kagablog

by margaret o connor

The corrugated iron and scrap shacks scarring the Johannesburg landscape in the recent sci-fi film District 9 embody stereotypes about where the South African poor live. But the country’s self-appointed guardian of design, in conjunction with 10 teams of “starchitects” and the national government, is trying to alter this for thousands of households.

Ravi Naidoo, the Cape Town-based founder of the annual Design Indaba conference and exhibition and a fixture on the international design circuit, conceived the 10×10 Affordable Housing project to create a better blueprint for homes that could be built for R50,000 (£4,000, $6,000) each – the national government’s housing subsidy. Global architects such as David Adjaye, Tom Dixon and Shigeru Ban partnered with local luminaries to conceive solutions that could be replicated countrywide and help the ANC-led government deliver on its promise to eradicate townships of jerry-built dwellings.

The challenge he has set himself has proved immense – but also produced revealing insights about the interaction between design and community and into the difficulties of making design work when the clients and professionals are from economies at very different stages of development.

Naidoo’s first step was to convince The Niall Mellon Foundation to set aside a parcel of land for 10 new homes in a township about 20km from the Cape Town city centre, where the Irish philanthropic organisation was already building new homes for 500 families. The participating architects grumbled, however, about the site, saying they would prefer to develop homes closer to the inner city so that residents would have easier access to schools, jobs and transport links. The government was unwilling to offer inner-city land for a much-needed exploration of high-density housing and municipal authorities were reluctant to endorse variations on street widths, drainage and electricity connections.

The second step was to create each individual design brief. The Development Action Group, a non-governmental organisation, ran a housing lottery for existing residents of the area. Each of the 10 winning families was assigned a pair of architects, who received a short film documenting their new clients’ wishes and passwords to a dedicated internet site to allow them to exchange ideas. But, working remotely before they had a chance to establish commonality or chemistry, the cross-border collaborators often struggled to agree on solutions. Some clashed over different interpretations of their clients’ needs and the cultural values of materials. A recommendation to use banana leaves, a plant not found in the Western Cape, for roofing on a site that is pounded by cold, winter rain was one of several misplaced attempts at sustainability by time-pressured non-South African professionals.

Internal power struggles also hampered several teams. The most dramatic occurred between Luyanda Mpahlwa and Will Aslop. Mpahlwa, a graduate of the Free University of Berlin with 15 years of European experience, objected to having “someone in London try to tell me what to do”. Agreeing to disagree, they pursued separate solutions. Other pairings followed a similar course and Design Indaba received a total of 14 affordable housing plans. Quantity surveyors assessed the building cost of each to ensure they were structurally sound and within budget but two blueprints that met both criteria were discarded because of Naidoo’s concerns about community reaction.

Henning Rasmus, a Johannesburg-based pioneer in developing prefabricated building solutions for logistically challenged markets such as Angola and Rwanda, engineered a home entirely from glass and a synthetic board material made of resin and recycled wood known as Versaqube. This low-cost material, developed and patented by a fellow South African architect, enabled Rasmus to design a R50,000 home that was 16 sq metres bigger than the programme stipulated. However, when news of this proposal reached their neighbours the client family received death threats. Allegations of unfair advantage to the family prompted Design Indaba to abandon Rasmus’s solution. “It would have been a dereliction of duty to give participants more or less than the government allocation. We couldn’t afford to cause a riot in Freedom Park,” Naidoo explains.

Construction workers at work :Building work under way using a sandbag and plaster technique

Other blueprints produced different challenges. Jo Noero, the inaugural winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects annual International Prize and former head of the University of Cape Town’s architecture school, proposed that his client family bring their existing shack to the project site, attach it to the back of a simple 25 sq metre home that the client had a role in configuring and generate instant rental income from the additional space. His proposal was based on his belief that good quality shelter is only part of the solution. He insists that integrating homes with quality public spaces as well as access to education, employment, and transportation is essential to creating a successful community.

“Government needs to recognise that shack dwellers use recycled materials at no cost to taxpayers. The desire to promote black pride by eradicating informal settlements demonstrates their middle-class view of development. I’m tired of this control freak approach which dictates what poor people get,” Noero says.

The pairing of David Adjaye and Martin Kruger also encountered political tensions. London-based Adjaye, born in East Africa to Ghanaian diplomat parents, was quoted in a US magazine asserting that: “Architects are good at building. They are not good at politics.” Meanwhile Kruger, best-known for the green design of BP’s Southern African headquarters but most proud of a crèche he built in the Brown’s Farm township, countered: “More architects need to become housing activists. Ravi started a critical debate – even if he came to it without appropriate architectural experience.”

A member of South Africa’s political aristocracy, Mpahlwa was the first architect to have his scheme – shortlisted for The Brit Insurance Design Award and included in a Design Museum exhibition in London earlier this year – built. He used a system developed by Cape Town’s Eco-Build Technologies that promised excellent insulation and ease of assembly and consists of a timber structural frame filled with sandbags. His clients initially objected because they associated sandbags with military bunkers and flood prevention but acquiesced when they learnt that a plaster finish would make their new homes resemble those of their middle-class neighbours.

Scaling the learning curve slowed construction – materials vanished from the site until security guards were appointed and the builder wrestled with practical problems of using a new material for the first time. Eventually David Jonkers, his wife and their six children under the age of 11 moved into the double-storey residence. However, the self-taught craftsman rejected the architect’s idea of securing the home by opening it to the street and encouraging community self-policing. Instead he barricaded his family behind a gate constructed from recycled metal, carving wooden owls, traditional symbols of watchfulness, to stand guard in the street-facing windows to complete his security plans.

Construction of other architects’ plans will require another round of private sector sponsorship. The Vodacom Foundation, a social investment programme run by one of Africa’s leading communications groups, is evaluating a proposal to bankroll the implementation of three new designs during the next year. Naidoo plans to build the next 10 homes on state school grounds. Local administrators and the regional education minister have agreed to allocate land adjacent to existing schools for housing teachers and in so doing hope to reduce the levels of vandalism and theft of school property, expand the range of extra-curricular programmes offered by resident teachers and help in the recruitment and retention of better-qualified teachers. The design developed by Adjaye and Kruger leads the list of those that could be rolled out next.

Meanwhile, the affordable housing debate in South Africa continues to engage new audiences. The launch of an Iziko South African Museum show, The Everyday and The Extraordinary, examining three decades of architectural design by Noero is attracting interest from architects, academics, students, the media, and design aficionados. In keeping with the theme of his 10×10 submission, Noero stated at last month’s launch: “Architecture is first and foremost a social art that is shaped by people and society.”

It seems that satisfying raised expectations about where – and how – people should live requires the 10×10 initiative principals to put aside their differences and figure out how to align their visions with those of government. But even if the pace at which better affordable homes are built accelerates, it is unlikely to outstrip the pace at which impoverished migrants and economic refugees assemble District 9-like dwellings.

‘The Everyday and The Extraordinary’, Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town, until November 30

this article first appeared on ft.com

for a preview click here

my menstrual blood does not “run”.
it’s too viscous.
it builds up behind the bottleneck of my cervix until the weight of
sloughed-off lining gets too heavy to contain,
then it blurts out
in thick, slimy strands of not-baby,
a cosmic disappointment
smelling of fresh death.
sometimes crimson, still almost fecund,
sometimes older and blacker, a nauseating cousin of bile,
blended with albumen, like broken egg white, like frogspawn frustrated.

inside my insides,
god’s scraping a blunt teaspoon round and round,
clearing the walls of my womb for another hit-and-miss next month.

on a heavy day,
pulling out an incontinent tampon,
i sit there on the loo,
toilet paper wrapped round my fingers,
trying to abbreviate the sentence of clots
my lips are drooling into the toilet bowl water.
it’s not a lake, it’s a suspension,
a hanging paragraph of placental full-stops that goes on and on,
inexorable
and i wipe and shove in another wad of cotton to staunch the ooze for
another few hours of outer peace.

one day, sometime in my forties or fifties
i’ll be paroled,
retired from service.
god will give up on my body
and that will be the end of that.
it’s irrelevant what anyone else wants.

my cunt is me, but it’s also beyond me,
ordained for a purpose beyond my control,
just like your cock is you, but it’s also beyond you,
ordained for a purpose beyond your control.
mostly we are blasphemous.

the obsession with looking into cunts, like the obsession with hard cocks,
is an ontological obsession with discovering and controlling our cosmic origins,
an expression of our raging, impossible desire for omnipotence.
and indeed pornographic images ARE redundant in that they hold no
physical power to alter the workings of sex
those closeups of fucking are nothing more than flat reproductions of
ten centimetres of Life’s copy machine -
mostly they are over-man-ipulated and bear little resemblance to real
bodies interacting.
porn is the simulacral fantasy of ruling the universe.

