Identity Crisis

Well, I went off the grid for a few days, only to return to concerted attempts to shut down the #Occupy encampments across the world. These efforts range from the civilly legal (as in Vancouver) to the heavy-handed & legally gray (in New York City) to the unconscionably brutal (in Berkeley, California). Though these developments threaten the very existence of movement, I've sufficient faith - however slight - that the protesters will not go gentle in that good night. I began typing up the following spiel late last week, and have completed it on the assumption that the Occupations will survive well beyond this week...

The greatest threat to any movement that is not fascist in nature is itself. The greatest threat to the #Occupy movement is not the conceited scorn of Reichwing TV pundits, nor the rubber bullets & billy-clubs of the Oakland police, but the yawning void where its ideological & strategic nucleus should be. By its desire to be omnivorously inclusive & inoffensive, the movement has voluntarily sacrificed almost all political radicality: it refuses grand statements, hamstrings direct engagement, and declines to make transformative demands. This timidity has left the movement exposed to an influential, charismatic element that will - for better or worse - come to define the movement itself.

While I've a grudging respect for the hacktivist swarm Anonymous, I can't say I particularly trust them. I don't trust acephalic crowds in general. "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people." Especially people who've chosen, as their anarchosyndicalist hood ornament, the corporate depiction of a mercenary Papist who attempted to establish an English theocracy. Well thought out, indeed.

At the same time, I think the power & influence of Anonymous as a sociopolitical actor is vastly overstated. That's not gloating on my part: I'm sympathetic to many of Anonymous' operations and wish them greater success against bigots, child predators, and oppressive regimes. But despite their best efforts, Scientology, Bank of America, Koch Industries, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, and Bashar al-Assad are all going strong. Also, last month's abortive dust-up with barbarous Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas proved that Anonymous balks (sensibly) at crossing the line where Situationist prankterism ends and shit gets really, really real.

Still, where ever someone flips the bird to the Powers That Be, Anonymous will appear post-haste. Their stylized Guy Fawkes masks are the most recognizable non-textual symbol of the Occupy movement, inspiring numerous think pieces on the polysterene disguise. The masks serve to unify an operation that is polyglot, decentralized, and manifold in its provincial complaints - which is both beneficial and detrimental to the movement. Symbolically, the mask creates a sense of international solidarity amongst the protesters. But in a practical context, the masks encourage & enable deindividuation.

For those of you who haven't the time to peruse works of Philip Zimbardo, I'd point you to Derren Brown's recent special, The Game Show, a succinct & dismaying experiment in mob mentality. As Brown explains:

[Deindividuation] is what happens when people become anonymous members of a crowd, which allows them to behave in a way that goes against their moral code. It's a large part of what turns normal people into internet bullies, rioters, football hooligans, and encourages reality TV audiences to victimize contestants.

This deconstruction of a subject's sense of personal responsibility begins as the individual becomes physically subsumed in a large group, and is aggravated by even the simplest disguising of their personal features - say, a black hoodie, bandana mask, or the plastic semblance of Guy Fawkes.

Obviously, this poses a very big problem for those within the Occupy movement who want to keep their disobedience civil. By having tacitly joined forces with Anonymous, and for having allowed the porcelain-toned moustachioed trickster to become the movement archetype, Occupy has made a bargain that Faust would find foolishly short-sighted: Occupy have embraced the very element most likely to engage in the "irresponsible", "reckless", "anti-social" behavior that would cost the movement the majority-approval it so desperately craves. I'm not talking about the errant asshole who can be purged or pacified by some new-age group-hug intervention; I'm not even saying the loudest mouth wins the argument. I'm saying that within the movement is a subsect that can - autonomously, collectively, and suddenly - react in a manner at odds with group consensus.

Lest anyone fear I'm exaggerating the hooliganish potential of Anonymous in the context of popular protest, I refer you to this trailer for the upcoming documentary on hacktivism's reigning cabal which deliberately and repeatedly mixes & matches images of "orthodox" Fawkes-masked Anonymous members and Black Bloc anarcho-delinquents. Evidently, even to their ostensible supporters & media boosters, the two are interchangeable.

Now, I'm not saying that Anonymous' volatility & potential for hard resistance are a bad thing. As Disaster Notes explained earlier, it's still very early days for Occupy yet it's already minimizing its more radical ententes in favour of some latté-hipster version of Satyagraha. In light of recent developments, the movement's apparent commitment to moderation could very well prove suicidal. Several weeks ago, the Oakland PD's attack on protesters was a one-off aberration after six peaceful & dignified weeks, allowing Occupiers to feel smug with the relative ease of their success thus far:

While the cops may have the guns I think they’re starting to realize they don’t have the power - they’re on the wrong side of history. When they start seeing their neighbors, children and parents standing in the front lines of the OWS movement, their loyalties will shift and shift swiftly.

