroom as internet search histories. Linked in, afternoon’s delight ahead, teenagers who discovered Eros in the late 90′s are rerunning as gratitude for the moral gift that Dawson and Joey provided. The way to love and fuck your best friend is slowly, with close-ups and soaring strings. Living the gift in its negative form first time around I’m not jumping out of my skin to go Capeside again, but could if forced deal with visiting Pacey at the video store. I must insist we leave before Dawson starts his film shoot: why go back to the days of stupor when his directing techniques were metaphors describing how it feels, to like, you know, be utterly incompetent at feeling?

Like a gesture of foreplay that intends to move as quickly as possible to its climax, let me masturbate my engorged theory of the teen-crazed theme: a few minutes before midnight strikes off the second millennium, the entire force of dramatic tragedy has been erotically saturated. Stimulation-affect symbols animate an entire generation of digital natives, mythsters for whom the world is a desire-complex and being the lead role in a consumer melodrama of self-realisation within worldly desire.

The translation turns out be more turned on: Cluelessness is the best film skin anyone born in the 80′s ever wore in the 90′s. Obviously Amy’s Bacon number is never going to be higher than two but that the Oracle should return Alicia as first connection is providential. Needless to say, Cher is both prima donna and poster child of my theory-boner. Silverstone arrived to adolescents as a formally perfect herald of the day after tomorrow: all will have mobile phones, all will have internet on home computers. Now that we drive and the phone is the internet, Alicia watches over our post-adolescence as an archetype of the day before yesterday.

Our mood cast backwards as such, both mind and organism contemplate the days before the day before yesterday. From out of this chronic confusion we see via its outlines that the theory of love as the wisdom of best friends emerges in two epochal moments that profits us to superimpose. Jane Austen’s Emma as a steam-powered engine who primes readers for a future with the telegraph and electricity. Amy Heckerling’s Cher as a mobile phone with car priming viewers for the internet and network-centricity. Call them the babes that cut into the present and let the future leak out.

Having substituted items of clothing for friends, all we need to add to Cher’s wardrobe-matching software to make Facebook is an Ivy league intranet and a code-writing loser who just got dumped by his girl. One wonders if it will ever it dawn on Amy’s lawyers that her pre-market proof of concept entitles her to a slice of Mark’s monstrous pie.

Who Dat? Nation

October 11, 2012

Where we’re living Desire and Piety are on the same block.

Maggoty, Lizzord and I stir mid-afternoon, hungry as maggots,

Cycling our slightly–wounded delirium to a vibe vacuum.

You have to put a lot of effort in to suck that hard in this city.

Window–seated and held in like stifled farts, we caffeinate.

Mini–duck sandwiches and mayonnaise by the bowl,

The uninhibited outside freely looses its bowels.

Bloody Mary in hand, Wanda’s poolside at the clothing optional

Country Club with a native whose name is also Button.

The native is laced, ex–lover to Wanda’s sister Elegy, and it was

In the bayou of loving this native that Elegy discovered, and so

Now was Wanda, that both their fathers are called Christopher

Button and both their brothers are called Taylor Button.

That kind of shit makes the proud display of genitals seem trivial.

This gives some sense of event density in the otherwise

Emptied experience of dizzy tidbits and easy lie–balls.

I’m going with: Wind whips the rain attack sideways.

It’s cloying, but alloyed to your experience of storms,

I’d appreciate it if you could pretend, at least to my face,

That the writing conjures more presence than the video.

The fact we’re not talking about music as doing–theory.

Reading refuseniks will talk about scratched lens’ and

Mega pixel limitations, meaning that poetry is only

Better than video if the quality of the video is shit.

Aside from embarrassing friends, conscious crapness is what I

Like most about my media. It’s one of the few truly fashionable

Democratic forms, a game pimper if not changer,

Setting the bar so low that high jump switches to limbo.

Fuck it: let’s embrace contradiction like a vegan lover

And make our place into one of recuperation.

When the cries of conservatism arrive in the mail,

We’ll forward them on to Benedict Wussypip,

Our well-connected man of letters who so loves

Toying with the spitefully confused.

Thunderstorm tourism is big here, and getting bigger.