Preview and outtake of the forthcoming (second) album of The Mount
Fuji Doomjazz Corporation.
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble’s live improv alter ego.
‘Succubus’ is a live improv session recorded while viewing Jess
Franco’s exploitation classic ‘Succubus’ from 1969.
Release date mid 2009 on Ad Noiseam.
www.tkde.net www.adnoiseam.net

reviewed by Alexander Tudor

Judged by its cover alone, Deceit (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khruschev shaking hands; Stars & Stripes across the tongue; Ron & Nancy on the forehead. These are the images still familiar in 2008. The lyric-sheet is scattered with the same clippings, and some more helpful captions. Much of this is identical to the collage ingredients for OK Computer (1997) and its singles: what to do in the event of a bomb, or when the siren sounds; where tactical nukes are deployed, worldwide; those oddly dehumanizing line-drawings of how to prepare your fall-out shelter. Deceit came out in 1981, though – a couple of years before Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative); before Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein; before the first massacre of the Kurds. Ten years later, GW1; ten years further on, 9/11; then the War for Oil, then the Credit Crunch; and only this week can we see real hope of a decline in Republican war-mongering and financial mismanagement (the legacy of Milton Friedman, via Reagan & Thatcher). You know most of this; the point is, to get a sense of history… but also a sense of “prophecy” as a meaningful term in the context of avant-garde music.

Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon’s definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – Metal Box (1979) – This Heat’s debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the “military industrial complex”. The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…

Deceit (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it’s glossolalic – it’s gibberish, it’s speaking in tongues, it’s too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like Revelations. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, ‘Cenotaph’ spells this out: “his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself / Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies” – it’s literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it’s not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who “served” (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably “punk” track on the album, ‘SPQR’ (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we’re taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: “we’re all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.”

The devastating industrial freak-out, ‘Makeshift Swahili’ (Track , condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn’t know it at first from the Dalek-voice: “…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she’s trying to say / she says ‘You’re only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don’t understand / the words.’ / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It’s all Greek to me!” The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: ” ‘we give you firewater / you give us your land’ / ‘white-man speak with forked tongues / but it’s too late now / to start complaining…’” The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking “Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!” Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four’s contemporaneous Entertainment!). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism’s loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan “Surrealism in the service of the revolution”, and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.

What of the rest of the album? It’s a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn’t be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only Liars have come close, with Drum’s not Dead (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat’s weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: ‘Sleep’), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase “the sound of explosions” on ‘A New Kind of Water’ (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno’s “bomb-noises” for Nico’s The End. (Eno also recorded Manzanera’s pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.)

Opening track ‘Sleep’ tells us we’re all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence “softness is a thing called Comfort”), and these operate on us like Pavlov’s dogs (CHORUS: “stimulus and response”). ‘Triumph’ might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage Triumph of the Will. ‘SPQR’ is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as “unconscious collective” – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn’t about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. ‘Independence’ (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn’t its endorsement of revolution sound – well, “un-American” (as the Patriot Act defines “American”)? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, ‘A New Kind of Water’, which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn’t yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers (”we were told to expect more / and now that we’ve got more / we want more”). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – we have hope, it says: ‘a cure for cancer / we’ve got men on the job.’ Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland (”fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…”). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji (’Hi Baku Shyo’), and then translated into English (’Suffer Bomb Disease’). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious “Yellow Peril” (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it.

this review first appeared on drownedinsound.com

take a bow… and shove it up your arse! eish. i guess sometimes the line of defence against pedants is to be more anal than them… i know, i use it too. unfortunately when one does that one runs the risk of sounding like a bit like a poephol too.

e.g.: very few people in kzn speak isixhosa. if nishlyn ramanna, as a durbanite, were familiar with any so-called “indigenous south african language” other than his own, it would be more likely to be isizulu - which actually *was* taught to me in a so-called “white” government school in eighties kzn. so, in fairness, i have to observe that you are making the same kind of uninterrogated statements that you lambast ramanna for, back at him.

funny you remark about the absence of ululation: trevor steele-taylor repeatedly held me back from ululating during the last couple of pieces in the first half. in particular, i felt that the one with sazi dlamini that you mention compelled a response, and i felt uncomfortable keeping quiet! trevor said it was an inappropriate context and i supposed he was right, given that he’s a lot more experienced in attending these sorts of erudite event than me, so i kept schtumm. in fact, i suppose i asked him whether he thought i would be out of turn because i sensed it wasn’t entirely appropriate too. it’s ironic given that it was durban, supposedly the biggest, most vibrant, cosmopolitan city at the heart of the zulu kingdom!

the audience response certainly was subdued; even without other bow project performances to compare it to i noticed this, but i don’t believe the blame for this should fall squarely on the audience (and there were plenty of us under 50 - definitely journalistic license you are using here!).

my reserve was largely because michael blake seemed very uptight that night, getting up to fiddle with stuff between pieces (pardon the highly inappropriate PUN). it was also clear that there was a recording taking place - you were sticking up in the midst of us with a camera skimming our heads. people who are sensitive to this sort of thing - and many of the people in the very small audience seemed to me to be connected to the music department, so might well be - often hlonipha the camera by remaining as unobtrusive as possible so as not to ruin the quality of the recording. they don’t do this to the same extent if it’s purely an audio recording because they can’t SEE it happening as obviously… remember that hilariously consumptive cougher on that otherwise exquisite sviatoslav richter recording of lizst’s transcendental etudes from the 50s?

you might argue that in other auditoria the audience paid the camera no mind, BUT i would respond that the venue in durban happened to be howard college, the university’s law building. it has always felt stuffy to me. people are terribly polite in there. i used to watch lunchtime concerts there on mondays while at UND at the end of the 90s, and even those, which were very informal, felt contained and academic. this is mainly because, i think, the propriety of the building rubs off. seriously. i used to go and read in the Howard College law library when i wanted peace and quiet, purely because students respected the rule of silence there more politely than they did in the main campus library.

one last comment: i must say i did feel the separation between mantombi matotiyana and the nightingale quartet keenly too. it did feel awkward seeing the quartet and mantombi performing on the same stage all night, yet at all times separate from each other. though i didn’t read anything racist into it at all (i read it more with a kind of call-and-response idiom myself), i would personally have loved to hear them play something all together to dissolve that sense of compartmentalisation - in fact i was almost expecting that resolution. it could have been a fascinating experiment, and it would have smashed any possibility of dorks like ramanna reading apartheid into the evening.

however, because of the way the evening was structured, without the quartet and mantombi ever playing together, i think it is understandable that mantombi could have come across as having been put there to perform the “reference pieces” for each subsequent nightingale quartet version. this would make her performance read as curiously museumised in some way: in a sense as the “traditional” rendition faithful to “the great nofinishi dywili”’s original (which, of course, is an impossible notion, and one which would render mantombi’s iteration subservient to nofinishi’s), provided as an antecedent or an ahistorical backdrop for the bow project compositions. the dialogical aspect might have been better highlighted by a confluent performance of everyone on stage so that at some point they inhabited the same space and time, the *NOW*, more explicitly.

ok, enough dissent. i just feel that your response was not measured enough to RE-BUTT that truly shitty review effectively.

cherry bomb

As a woman, I would not advise following Mr Pessoa’s imaginative advice here, however poetic it is. The point of fulfilling sex for me is to reintegrate body and soul. There is nothing more damaging to my enjoyment and emotional wellbeing than dissociation during sex. Yet dissociating is pretty much the only way to deal with fucking someone you don’t want to. It’s a really destructive thing to do.

My advice to unhappily married women would be to leave, however difficult it is. Being alone is better than being estranged from your body and the body of the person you share it with most intimately.

Granted, the above passage was written in another time where women were not able to choose to leave as easily… And I know leaving is almost always immensely painful and difficult. But I saw how enduring an unhappy marriage for 7 years almost killed my sister’s spirit, and how, when she finally left, she revived as she became fully present in herself again. Her sense of humour, spontaneity and creativity returned. She had become a zombie to cope. She thought she was staying married for the kids… but life at home is far more stable and happier for them now with a mom who isn’t emotionally disengaged.

By Ben Watson

Ben Watson explodes the integrity of cookie-cutter modern music, dynamites the shameless posturing of other critics (Po-Mo or otherwise) and makes those who listen to Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram without an open copy of Negative Dialectics in their lap look like utter, utter fools

Just when I thought ‘contemporary music’ should be renamed ‘missed opportunity’, I came across the music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, two composers from Bucharest in Romania. Despite support from the Romanian government, they’ve made little impact on the pusillanimous music scene in the UK, and it’s been left to the usual malfunded outsiders to support them. Over the last few years, London Musicians Collective (as was) and Resonance FM have organised concerts for them at Conway Hall. The Avram and Dumitrescu CDs on their own Edition Minuit label are distributed by ReR Megacorp in Britain and in the rest of the world by the network of ‘avant’ labels which drummer Chris Cutler has assiduously knitted together over the last three decades. The fact that Tim Hodgkinson (along with Cutler a member of Henry Cow in the early-’70s) is actively involved with Dumitrescu/Avram - playing bass clarinet in their ensemble, contributing his own pieces - shows that I’m not alone in considering their music as the ‘rebirth of avant garde’.

In the classical world, the one critic to champion the music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram has been Harry Halbreich in Paris. His musicological championing hinges on the fact that the two composers are using Romanian scales to bring about the rebirth of a dried-up and moribund tradition: that of European score-writing. While what Halbreich says does not fly in the face of the evidence, it doesn’t do enough to celebrate the dazzling importance of what they’re doing, which is a rebirth of avant garde as total challenge to generic separations - and therefore the division of labour such separations pay tribute to.

But Halbreich has made one ground-breaking remark. He hears ‘a sort of nuclear fission’ in the music written by Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu. This music is explosive, and I can still recall the shock and pleasure of hearing the first CD. It’s a bomb going off that doesn’t stop going off. Not simply another sonic ‘experience’ or ‘adventure’, but something which shatters your previous concepts of music, idiom, genre and modernity. The music is correct in the way which polarises opinion and heats the blood. Like a flag raised above a battlefield, it incites a hotspot of enthusiasm which makes all the tepidness around it look like grey and soggy business-as-usual excuses. Timidity and cravenness. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the red-gold TRUTH which the sophisticates and sophists have been hiding beneath their dunghill of sorry irony!

When I read about today’s scientists researching cosmology - research which unites study of subatomic particles with speculation about element formation in the first microseconds of our universe - I’m instantly reminded of Iancu’s computer music: the sensation of a gigantic, unstoppable cosmic explosion which also has a place for the most minute transformations, also for randomness and indecision and the possibility that everything will close down and reverse and perhaps disappear at any moment. It’s imperative that I listen, but I have no idea what might happen next. This sensation recalls every heightened time in our lives. In this, Iancu connects with other great forces in music - Edgard Varèse, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix - who deal with objective structure, the physicality of sound, with such untrammelled curiosity and passion that the results are positively erotic. This is because, as Wilhelm Reich said, orgasm is ‘cosmic plasmatic sensation’. Albeit a sensation trivialised and degraded and commodified in this society as a standardised frisson, rather than appreciated for what it actually is: the very point of the universe.

To cross object and subject poles in this way is revolutionary, and begs every question under the sun - including why, in an advanced, technocratic, fullspeed society we still have beggars under the sun. When truth in music is unleashed with this amount of violence and gusto, the ‘social question’ is no longer a moral conscience limping behind the gilded carriages of those attending the latest operatic divertissement, but a fighting demiurge which leaps out fully armed. What is this weak and tasteless gruel we’ve been surviving on for so long? How come we’ve tolerated so many boring concerts and meaningless experiments? This music refuses the repression introduced into music and theory since the failure of May 1968.

In November 2006, I was given the opportunity to take the above argument to the heartless heart of the postmodern beast: I was invited to contribute to a discussion of the Avram and Dumitrescu music in the Salon d’Or of Hotel de Béhague, the seat of the Romanian Embassy in Paris. What you’ve just read is based on what I wrote on the Eurostar whilst travelling to the conférence. Naturally, I worried that bringing avant garde and postmodern stars ‘down to earth’ in this way may not seem appropriate in a Salon d’Or. Such arguments certainly offended Bernard Stiegler - director of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and genuflector before the usual postmodern icons - when I voiced them from the floor at a conference organised in London by the journal Radical Philosophy. In his paper, Stiegler seemed to think he could trump the outer reaches of radical thinking on music by reminding his captive audience of Aristotle’s idea that listening to music makes you a morally-superior person; whereas all my experience of listening to fantastic music from the last hundred years is that it puts me out of sorts with society.

With the wheatfields of Northern France whipping past me, I sucked my Biro and wrote the following on a brown paper bag:

‘In putting back “society” into the picture - the move of every earthy, dun-faced dialectician faced with “cosmic” forces - I suppose I’m in danger of introducing the parochial concerns of an unemployable music critic from London. But that would be preferable to allowing the weak charade of what passes for “radical Paris” to carry on unmolested!’

Despite my efforts on the Eurostar, there was actually no opportunity to read this text at the conférence. Harry Halbreich’s introductory remarks were so lengthy, it became obvious that he didn’t really want to hear what anyone else had to say, especially some radio DJ from London who Avram and Dumitrescus had picked up on their travels. So I was forced to leap up and seize the microphone to voice my criticism of the way French philosophy, ever since Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel (this was the man who hailed Stalin as ‘a new Napoleon’), has hobbled along with a flawed dialectic; Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Badiou … they’re compromised rubbish, and for very concrete reasons: France having had the most reactionary Communist Party on the planet; lack of an immanent, Marxist critique of the Soviet bloc; craven aspiration to bourgeois academic fame; the inability to think beyond the mind/body dualism of Descartes … which dualism immediately manifested in the conférence as a stand-off between explanations of spectral music as a result of ‘nature’ or ‘science’. Marx’s observation that labour power is a natural force, which explodes the metaphysical separation of man and nature inscribed by Christianity, was badly needed here. It is in fact the philosophical equivalent of Dumitrescu’s musical revolution! Of course, all the old ‘fellow-traveller’ Stalinists of yore (Halbreich told me afterwards that he regretted the fall of official communism!) are now so thoroughly ‘postmodernised’, they flee the podium at the mere mention of Marx. Which Halbreich did, calling Adorno (and by extension me) a ‘Nazi’. What Halbreich - like all those trained in post-68 French theory - detests is the revolutionary idea that subject/object relations might be transformed. André Breton and Guy Debord - somehow always missed off the reading lists - are Paris’ sole moments of brightness. Come to think of it, perhaps it’s the fact that those two can actually string a sentence together which makes them so repellent to the would be academics and bureaucrats whose prose endlessly plagiarises the proliferating margins (yawn) of Ferdinand Braudel.

I’d created a rift in the proceedings (something Ana-Maria graciously described to me later as the ‘motivating crisis’ of my ‘composition’). Having interrupted Halbreich’s monologue, I now attempted to create dialogue. I returned to my positive response to the Dumitrescus’ music, our common ground at the conférence. Hear the next paragraph as a confessional, peculiarly personal and English.

When I first experienced the music of Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu, it dawned on me how repressed and restrained and pallid and tight and downright petty was the British ‘radical’ music (‘the New Complexity’) I’d previously been supporting. These worthy composers just don’t seem able to persuade their musicians to attack their instruments with this amount of reckless sensuality (‘gusto’). You’d have to go back to the early days of Free Improvisation (the Tony Oxley Sextet; Bailey & Bennink; Masayuki Takayanagi in Japan) for this kind of advanced instrumental extremism.