Cruising about in a fluorescent pink Circus Circus cap and a

Blue t-shirt that says: I make a difference everyday,

I’m starting to get how the crazy smoosh works,

How tackiness is as an aesthetic to build a life out of.

Too much walking in the sodden quarter awakens the fattist demon,

Whose cruelty similes like a public health advocate on their way to

Coop’s Place to tuck into a plate of fried chicken with red beans and Rice.

Becoming Otherwise Occupied

July 3, 2012

[written for 89.7 Eastside radio's Something Else program, produced by Lauren Caroll-Harris, can be listened to here.]

In August 2011 I was lying on a hotel bed in Nashville, Tennessee sending a desperate text message: Aaaarg, you who occupy me so! The response I’d be stinging for arrived the next morning in an email, its essence encapsulated in the line: Don’t occupy yourself with me! In emotionally vexed moments like this I always write to Fred, who was in Sydney, and he offered this consolation: When I was running in the beautiful spring evening I had the thought that one’s love is always in excess of oneself, and therefore accurately describable as something that one occupies or inhabits, rather than possesses.

When Occupy Wall Street began in September 2011 I felt it as a set of talismanic co-incidences projecting directly onto a longing now dislocated back to Sydney. And so in October, when Occupy Sydney arrived, it was for me already conjugated by love in an uncanny and narcissistic manner. Compared to collective global struggles, the banality of my romantic ego seems irrelevant, offensive even, the tedium of a private privilege that has nothing else to do except gratify its infatuations. I’m reminded of what Jenny Marx thought upon first encountering the Parisian bourgeoisie when her and Karl first moved to the city in 1843: it was if these upper classes had nothing to think about but love.

To be sure, my particular love woes are utterly insignificant, but that doesn’t make the question of love insignificant to politics. One of the things Occupy taught me was that I can’t dissociate my politics from my love. Although I believe both commitments to be sincere, I cannot honestly distinguish the desire to Occupy as a political commitment from the desire to become otherwise occupied by love. I’ve come to think that love is at the centre of any real politics, and that true politics can never completely distinguish between nor absolutely align its commitment to others and its commitment to who it loves. When private love is staged directly in relation to a political movement we are compelled to ask a significant question: how do we invent systems that extend love’s generosity beyond the limits of the people we love?

Our love, in the sense of saying to someone I love you, is a love that is privileged and private, something reserved for the few, and the infinite generosity of our love is exclusive, it’s only for them. This private and exclusive privilege of love explicitly contradicts a politics that is public and inclusive and underprivileged. Here I think about the love my parents have for me, a private, exclusive and privileged love in which I have been provided with endless opportunity. And I think the same when I look at my nephew, how he must think that the entire world exists for him to extract maximum benefit from it. But of course, like most families, my family are inclusive and extensive in their generosity to their friends and to my friends. And this is the defining attribute of exclusive love, if you find yourself inside the privilege then it’s pure and open generosity. But everything turns on this interior if. The purist experience of communism I’ve had has been in the bosom of privilege provisioned by capitalism. My life could reasonably be described as a mobile commune of fun subsidised by capital.

I saw a sticker on a car recently that put it nicely: Fuck your family. This is a far more political statement than any sticker that garishly announces its politics, because it scandalises the sacred cow of political discourse, that thing which everyone apparently agrees upon: that one’s family is the most important thing in all the cosmos. That as an individual you can and must do everything for your family, and that doing what must be done for them, no matter what, is justified. And as a corollary of that, what society must do is support families by either helping them out or getting out of their way as they express their natural and inalienable and incontestable rights to be just what they are. A brief encounter with political discourse would leave you with the impression that this thing called society has changed its name to economy and that this entity is made up of a conglomeration of working families. If you drink enough of this diet-discourse you might conveniently forget that global financial capitalism was the controlling agent. I would like to propose a sibling car sticker to Fuck your family, which says: Fuck your Love. Fuck, that most malleable of words, would be a metonym for politics, and could effectively translate as: Politicise your Love. Or again: Politicise Love.

The problem of privileged love is, of course, internal to capitalism, and capitalism is that system which perfects the art of love for the few at the expense of the many. Those strange medieval and metaphysical creatures known as corporations are the exemplary models of this art of inequality. But it’s important to remember that love’s privileging is not exclusive to capitalism, it existed long before it and will survive it. Against the cynicism that is so easy to mobilize I find myself wanting to repeat over and over this optimistic yet pragmatic and true statement: Love precedes capitalism and will survive it.

We perhaps find ourselves wishing that we could either sever or align love and politics. That is to say, we wish we could sever the relationship between exclusive love and the exploitation of others, and we wish we could align our love to include the excluded and exploited. This, we might hope, would resolve the contradiction. But the presence of contradiction is absolutely crucial and this resolution is in fact impossible. Contradiction, like love, is a sure sign that politics is truly present. Remember how after the Berlin Wall fell they said, market capitalism has prevailed, there are no longer any systemic contradictions, there will be one system to rule them all and it will contain and resolve all its contradictions. This is the end of politics, they said. Of course, now they admit they were wrong. The question is, therefore, not about the resolution of contradiction but rather the full articulation of contradictions so that the anarchic principle at the heart of democracy may express itself, and that this expression would become the polis. This would not be the democracy we know but would be another democracy, the democracy to come, one perhaps closer to the political model Occupy was experimenting with.

But, of course, you can’t really love everyone. I was once in love with someone who tried to live the infinite extension of love. It was intoxicating, the richest kind of social giving, but it was deeply self-destructive. They spoke about how it obliterated their person-hood, and it was a big part of our unravelling. So there is and there must be a limit to your love. Yet there is in the experience of love a movement that absolutely exceeds oneself, as Fred said, one’s love is always in excess of oneself. We are never more threatening to our limitations than when moved by love, and the threat, which is also a promise, is one of global transformation. It’s this transformative affect of love’s movement that I want to extract and place at the centre of my concept of political love. If you are falling in love, or your love is breaking apart, the deepest sense of your self-organisation is threatened with total transformation. You will be someone different after this. When my one significant experience of love was breaking, I felt a level of self-exposure that was in fact a death experience. In the most painful way I understood Rimbaud’s famous line: Je est une Autre // I is an other. Later, having come to terms with the fact that love’s apocalypse is never the absolute death it initially seems, we said of our love that we had given each other the gift of our adult selves. The long experience was utterly transformative.

I speak about love as though it were one’s own, but we are never the origin of our love. Love’s movement always comes from outside ourselves and for this reason is a divine force. Love itself is not, as in Greek mythology, a god per se, a god who might seek praise in return for good favour, but is rather a spirit who gifts to mortal life the apex of its experience. Although peerless, the gift that is given is not Love itself because Love itself is impersonal and cannot be given to our experience. Yet the gift remains singular. Put in terms of mythology: think of Cupid, the Roman god. Cupid does not give himself to us but rather shoots an arrow at us, and in loosing his bow he initiates an unparalleled motion from the universal to the singular and from the singular to the universal. It is a shocking movement that comes from beyond us, pricks us, floods the nervous system, burning a passage through the body, firing the neurons, flushing bone on the way back to the skin, leaving us occupied, haunted and attached to its trajectory. What becomes our love is a sort of witness to the sense-experience of this movement that gives more pleasure than any other conceivable action, which is neither ours to refuse nor ours to own, precisely because it exceeds us. Its double movement shudders through the core of the creature at the same time as it retains its impersonal force, that which, owing to its premium intensity, is simultaneously the thing most personal to us yet does not belong to us at all. This then is Love’s paradox, it’s both totally narcissistic and absolutely selfless.

Love shares the following quality with those brave and silly souls who threw themselves into Occupy Sydney: it is something most personal to us yet it does not belong to us at all. You cannot own a movement, even if you happen to be at its centre. Love and Occupy also share the character of being an infinite and impossible demand. One morning down in Martin Place a lady walking past said to someone I’d like to support you but I don’t know what it’s for. This was the criticism repeated ceaselessly: you don’t have any concrete demands. The demand for a demand is what’s expected in return for tolerating protest. Tell us what you want and we will say no and then you will go away. But Occupy, like the declaration of love, is not a protest with a time limit, it’s an occupation with no time limit. You don’t say to your lover, I love you until I get what I demand, you say I love you and the declaration is infinite and also impossible. You cannot guarantee this declaration I love you, but without this declaration, there can be no love. We do not make the declaration to Occupy because we can guarantee that things will change, and in this sense, revolution is like an object of infatuation, you will never have known if the revolution was real until afterwards, perhaps never. But certainly, there will be no revolution without this declaration.