I believe this is the reason Tim Hodgkinson got involved, and why Edition Minuit CDs are distributed by ReR Megacorp, Forced Exposure and Metamkine: the power of Dumitrescu music transcends genre, or rather marketing niches, and can speak to listeners whose other listening could be, say, Rod Stewart or Masonna. I take it as axiomatic that the British composers worth taking seriously today would be Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, James Dillon or Richard Barrett (today lumbered with the description the New Complexity, a label they all despise), rather than any of the busily promoted approaches to easy listening and film music who use postmodernist excuses about ‘after avant garde’ (and a positivist concept of chronology) to justify their contrivances (Nyman, Bryars, Taverner, Martland etc.). I think perhaps the restraint of advanced music in Britain may be a reaction to the overwhelming popularity and visibility of British pop and rock - but something is getting in the way of making great music happen in London right now. Which is why I’m excited with Dumitrescu and Avram!

I’ll finish with a brief word about genre. I agree with Ornette Coleman when he said in 1977 that ‘any person in today’s music scene knows that rock, classical, folk and jazz are all yesterday’s titles’ (from the sleevenote to Dancing In Your Head, omitted in the CD reissue). It’s not that I crave some all-embracing ‘polyvocal real’ or thing-in-itself without conceptual distinctions (indeed, the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s epistemological anarchism/neo-Kantianism on music criticism has been everywhere malign), it’s that the real structuring tension in music is not between the competing identities of genre - that’s something sold to people as consumers - but between the ‘Prolific’ and the ‘Devouring’, as William Blake put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, or between the working class and those who manage their productions, as Karl Marx put it. Of course, cultural goods are a special case; but when I look at how Ana and Iancu produce their music - detailed and challenging scores, certainly; but also with ears open to amazing, creative improvisors like Fernando Grillo and Tim Hodgkinson; ears open to the erotics of amplification and the unearthliness of computer-processed sound; their generosity in presenting programmes of music written by like-minds across the globe - I don’t see what they are doing is so different from the actions of those who’ve produced great music in other, supposedly separate genres - like, say, Jelly Roll Morton or Charles Mingus or Frank Zappa or Muhal Richard Abrams or Simon H. Fell. As usual, if we look on the productive side - the progressive aspect of this system, one whose capapabilities and possibilities suggest a whole new social order - we glimpse a universal humanity repressed and denied by the hierarchical snobberies, sectarian narcissism and military spectacles of the consumer society. Peace!

But, as a responsible columnist rather than a soapbox orator, I should take a deep breath and try once again to explain why Dumitrescu/Avram are going to wake the guilty intellectuals from their collusive slumbers, drag militant sensuality onto the side of historical action, and save the world. Getting ‘beyond genre’ was the task music set itself in the 1980s. John Zorn was patron saint of this brave new classless music world. Yet despite Zorn’s brillaince as a bebop altoist, everything was thin and strained: he was to Frank Zappa what Prince was to Hendrix, the semblance but not the action, the concept but not the feeling. But Dumitrescu/Avram are doing it. Their music works through the CD-form, something the ‘classical’ world - with their eyes on the ‘great-man’ fetishism granted to the dead romantics, or on the spurious glamour sprayed on commercial product - has never been able to achieve. The ‘classical CD’, with its ghastly colour photographs of grinning music-student jackasses with clean-pressed shirts and dowdy dresses and its weedy, far-from-the-mic sound quality, has always been a complete abomination.

The Dumitrescus work inside the ‘reference tone’ (Beefheart), the ‘hear-stripe’ (Adorno). Their music may be score-based, but it’s heading towards the sonic, not the visual. Closemic’ing and computer electronics bring the acoustic world into discussion with your domestic hi-fi as authentically as Muddy Waters’ amps or Sam C. Phillips’ Sun Studio. When Iancu Dumitrescu last conducted at Conway Hall, his small audience clapped so long, he had to give them a short encore - he directed his musicians with gestures, got the flute player to lead, and created a new piece. In conducting scored pieces, one of his persistent gestures is to point to himself: ‘watch me! follow my timing! don’t read the notes on paper mechanically …’. This is what real music does when it needs to be realised: it smashes through the curtsies to tradition required of the dullards, and uses all means possible to realise pertinent sound. The Dumitrescus are doing this. When you inflict a CD of theirs on guests, they don’t know what the fuck it is: it’s sound writhing like a sculpted ameoba, protoplasm in the auricles. It strips music of its social-reference codes, its snob mobiles, its trappings, its exchange value: it breathes embarrassing ooky-nooky in your ear like Beethoven or Ray Charles. It’s the real deal. The use-value of modern sound in polemical upsurge! And all the people - professionals, pundits, critics, taste-makers - who’ve been keeping it from you are … full of shit.

But I don’t want to end with shit. I want to end with shit’s use in the biosystem, its necessary provision of nutrients to the bacterial and plant world. Dumitrescu music is the next stage in total thinking, so real you can taste it, so real that only those with minds blocked and stodged by taste and knowledge can’t grasp it. It’s the music written by someone who read V. I. Vernadsky on the biosphere, grasped the point, and wrote a minute description of the hormones released in their bloodstream by that elation. That tall. Really! See you next time, folks.

Ben Watson < info AT militantesthetix.co.uk > is a music writer (Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Derek Bailey & the Story of Free Improvisation) who in 2005 decided to abandon his struggle with Wire magazine and raise children instead.

this article first appeared on metamute.org

In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of ‘world class cities’ – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination.

In District 9 the shacks in Jo’burg are inhabited by extraterrestrials which humans call prawns. Science fiction can, to borrow from the lexicon that the film’s hero Wickus van de (sic) Merwe has taken to the world, just be a load of kak. But, like all forms of fantasy, it can also be a dream of the present illuminating it with more power than the ordinary categories through which we see the world. When it can illuminate aspects of reality hidden by ordinary ways of seeing it can reveal those ways of seeing to be the real fantasy.

District 9 is set in something very near to contemporary South Africa – Mahendra Raghunath reads the television news, the red ants swarm through the shacks with their crowbars and the human rights activists demonstrating outside the shacks are vastly less effective than the xenophobic mobs. But the film also evokes the past. Apartheid is everywhere from the ubiquity of white and male power to the peculiar type of nerd that Wikus van de Merwe’s character parodies. District 9 also reaches into a vision of the future. Van de Merwe works for a multinational corporation rather than the state. Multinationals, like Group 4 Securicor, are already in the business of beating the poor into their place but they take instruction from the state. Here, in a staple of nightmare visions of the future, the state seems to be a junior partner to the multinational.

By weaving past, present and future into one cinematic vision District 9 steps out of the all too easy distinction between an absolute break between bad apartheid and good democracy to look at how some processes of exclusion endure or mutate as we move from one political system to another. Some reviewers, referring to their experience of apartheid evictions, have written about how the eviction scenes have a strangely hyper real feel despite the fact that the evicted are fantastical aliens. But these scenes are also a hyper real description of contemporary evictions. The bureaucrat who is ‘here to assist you’ by destroying your home, the clipboards, the helicopters, the red ants, the casual and contemptuous exercise of arbitrary violence, the assumption that the shack settlement is a zone outside of the ordinary rules of society and the relentless presumption of criminality are all very real aspects of our society right now.

Shacks in Johannesburg have always housed aliens. Apartheid turned most black South Africans into aliens in their own country. In democratic South Africa we turned Mozambicans and Zimbabweans into aliens. The obvious value of turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the continuities in the processes by which we turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them ‘for their own good’. District 9 confront these continuities head on and so although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than we’re likely to find in many of the spaces that produce, circulate and authorise the official consensus. It shows contemporary development-speak in which the only real issue is the ‘pace of delivery’ to be a fantasy as ridiculous as it is perverse.

After all, we tell ourselves that the new order has made a decisive break with the essential logic of apartheid as we are driving shack dwellers and street traders out of our cities at gun point. We tell ourselves that we have a new order founded on human rights and protected by the best constitution in the world as we exclude migrants and the poor from that order. We tell ourselves that building stadiums and ‘eradicating’ street traders and shack settlements will bring us into a new era of prosperity while we are actively and often violently make the poor poorer.