In the face of love’s transformation we are unsure of ourselves, cautious and self-protective: am I really in love, or is this just a phase of infatuation? Perhaps we never distinguish our true love from our delusions, but for the transformation to take place we must embody the possibility that is given in the promise. Occupy, also, can never know if its momentum is or has been truly transformational, its politics is prefigurative, it tries to embody the kind of change it wants to see in the world rather than politely request change to the powers that be. This prefiguration takes the form of a horizontal structural, an artifice that is an experiment in extending love’s generosity beyond the limits of the people and things that we love.

The anti-hierarchy of the general assembly is relentlessly inclusive and requires a forgotten patience in a world where we have outsourced difficult collective decisions to representatives. The Occupy process is difficult, inefficient, tiresome, plodding and messy. But the presence of mess, like contradiction, is a necessary condition of democracy. If your love is clean then it is short. The time of mess is essential. If there is no time for the people to decide then there is no democracy, as the people of Greece know: the slow time of democracy and the fast time of global financial capital are not compatible, in fact, directly at odds.

Needless to say, the slow time of direct democracy is a tough love. Love, I hope you understand, is not soft, although it contains softness. It is not effusive, unifying and orgiastic. The intimacy of a hug is important, but it will not be by hugging everyone that we tame global capitalism. The love I mean is difficult, severe and rigorous. It is vehement, even violent. It comes at great cost, a cost that I for one have never had the courage to pay. I think once again of Jenny Marx. She who was a Baroness and fell in love with the son of a Jew, and who’s love lived on the promise of a book, a book that would catalyse and frame the revolution. This book missed its revolution by nearly two decades and it was not in the end the revolution that was promised. She knew what it was to live a life of political love. Her life was giving extensively at the expense of her self, a life of exile, poverty and lost children. Her love was a faith bound to a man who despite being right in the centre of the struggles of his time, was always running hopelessly behind. Yet even when revolution was a dim prospect and she had pawned all her clothes, the Baroness von Westphalen welcomed every fellow exile into their home. The Marx home was a place where the generosity of love always extended beyond the limits of the family.

lighter rain

July 3, 2012

The best costume at the mad science-themed party was definitely the broken lighters who rained from the sky. Followed closely by the sliced potato that Smith copped in the head. The gromits of Marrick village are canny that way, with their flat command of the field. And wait till you meet the neighbours. This was even before the tabs, of which we only got half, so you have to go and fuck wet fart and then bring us back the mushrooms. Look out, now she’s flashing arse cat-grabbing in the ferns. These liquid glasses make everything taste plastic. Wanna squelch one of these vodka-jelly tubes with me? When politics doctorates take acid they go hard on the Slipper. By now Shackelton’s probably had his first crack, but don’t worry, there’s two more swings and its deep in the night before old grey Ernest strikes out in champagne breakfast style. You’re out! I was in a festival, in Mexico, or was it Rio? No, listen, listen, you have to listen to this. At this festival, all the men got naked with their Djembes. I was taking my clothes off and I was being badgered in the hallway until I rotated into the doorway and discovered whole new worlds with small beaming poets painted silver, levitating sky-beds and silent men stroking the birthday girl. Twyf was mark-making without natural attachment before Djembe evacuated the dancefloor, so it’s now our responsibility to write a meaningful sentence together. I. No. We. No. And right then we discovered, if the lighter rain was trace then slashing everyone’s bike tyres was graphic incision as meaning. Now it’s Fitch’s turn to write for us. This kitchen is seventies space-station. In Taos they call this an earth ship. You Canberra-bullies are talking about Canberra too much, you made all the girls leave. Why don’t you get your Djembe? What do you want me to say? Thanks from the community? You could have stuck up for me there man. At a certain point there’s nothing left but the moving world and testosterone. It’s a much better idea not to go and beat up random people on the street. It’ll be hours before you can have that bath in the backyard, happy birthday, I don’t know what happened here, I almost don’t want to leave, but the agent of chaos going home with wet fart still takes the cake, a volcano.

 

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 24, 2012

14. (Vivace)


Did you hear the one about the orientals who own the moon, the Spanish who own the lyric atmosphere, the indigenous whose songs own the long sentence and the English language that owns everything else? I forget the details but I remember the moral was make sense, and love making it, or fuck off. The antidote to the undue influence of billionaires is more billionaires, so I’ll see your Palmer, Tinkler, Forrest and Reinhart and raise you a Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg and Buffet. Actually, come to think of it, the question of billionaires is a glaring omission from this clash of fundamentalisms. Straight off the bat I have to say how great it is to hear the Cardinal talking about the bodily assumption on live television. If your concept of heaven limits me to a human body then your heaven can suck my balls. Any heaven worth its salt would have open metamorphoses and free temporary transmigration as an entry level privilege. The ridicule of secularists is water off a duck’s back if only you could promise me the experience of being the duck and the water off its back. When we get to preparing the alter boys with a concept of Hell that repeatedly falls into a Hitler-trap of its own making, it’s clear we’re talking seriously light-weight theology. But still, to be live on television and suggest, even in the absence of meaning to, that real presence is neither literal nor metaphoric but metaphysical, well now we’re finally getting to the edge of revelation, this medial supernaturalism: God as information theory’s algorithm. As expected, the bitchy atheist is having none of it, yells what’s so funny about that!? at the crowd-planted Catholic youth who like the rest of us are enjoying his attempt to define nothing. If I die and my soul becomes a Tweet it will Tweet: My metaphors bring all the boys to the yard, and they’re like, they’re better than yours. Damn right, they’re better metaphors. I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 23, 2012

13. (Allegro)


It’s so far up my alley you’ll need the torches of convenience to find it, the ones that are always burning and never run out, unless the god Plot should desire it. Sex scenes double as back-story filler, the money we save not doing battle scenes goes into costume and set design. It was very thoughtful of the medieval world to light itself with the future of television in mind. Of all the false historicisms that can be packed into a single crack-hit, are the cliches about feudal violence the most objectionable? The stylised sound-gore of the blade in a world where only Sean Bean is not resigned to ceaseless brutality, and for which, naturally, he will be decapitated. It’s not merely fantasy but is more properly science fiction, where one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and those creatures, ourselves. Watching you watch your dad’s head being cut-off and then being forced to see it rotting on a stake, I’m now sure this sort of thing was a daily occurrence for millennia, as old as steel and megalomania. Medieval violence is fine for some unless they show what they actually did, but can we imagine a subject who was in charge of their own life, who controlled the production of their economic livelihood, and in return received protection for more or less reasonable taxation and the occasional ostentatious display of fealty? If that seems more sophistry than simulated ignorance then what about this one: could Aristotle look at a modern citizen who was fully indebted to financial systems, whose entire labouring life was spent repaying their debts, and conclude that they were not slaves? I know we don’t usually do Aristotle on Sunday afternoons Daddy, but I thought it would be fun to take him to a football game, see what he thinks of the spectacle.

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 22, 2012

12. (Vivace)


I’ve long toyed with the idea of starting a school of cosmic realism. Kirsten Dunst will be my exemplary student. We won’t have a motto, just a basic stick structure to hold hands and huddle under when Melancholia hits, and the obligation to experience the end-times as the beautiful weather event that they are. The only requirement for admission is to answer one question: Does the fact that everyone will die at the same time make you feel better or worse about dying, and what are the aesthetic implications of this? I realise that it’s going to be difficult to distinguish our school from a host of other long-established and more reputable institutions, and that accounts for why we’ve struggled to get beyond the speculative phase. But now the apocalypse is really here it’s far too late to be initiating complicated bureaucracies, and that will be our competitive advantage, to have started a school when there was no time for it. Securing a bourgeois premises with a golf course will be easy since most one percenters have chosen suicide with pills in the stables, although for us cosmic realists this kind of ending is a really bad dad joke. Our strength derives from the extra-sensory yet deeply sensual intuition that the question of significance has to be a cosmic question if it is to mean anything at all. You’re boss will be the best man at your wedding, in fact you’ll still be working, harangued by an underling all night long for a tag line. Later you’ll fuck this boy on the eighteenth green and he’ll propose a rival business venture. The nearer the fly-by planet gets the more fashionable our brand of cosmic realism becomes. Clearly, if your brand is on people’s mind as the apocalypse arrives, you win.