The reality is that we have, at all levels of society, colluded to exclude some people from those who count as real citizens. This exclusion is often built into our speech. Some of us call others Makwerekwere. The state conflates ‘illegal immigrant’s with ‘criminals’. It conflates the theft of electricity cables to sell the copper with ‘illegal electricity connections.’ Exclusion is also being actively built into the structures of our cities. Shack dwellers are removed, often at gun point, to peripheral ghettoes. The reality is that some people and some spaces are treated as if they are outside of the law. The state, whether wielded by the DA or the ANC, engages in openly criminal behaviour towards the poor.

People who cannot afford to live their lives according to the rules of a society that assumes that everyone can be a consumer are usually understood in two ways by elites. They are either dangerous criminals who need to be repressed or childlike incompetents who need to be placed under some form of tutelage. District 9 makes a welcome break from this consensus, which is another elite fantasy, when it shows that the aliens have a weapon. In contemporary South Africa those weapons are the road blockade, the vote strike and the land occupation.

But just as our move from apartheid to post-apartheid changed who we turn into aliens but didn’t put aside the assumption that we should construct our society against the alien this film has its own aliens. In District 9 the Nigerians are, as in Jerusalema, another recent film about Jo’burg, presented through the basest racist stereotype. The depiction of the Nigerians is so extreme that many reviewers have concluded that it was intended to illustrate that as one alien is humanised another is created. But the film maker’ s comments don’t lend much weight to this interpretation. It seems that the film has inadvertently reproduced exactly what it set out to overcome. Perhaps this is its key lesson. As we humanise one alien we create another.

By Richard Pithouse. Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University.

Creative Commons License Please attribute The South African Civil Society Information Service (www.sacsis.org.za) as the source of this article. For more information, please see our Copyright Policy.

27

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
…
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

~ from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

“I can tell you know what it’s like
The long farewell of the hunger strike
But can you save me?
Come on and save me
If you could save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone
Except the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone
Except the freaks who could never love anyone.”
~ Aimee Mann

Les Paul, the jazz guitarist who died on August 13 aged 94, invented the solid body electric guitar and revolutionised the sound of pop music recordings.

Known as “the Thomas Edison of the music industry”, Les Paul pioneered multi-tracking – whereby instruments in a band or orchestra are recorded through separate, independently adjustable channels – and overdubbing, in which additional sound or music can be added after the original recording is made.

Before the invention of the microchip, before even the transistor, Les Paul was adapting the guitar with electronics – warping notes, experimenting with echo and feedback, and twiddling knobs to alter its sound.

Yet he had no training whatsoever in either electronics or music. None the less, he is responsible for an instrument that has carved his name in the annals of music – the Gibson Les Paul – which became the guitar of choice for stars of the rock and pop era.

He was born Lester William Polfuss at Waukesha, Wisconsin, on June 9 1915. As a child he taught himself to play the harmonica, copying the country artists he heard on the radio. He also learned how to program his mother’s pump upright piano, punching holes in the piano roll.

He progressed to the banjo and then the guitar, and was among the first to introduce simultaneous harmonica and guitar picking. A prodigy, he began playing professionally at a local drive-in restaurant at the age of 13.

It was there that he made his first breakthrough in fusing music and electronics. In order to make himself more audible to his outdoor audience above the roar of car engines and noise of customers, Lester rigged up his first electric guitar, using a phonograph needle wired to a radio speaker.

He soon won the sobriquet “the Wizard from Waukesha”, and dropped out of school to join a cowboy band. With them he drifted to Chicago, where he was swiftly absorbed into the unpredictable world of Mid-Western American radio in the 1930s. Shows were transmitted live amid often chaotic scenes; radio stations themselves were a circus of musicians, preachers and agony aunts.

Pseudonyms were obligatory, and the teenage Les Paul was known as “Rhubarb Red” as he led his country band on WJJD radio. Just two years later he was playing electric guitar, which he called his “own contraption”, over the airwaves of the national network NBC.

But Les Paul aspired to the more sophisticated world of jazz, and began rehearsing with the bass player Ernie Newton and the rhythm guitarist Jimmy Atkins. Together they formed the Les Paul Trio, which, after moving to New York in 1938, alternated mainstream work for the popular bandleader Fred Waring with Harlem jam sessions that featured Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Ben Webster, Stuff Smith and Charlie Christian.

Throughout the 1930s Paul had continued to experiment with different forms of electric guitar. He eventually came up with the notion of a solid-backed model after trying to cut down on feedback by stuffing towels in the “f” holes (vents in the bodies of most stringed instruments) of a hollow guitar.

His first significant effort, in 1941, was a four-by-four-inch board with strings, an attached pickup and a neck cannibalised from an Epiphone guitar, which he called “the log”. The legendary marque was born.

The same year, his trio disbanded, and Les Paul headed for Hollywood, bent on the notion of introducing Bing Crosby to his new instrument. Sidetracked by Chicago radio, he eventually arrived in Los Angeles two years later. Crosby pronounced Paul’s electric instruments “the greatest sound” he had ever heard, and sang vocals, backed by Paul, on several recordings for Decca. Among them was the hit It’s Been A Long, Long Time.

During the Second World War, Paul served in the Armed Forces Radio Service under the bandleader Meredith Wilson and travelled with the Andrews Sisters, a trio enjoying immense popularity at the time.

Living in Hollywood after the war, he decided to indulge his passion for technology and electronics by building a recording studio in his garage. Breaking the rigid rule that artists should stand two feet from the microphone, he experimented with the close-mike technique, which reduces background noise and prevents feedback.

Les Paul’s curiosity also led him to record several times on the same acetate disc, laying down one musical “track” on top of another and building up a palimpsest of sound. These so-called “multi-track” recordings evolved from home-grown recordings to commercial ventures with the release of Paul’s instrumental solos Lover and Brazil, which made use of the technique. In the years that followed he also had Top 10 hits with Nola, Josephine, Tiger Rag and Meet Mr Callaghan.

But multi-tracking had even greater potential with the new technology of tape-recording, which emerged in the late 1940s. Bing Crosby also spotted the possibilities of tape, and gave Paul one of the first machines to arrive on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, in 1949, Les Paul married the singer Iris Colleen Summers, who later changed her name to Mary Ford at his suggestion. Capitalising on his innovative sound-on-sound technique, he multi-tracked his wife’s vocals and his instrumental backing. Though there were just two of them in his recording studio, Mary Ford suddenly sounded like a trio of voices, in harmony, backed by a full band.

While the basic early technology made it fiendishly tricky to pull off such recordings successfully, the couple had a string of hits in the first half of the 1950s. The first was Tennessee Waltz, which shot to No 1, followed closely by Mockin’ Bird Hill, How High The Moon, Vaya Con Dios and Hummingbird.

In their radio and television appearances, Les Paul used what he called the Les Paulveriser, a backstage electronics system controlled from a black box attached to his guitar. The device made the duo sound like a full orchestra, including drums. It also multiplied Mary Ford’s voice – just as it had been in their garage recordings.

It was at this time that the Gibson Les Paul guitar – a manufactured guitar based on Paul’s solid-body concept of the late 1930s – burst on to the market, though the extent of Paul’s involvement has remained the subject of controversy. Gibson’s president Ted McCarty has suggested that Paul was approached only for licensing rights to his name, and had almost no input into the design.

Les Paul’s supporters, however, claim that he was key to the success of the maple and mahogany guitar, with its now-familiar curves. Either way, the Gibson Les Paul was launched to tap into the rock and pop craze, which its rival Fender was successfully exploiting with its electric guitar, the Telecaster.

But whereas the Telecaster was considered a cheap but effective model for the mass market, the Gibson Les Paul was deliberately conceived as a high-end instrument.

The contract between Les Paul and Gibson, under which Paul could been seen using another brand, endured until the early 1960s, when he fell out with the company over design changes. He continued to play, with his wife, and by 1962, when they divorced, they had cut 36 gold discs together.

Subsequently Les Paul increasingly exchanged his life as a professional musician for one as a professional tinkerer and inventor, only to rediscover his country roots in old age.

During the 1970s he recorded two albums with the influential country guitarist Chet Atkins. One of the results, Chester and Lester (1976), won them a Grammy for best country instrumental performance.