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 22, 2012

11. (Andante)


Conservative poets are notorious sticklers for hunt etiquette so I’ll rock my scarlet pinques with black breeches and dress boots for tonight’s game. Culinary ignorance requires cat lovers to wear a tweed ratcatcher all season but as the resident dogmatic Marxist I have to say your desire to define game as a flavour is just petty bourgeois materialism. All this game-foxing clearly violates my poethics of sequential meaning, that is to say: any event of language which I can’t understand is at best feeling guilty about jerking off and at worst publicly advocating genocide. In this next sentence I will contradict my functionalist ethics by punching you in the face. Imperial Pelvis is probably my favourite DJ coming out of the Atlantic Boing movement, have you head of it? It sounds like a blue whale mated with a sperm whale and produced offspring whose song is the lament of a creature for whom no possible mate exists. But they always say that about genres, don’t they, that they have no future? Frankly, I’d sooner go body-surfing with hard-right Catholics than continue this dog lovers discourse where books substitute for coffee dates and sex. It’s the same people who drive souped-up Holdens to eco-poetics conferences in Queensland and whose sad atheism sequences the game whose outcome we previously intended.

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 22, 2012

10. (allegro)


The vagueness of this notional outside accounts for the somnambulist, but the burning question my friends is whether you feel you have been given this time or whether you have chosen it? A good rule of thumb I’ve found is this: if you remember anything at all, remember that not being able to forget is utterly debilitating. A better rule of thumb I figured out yesterday is: if you can’t work out the erotics of this experience then you’ll end up doing a lot of wanking. Ignore the cabinet of cynics, her majesty the Queen (no, not that one) has a new chap book coming out that eloquently differentiates being given from having chosen. Forgive my improper sprechen my friends, it’s just that I’m sad we can’t go binge-drinking in Second Life and I want to acknowledge the concept of a heated argument even at the risk of fisticuffs. Good friends can exchange firm blows without loving an ounce less. I found an old how-to manual in a box in the garage and it said: Without a bit of vehemence, the bankers will keep fucking us. In that case, I’m not leaving until the whiskey bottle is bone dry. Have you noticed how many of these old things lying on the ground are turning out to be prophetic? It may have been something you said, but a drunken Muppet turned on us with aggressive lyricism, saying Look mate, four hundred metres of electrical tape is a shit load in anyone’s language! We could have argued the point but that would have involved his apocalyptic mistress, and she was already enraged by the ethically-driven theft of her shoulder cat. I like animals as much as the next animal but the subtle and peculiar policing methods required to settle this dispute are only moderately compelling, so I’d like it if we went home now, please?

The School of Cosmic Realism

April 22, 2012

9. (allegro)


While saying they were born is plain wrong, invented perhaps overstates the role of the human, so let’s say that synthesizers were latent potentia until the day two friends walking down an alley pinged a football between brick walls and were stupefied by the reverberation. Of course it was the dork behind the wall and not the dumb haptic jocks who began ruminating upon the aural phenomenon. It seems you’ve thrown down the semantic gauntlet with: two’s right to charge ey, thank you very much, challenging us to imagine six different contexts in which this would be a meaningful utterance. The scenario of a man sitting in the control room of a steel works operating the blast furnace is fanciful, to say the least, but not entirely unworthy of the fluro men who chisel authentic speech-acts from the marble of muteness. The penny really started to drop around the same time as the bomb and so like most things has to be historized in relation to it. Rock puritanism was not even alive and already it was turning in its grave, grinding its teeth down to the blunt stubs and bleeding gums, not instinctively the first place I’d go to get a blowjob. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that replacing oxygen with plastic in the effort to conserve a body requires that cadavers be sourced from the black market, but as your lawyer let me say: although this adequately expresses your unhinged temporality, body-snatching is only comparable to a hydrogen bomb in the sense that destruction is built into the architecture of all things.


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