In recent years, he became as feted as the guitar which bears his name. In 2005, the year that Christie’s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600, he was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame.

Into his nineties, Les Paul continued to play a regular Monday night session at a jazz club in New York, where rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page sometimes came to listen to him.

Les Paul, whose wife died in 1977, had three sons and an adopted daughter. In later life he continued to tinker with the Les Paulveriser to reduce its weight from 1,100lb to a more manageable 100lb. The design has always remained a secret.

first Published August 13 2009 by the telegraph

By Ron Rosenbaum
July 6, 2003

Why dude , now? It’s not just that Ashton Kutcher, the demigod of Dude ever since Dude, Where’s My Car? , has become a Demi-god of another sort. It’s not just the rise of Keanu Reeves (who revived “dude” in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure ) as Neo-Dude. There’s more to it, dude.
Back in 1964, Susan Sontag wrote an eye-opening essay in Partisan Review called “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Partisan Review , alas, is gone, but camp is here to stay, and perhaps the time has come to begin to assemble some notes on a similarly recondite phenomenon: Let’s call it “Notes on ‘Dude.’” Because recent evidence suggests that Dude, too-Dude in its most expansive, capital-D sense-is here to stay as well. In some ways, the impetus for studying Dude culture is dual: I feel I’ve grown up (or down) with “dude,” having first heard it from the single surfer dude in my high school and then the single surfer dude in my class at Yale (he dropped out freshman year to party with the waves). But there’s also a similar motive to that which prompted Ms. Sontag to investigate the resonances of camp. She opened her “Notes on ‘Camp’” essay with these two sentences: “Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility-unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -that goes by the cult name of ‘Camp.’” (My italics.) Similarly, Dude has been named, but has Dude-as sensibility-been adequately described? If camp is “a variant of sophistication,” Dude might be called a variant of unsophistication . And yet also “hardly identical with it.” In fact, it can be, when used ironically as it often is here in New York City, a sophisticated take on unsophistication. Why Dude now? Well, for one thing, what Ms. Sontag documented (or perhaps created) was a cultural moment when camp-which she described as an underground, mainly gay subcultural sensibility-crossed over into the mainstream. And I’d argue that the moment has come when, like it or not, we have to acknowledge that Dude-in what you might call its ecstatic Jeff Spicoli sense-has crossed over. Crossed over in two ways: First, it has made the transition from transitory subcultural slang term to mainstream cultural-or at least linguistic-phenomenon of a sort. And what’s more-and this is what prompted this essay-like camp, Dude has “crossed over” in a gendered way as well. And so perhaps, it might be appropriate to begin these tentative notes with: 1) THE SEXUAL TRANSMIGRATION OF DUDE I think this is one chief indication that Dude is here to stay: the fact that it now can refer to both men and women. It’s true that there still may be some salons and dinner parties-mainly in certain clueless precincts of academia-where “dude” will still not be uttered at all. And it’s more likely you’ll hear “dude” uttered downtown, or on the L train, than in the back of Town Cars and Navigators. But outside of those sad figures who cloister themselves off from the pleasures of pop culture, “dude” is not just a part of the language-Dude is a whole discourse. And what’s more, Dude-ism, once mainly male, is now being used self-referentially by women as well. I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I may have been aware of it in a subliminal way, but I know the precise moment the conscious realization that “dude” had transcended gender came to me. It was in the second week of May; I was in a car somewhere off a freeway exit in Chicago with two journalism students who had picked me up at O’Hare to take me to a guest-lecture gig at Medill Journalism School. We seemed to be lost and, as I recall, the woman in the back seat said to the woman at the wheel, “Dude, I think we’re going the wrong way.” Dude! Sweet! (as they say in Dude, Where’s My Car? ) These were smart, well-educated, self-aware women in their 20’s, and they thought nothing of calling each other “dude.” They said it was a fairly common usage. Well, maybe with a little of the in-built irony that “dude” has for all who have used it post–Jeff Spicoli. Little did I know that I was witnessing a phenomenon that was, in fact, a hot topic among lexicographers and linguists, according to my friend Jesse Sheidlower, the astute North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary : the sexual transmigration of “dude.” Where once “dude” had applied mainly-only-to men, “there’s a lot of discussion now,” Jesse said, among his colleagues in the word-study business, over this issue: whether “dude” (in a descriptive rather than prescriptive sense) could now generally be said to apply to both men and women. (The way “babe” has crossed over from the other direction, you might say.) The online edition of the American Heritage Dictionary , for instance, has already made the leap and recognized the duality of “dude” when it comes to gender, defining it (in 3.b., “dudes”) as “Persons of either sex.” Oxford was still studying the matter, Jesse said, although he checked the O.E.D. ’s on-line data base and found a citation for “dude” applied to a woman as early as the mid-70’s. And one in the mid-80’s, in Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero , in which a young woman tells her mother, “No way, dude.” These were relatively isolated instances, but it seemed like it was just a matter of time before the O.E.D. would give “dude” its due as a dual-gender appellation. (Or as Aerosmith might say, “Dude [sometimes] looks like a lady.”) The triumph of Dude is more than about a single word. It’s about an entire sensibility, a worldview. To understand it one needs … 2) A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON DUDE: Featuring the original ‘aesthetic craze.’ Everybody thinks “dude ranch” came first and was somehow the origin. But whence came the dude in “dude ranch”? Before the dude-ranch dude there was dude as dandy, the dude as an urban aesthete; it was the urbanity of dude that made the dude-ranch dude dude-ish. The print version of the unabridged O.E.D. curiously calls “dude” originally “a factitious slang term.” “Factitious slang”? I think what they’re suggesting is something like what happened when the guys who made Swingers tried to make “money” a slang term for “cool.” God, was that a disaster. Totally embarrassing, dude. Why did “dude” succeed while “money” died a well-deserved death? It may have something to do with its origins. “Dude” may have been made up “factitiously” (I’d like to know the dude who did it), but according to the O.E.D. , it first came into vogue in New York about 1883, in connection with what the O.E.D. calls “the ‘aesthetic craze’ of the day.” “Aesthetic craze”: Don’t you love it, dude? This is important to remember in considering the way “dude” has evolved, the way it’s come to be used a century after its origin, the aesthetic dimension of the word. Yes, it can be used simply to refer to a person or class of persons-the way I first heard it in my suburb in reference to “surfer dudes.” But more interesting is the way its origins in an “aesthetic craze” can be linked to the way “dude” (or rather ” Duuuude! “) had become a one-word expression of awe and wonder. A simple awestruck Duuuude! as a way of expressing aesthetic approbation of, a crazed mutual aesthetic appreciation of, something someone says, or some phenomenon someone points out. An acknowledgment of shock and awe-or, in some cases, schlock and awe. A friend of mine pointed out that what “dude” users (and abusers) have in common is transport . Originally, a dude was a dandy on horseback; contemporary dudes use other means of transport-skateboards, surfboards, snowboards and the like. There’s an interesting convergence here with Ms. Sontag’s exegesis of the origins of camp, one that also goes back to the aesthete and the dandy. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” she wrote. “As the dandy is the 19th century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture …. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity, the new-style dandy … appreciates vulgarity.” Dude, you might say-Dude with a capital D-is another answer to the question of how to be an aesthete in an age of mass culture, because Dude is a way of bringing a conscious unsophistication-an ironical unsophistication, an unsophistication in quotation marks, a sophisticated unsophistication-to an appreciation of popular culture. At least that’s the way I heard it in the exchange between the Medill J-school women; that’s the way I use it; that’s the way I hear it here in New York-where, for instance, the single most prolific utterer of “dude” I know works at The New York Review of Books . Of course, there still exists a kind of pure “dude,” a non-ironic use of the word. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) One could almost say that there has been, in the history of “dude” from its “factitious” origins in 1883, a dialectic of Dude, a dialectic of sophistication and unsophistication. Which really calls for … 3) A BRIEF HISTORY OF DUDE, PART ONE: THE MYSTERY OF THE TRANSITION The real mystery of Dude history is the Mystery of the Transition. How did the mildly mocking “dude” of “dude ranch,” a direct descendant of the 1883 urban dandy, become the “dude” of surfer talk-a respectful form of direct address, as in “Party on, dude.” A woman I know offered this theory of how “dude” migrated from dude-ranch mockery to the surfer term of mutual respect: “Dude” was originally a mockery of “gentlemanliness,” you might say, or gentility, and surfers later rescued the gentlemanliness from the mockery. When transformed, or inverted in subcultural slang-in this case, California surfer talk-the original irony was itself ironized, and, in the way a double negative can make a positive, it became thereby a mostly sincere, slightly arch term of gentlemanly respect , not mockery. What made the transformation possible was the presence of that gentlemanly dandyism in both usages. Surfer dudes decided to own it, own their elaborate subcultural aesthetic dandyism, the way some ethnic groups believe they can own words that were originally derisive slurs. In a way, to address someone as “dude” became a sign of ironic respect for that person’s ironic sensibility. 4) A BRIEF HISTORY OF DUDE, PART TWO: THE DISAPPEARANCE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF DUDE O.K., so “dude” made the transition sometime in the 60’s to a term of respect-but for a while it just stayed there, sort of dormant, a regional subcultural term, kept alive in certain rock lyrics (”All the Young Dudes”). For a while, it looked like “dude” might die out or become antiquated like “groovy” (as opposed to “cool,” which still survives in various ironic flavors). But then “dude” began to re-emerge in the late 70’s, less as a term of address-”Hey, dude!”-but as, once again, an aspect of an “aesthetic craze,” so to speak. Which brings us to what you might call the “whoa, dude” connection-and then the internalization of “whoa” by “dude.” I seem to recall being alerted to this transition in 1980 or ‘81 by a story that appeared in New West Magazine , by the gifted writer Charlie Haas. As I recall, it was one of the first to document the Grateful Dead cult. But what stayed on my mind was Mr. Haas’ hilarious but prescient opening riff on what he called “the whoa dudes”: guys who used “Whoa, dude!” to begin-and end-just about every conversational response, much the same way that Valley Girls were starting to use “like” and “totally” as all-purpose conversational punctuation. (And by the way, a whole other essay could be devoted to the way Valley-speak has, in many ways, survived and gone national-as the unexpected triumph of Legally Blonde like SO TOTALLY attests.) In any case, what the “whoa, dude” phenomenon documented was the way “dude” had made another crucial transition. It was the moment when saying “dude” was no longer just a way of addressing a person; it began to be an all-encompassing acknowledgment of mutual wonder, in that elongated form-” Duuuude! “-where the awestruck “whoa” is encompassed within the elongated “Duuuude!” so that it becomes a mutual communion with the wonder of it all, so to speak. Still, the real transition-the moment when dude went “worldwide” (to use a contemporary term), the moment when Dude “blew up” (to use a persistent 80’s phrase)-was the release of one film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High , and the introduction of one now-nearly-mythic character …. 5) THE DEMIGODS OF DUDE, PART ONE: JEFF SPICOLI I’m a big fan of Sean Penn’s serious work, from the underrated At Close Range to his direction of The Crossing Guard -but really, Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High is likely to become his one immortal American character, almost like Huck Finn or Chaplin’s Little Tramp. What made Jeff Spicoli great? Well, he was the pitch-perfect synergistic fusion of the four wellsprings of late-70’s Dude culture: surfer, stoner, suburban Valley-speak and biker-rocker dude. (Remember Spicoli’s dream, which concludes with his planning to “wing on over to London and jam with the Stones”?) But more than that, it was the amazing, oblivious good nature that Mr. Penn, as Spicoli, radiated. The Joy of Dude. 6) DEMIGODS OF DUDE, PART TWO: KEANU REEVES IN BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE I’d almost forgotten that Bill and Ted came before Wayne and Garth and Wayne’s World . And that “Wayne’s World”-both the Saturday Night Live sketch concept and the films that followed-was a pure cop from Bill and Ted . And that it was Keanu Reeves who immortalized the phrase “Party on, dude,” not Mike Myers. These are important facts. And although Bill and Ted doesn’t really hold up the way Fast Times does, it was Bill and Ted that introduced the aesthetic category known as “Excellent!” into the Dude lexicon, even before Bart Simpson and Mr. Burns made “dude” and “excellent” partners in crime. 7) DEMIGODS OF DUDE, PART THREE: LEBOWSKI vs. SLACKER I have to admit, I really, really disliked The Big Lebowski when I first saw it. But it grew on me. Not to the cult status it’s attained for some: Did you know the Second Annual Big Lebowski Festival is about to take place somewhere in Kentucky on July 19 (see www.lebowskifest.com)? Note to editor: Dude, here’s your peg! My problem with Lebowski at first was that Jeff Bridges gives slacker slovenliness a bad name-while the earlier Slacker gives it a good name. (See my column on that genuinely great Dude film, Observer, Aug. 13, 2001) Slacker , of course, is more explicitly philosophical and aesthetic than Lebowski , but lately I’ve come to think there is something likable about the Coen brothers’ film, almost despite the Dude element. What was irritating to me was the Jeff Bridges character calling himself “the Dude.” It was such a non-Dude thing to do. (Almost as irritating as the commodification of Dude by the so-called Dell Dude. I don’t blame the Dell Dude for taking the gig, but he was almost too good at it-to the extent that, for a little while, it began to feel a little tacky to use “dude.”) But to return to Lebowski : The real Dude in the picture is Lebowski’s buddy, Walter Sobchak (played by John Goodman) who’s the best thing in the movie-along with the two of them using the word “roll” for bowl (transport again). Indeed, the whole bowling/ spiritual aspect of the film is highlighted by Sobchak’s refusal to “roll on shabbos .” DEMIGODS OF DUDE, PART FOUR: ASHTON KUTCHER I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but the title Dude, Where’s My Car? can be traced to a line in The Big Lebowski , when Sobchak asks Lebowski: “Where’s your car, Dude?” And even though most of Dude, Where’s My Car? makes even Bill and Ted seem like a subdued, autumnal work of the subtle Japanese master of cinema, Yasujiro Ozu, Dude has become a cult film, and the title of the movie alone is worth the price of admission. And coming in the year 2000, it clearly signaled that Dude would span the turn of the century. The totally awesome title of the sequel alone- Seriously, Dude, Where’s My Car? (planned for release in 2004)-should insure that Dude lasts well into the new millennium. But, of course, there’s more to Dude, Where’s My Car? than the title and the theme of lost transport . (Well, a little more.) There’s that great, now sort-of-famous exchange between Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott when they read the tattoos on each other’s backs. It’s not quite “Who’s on first?”, but it’s not a bad update. See, they’ve just discovered that they’ve gotten tattoos on their backs, which they have no memory of getting. Because the tattoos are on their backs, they each have to read the others’ ink. And they discover that Kutcher’s tattoo reads “Dude,” and Scott’s reads “Sweet.” And since “Sweet” has come to be a synonym for the awestruck “Duuuude,” trouble ensues: “Dude, what does my tattoo say?” asks Scott. “‘Sweet,’” says Kutcher. “What about mine?” “‘Dude,’” says Scott. “What does mine say?” “‘Sweet,’” says Kutcher. “What about mine?” “‘Dude’!” says an increasingly annoyed Scott. “What about mine?” “‘Sweet’!” And so it goes, until they’re at each other’s throats. It probably doesn’t make any sense to those who haven’t seen it, but you sort of give in to it when you do. (Our “big-cheese editor,” as the Eight-Day Week likes to call him, boasts that he has it memorized). If this seems slightly less serious than the intellectual fare my readers are used to, let me offer … 9) THE DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR? LITERARY GAME This was something I devised during a dinner with my friends Virginia and David, although they came up with the best answer. The idea is to see how many great works of literature you can fit into the Dude, Where’s My Car? framework. For instance, Moby-Dick - Dude, Where’s My Whale? The Iliad - Dude, Where’s My Trojans? The Catcher in the Rye - Dude, Where’s My Innocence? A Tale of Two Cities - Dude, Where’s My Head? The Red and the Black - Dude, Where’s My Color Sense? The best was one that David and Virginia seemed to come up with simultaneously: The Sun Also Rises - Dude, Where’s My Dick? I’ll conclude this installment of “Notes on ‘Dude’” with some dude etiquette: 10) SOME DUDE DO’S AND DON’T'S -Never use “dude” more than twice in a single sentence. -Headline plays on Dude, Where’s My Car? have pretty much reached their limit. I recently saw a headline: “Dude, Where’s My Terrorism?” -So have plays on “Dude, You’re Gettin’ a Dell.” -Enough with the commercialization: A sample Web search revealed, among many others, the Weather Dude, the Pizza Dude, the Balloon Dude and the Cookie Dude. There was also “Dude Dressing: Major Zesty Garlic Peppercorn Ranch Salad Dressing that makes you say whoa dude!!!’” I even saw a Web site for “The Creator Dude.” It wasn’t God.

this article first appeared in the new york observer

August 6th, marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy”. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy - an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons.

more pictures at boston.com

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

From “The Sheltering Sky”, by Paul Bowles

Today, we posted Diane Benscoter’s revealing talk on being a Moonie and how cult thought can lead people to do the unthinkable. It’s a topic that’s not often talked about and that fascinates many, so, to bring you more from Diane the TEDBlog caught up with her for an interview. We talked about her time with the Moonies, her efforts as a deprogrammer and her ideas about how we should be fighting cults and extremism around the world.

Could you speak a little more about how you came to join the Moonies?

I had just turned 17. I was very idealistic. The Vietnam War really bothered me. I had a good friend with a brother in Vietnam. I was determined to find a community that would stop the madness. I went off in search of something like that. I went off on this Walk for World Peace. It was a five day walk, and during the entire walk there would be two people walking with me at all times, talking about this new world they were going to build, saying that I was special and chosen by God to be a part of this, otherwise I wouldn’t be there. There were lectures every night. And slowly I came to believe that they were right, and that Sun Myung Moon was the second coming of the Messiah.

What was it like once you were in the group? What was it like to live as a Moonie?

It was constantly reinforced that we had a purpose that was much higher than that of anyone else in the world. It was pretty appealing to be a part of something like that. But, I missed my freedom. There were times when I really missed being like the people I saw on the street every day. But, it was constantly reinforced that I was saving the world, so I trusted my beliefs and gave up my freedom.

I spent most of my days fundraising — selling candy and flowers. I started in Nebraska and began living in their Nebraska center. I cut my hair off and cut my ties with my family. I was shipped off not long after I joined, for training at a “monastery” in upstate New York. Then I began my mission — fundraising. We lived in vans and went from place to place selling candy and flowers. We also went back for training over and over, and the trainings were pretty long. One of them was 120 days. They reinforced beliefs and erased any doubts during their training. They kept the circular logic intact.

What was this experience like for your family?

They were desperate. You see, it wasn’t like I came from a family that was dysfunctional or abusive. I came from a normal, loving home. My mother was especially desperate to get me out. And when they did talk to me, all I wanted was to get them to join. I thought Satan was using them, was talking through them. They suffered greatly. Now that I’m a parent, I can’t imagine how hard it was for them.

They did everything they could. My mom really wanted to have me deprogrammed, my dad wasn’t as sure. It’s a drastic measure. And what if it didn’t work? He was afraid that if they tried, and it didn’t work, that they might lose me forever.

Could you speak a little bit about deprogramming? You were deprogrammed and became a deprogrammer, but it’s a rather controversial practice and many think that it brings up ethical issues relating to free will.

Yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic, but I’ll try to give the main points first. One — involuntary deprogrammings, which I was involved with, aren’t really taking place anymore and definitely not as they were. Looking back on it, I think there are ethical issues there. Still, I totally understand why people did it, why I did it — desperation, not knowing what to do, love of their child. You’re dealing with a problem that hasn’t been defined psychologically, so you can’t lock people in a mental hospital for it.

Now, I had one foot in and one foot out of the Moonies when I was deprogrammed. My faith was already wavering. Also, I had a loving family. But, to pull a belief system away from someone who doesn’t have the correct support system can be very dangerous. It’s like chemotherapy. Chemotherapy many times cures cancer, but it can also kill people. So, I’m not going to say that deprogramming is the way. And that‘s why I’ve gone in the direction of prevention.

Also, some people came to deprogramming more professionally that others. Some made mistakes and some used really admirable techniques. For the most part, in the ones that I was a part of, we just talked to the person and made sure that they ate and slept well. We were trying to introduce rational thought and a healthy mental state. We presented no new philosophy and no desire for them to take up any of our personal beliefs. We simply tried to explain that much of what they had been told was not true and was possibly brainwashing. We based our techniques on psychological theory, especially the work of Robert Lifton.

READ MORE: Diane talks about how to distinguish a cult from a group, what it feels like to lose your critical thinking and how we can combat extremism — using memes.

What do you think are the identifying traits of a cult? What differentiates cult from group?

The first one is an all or nothing world view. If easy answers to complex questions are handed to you on a silver platter and if you’re asked to believe in them unquestioningly and told not to seek an alternative, that’s a cult. If there’s a clear us and them, and we the insiders have the answers to all the questions about the world — especially if those answers are very simple. For example — Moon is the messiah. I’m a mere mortal so I shouldn’t question anything. Anytime that you feel that you’re inside a group looking out at the rest of the world thinking, “If they only knew what we knew, they’d understand how right we are.”

Also, if the leader is all-knowing. That’s a big one. And of course, the circular logic is the other thing. If everything comes back to this simple logic, if you can’t have rational thought or critical thought, that’s a cult.

What is it like to have this circular thought? What does it feel like for the individual in this logic loop?

Often, I would hear a song, or see a headline, or encounter someone that would bring up issues contradictory to the perspective of the group and it would just bounce off of me, because I knew that that was Satan invading. If it would start to make sense to me, it was Satan invading my thoughts. And this was reinforced by the group that that type of experience was as a result of a lack of faith. We were God’s soldiers and Satan was constantly trying to break down God’s soldiers. I needed to pray harder.

Any critical question — the kind that a scientist would welcome — was not acceptable. In circular logic, anything that questions belief means something evil, bad or Satan. It’s wrong to listen, it’s wrong to even play with ideas that are different. This is how unthinkable things can happen.

So, you stop using critical thought?

Yes. And the thing that takes the place of critical thought is someone else’s voice. That voice literally replaces critical thought.

Could you elaborate on the connection you made in your talk between memetics and combating extremism?

What I theorize is that we’re looking in the wrong place and we’re attacking the extremism in the wrong way at the moment. To try to fight extremism with guns and to simply label extremists as bad or terrible people is wrong. The actions of these extremists are unthinkable, horrific, repulsive, but the person is a person who is passionate and truly believe that they are doing good. A mother who fed poison to her baby in Jonestown is not an evil person. She truly believed she was saving her baby. It’s hard to contemplate, but these are the same motivations that drove Hitler Youth and suicide bombers.

We need to take these phenomena out of the realm of good and evil and into the realm of science. What we really need to do is understand what happens in the brain, and I challenge experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry to do this — perhaps there is some way to identify the extremist brain.

When extremism occurs, something has happened to our mind. The human mind is very susceptible to ideas — to memes. And, much like viruses, memes spread. If we can just define this as a problem, as a memetic infection, as a disease. Ideas can infect our brains, and shut down other pathways of thought.

I suspect that the more a person uses critical thinking, the healthier their brain is. It’s like a computer that is well-tuned and running fast. For some time now, doctors have been recommending to older patients that they do crossword or number puzzles to ward off the onset of senility — suggesting that practicing our thought processes preserves them. Circular logic stops us from using our faculties of critical thinking, and causes our ability for critical and independent thought to atrophy. A lack of critical thought can cause behavior that is dangerous to the person and to others. That person is like a machine that’s broken — they’re simply not functioning normally.

I think that this particularly dangerous state called extremism can be prevented. I realized that when I found memetics. For me, finding memetics was like water to a thirsty person. It was only theory that was able to explain what happened to my brain and how it could be prevented in others. This circular logic I was caught in was a malfunction — if that meme caught on and people started speaking out against circular logic, perhaps the incidence of that malfunction could be reduced. We have memes about which sandal is fashionable for which season, why not a meme against circular logic?

this interview first appeared on ted

kagablog wishes cherry bomb a very happy birthday!