But now the riot gear's out, court injunctions are flying, and the streets are foggy with tear gas and pepper spray. It would behoove the #Occupy movement to remember that it's up against the full authoritarian might of oligarchs who start wars to boost their GDP, cheered by a complicit media and a frighteningly large portion of the selfish, consumerist public. Unleashing Anonymous & the Black Bloc may be a PR nightmare - Occupy's "nuclear option" - but it's an option the movement needs available to them.

The perennial exemplar of successful civil disobedience is Mohandas Gandhi's struggle for Indian independence, but what's often forgotten is that along the way there were not only arrests & usual brutality directed at protesters, but whole campaigns of violent harassment and murder. Not to mention that Gandhi's nonviolent efforts were reinforced & underscored by many acts of violent revolt against state authority. Consequently, neither side can claim victory by their efforts alone, nor could either have succeeded without the effective support of the other. The de facto slogan of every popular uprising is that famous quote apocryphally attributed to Gandhi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

It would appear that Occupy has graduated to the stage wherein they are being fought. As unpalatable as Anonymous & the Black Bloc may be to the more genteel members of the movement, it may serve them well to have comrades who are more than willing to fight back.

The Death of Satire, Pt. ∞

With even the porn industry falling on *ahem* hard times, is there no corner of the global economy that isn't suffering? (Aside from the booming Armed & Racist sector, that is.) Well, according to no less a reputable source than TIME Magazine, DJ instructional classes & schools are packed to the gills - with Wall Street refugees and prospectless business school grads.

Sound like the setup to a vaguely familiar joke? That's because the inimitable Ian Svenonius already indelibly linked DJ culture to trade-oriented finance in his typically ingenious essay, "The Mix-Master Race":

The DJ-as-artist echoes the new role of the bourgeois as stockbroker/trader; designator of worth and handler of commodities. With the exportation of industrialism the third world and the new role of the imperialist as loan shark/investor, the grooming of the DJ as high priest/star-artist of the culture is a necessary part of ensuring the culture's aggrandization of the broker and the subsequent denigration of the actual manufacturer.

...The ruling class in the USA no longer produces, but merely moves money through stocks and speculation; they are the designators of worth. The DJ is their star. A preposterous poseur, once an adjunct to wedding parties, he is now exalted, featured in advertisements and lavished with wealth and fame. Like the rulers on Wall Street, he has no actual talent except to play with other people's labor. His talent is his impeccable taste and his ability to turn junk into gold, like his stockbroking masters.

Certainly, the most horrifying thing about the TIME article is the glimpse it offers into the snarled mindset of former Masters of the Universe, boldly underlining Svenonius' link between Wall Street and the wheels of steel. Witness, for example, the driving motivation of one Bay Area DJ:

You can control everyone.

Yowza. If that doesn't sound like the coke-fueled glee of conspiratorial stockbrokers out for a drink after a day working on Canary Wharf, I don't know what does. Even more disturbing, though, are the words of Ms. Koma Gandy. A textbook example of a financial crisis casualty, Gandy is a Harvard undergrad with an MBA from Georgetown University who used to manage hedge funds and now dreams of getting booties moving on the dancefloor. But the Wizard of Oz allusion she makes to describe her fascination with DJ culture could just as easily be used to describe the deluded faith in self-interested voodoo that blew all that hot air up the economy's ass over the past decade:

You go out to this party and the deejay is this mysterious entity behind a wall, where all this magic happened. I've always wanted to see how the magic was constructed.

These are the people who were handling our money: starry-eyed and conceited, overgrown children just desperate to be showered in whatever fairy dust was being blown around the VIP booth. And yet we still wonder exactly how we got into this mess in the first place?

My Hate Is Stronger Than Your Love

I scarcely pass up a chance to talk shit, but when no less a professional instigator than Simon Reynolds issues an open call for character assassination - well, how am I gonna pass that up?

A couple of folks have already responded, including Zone Styx*, who took Brian Eno to task for his Exlax-smooth glide from art-damaged visionary to Svengali of pastel banality. As boldly progressive as the first decade of his career was, Eno has spent the past twenty-odd years terraforming a plateau upon which the most median hacks have homesteaded. I'm tempted, though, to give Eno a pass because, in that first decade, he did pioneer almost everything interesting about modern pop. The tragedy is that he didn't pull a Barrett/Beefheart to cement his legend.**

Meanwhile, I'm putting my money on Carl for Hater of the Year.

The target of my wrath is not a sacred cow and is often maligned in a strictly anti-fashionable knee-jerk (which, naturally, is its own expression of consensus-culture). But as the record shows, I've had a long history of hatin' on these motherfuckers. So let it be writ in flames ten feet tall...

I Hate Animal Collective

Right off the bat, they're hateable on an obvious, superficial level. Their cringeworthy album & song titles - from the verbosely ersatz to bland single-word monikers - are almost as bad as their first-year community college art-elective album covers. Their hooks are as sharp as a pig's ass. Their stoned, smug permasmirks make me wanna punch 'em in the goddamned face.

Their music is... inoffensive. It's a meandering, granola-dude iteration of the Beach Boys' forgettably sunny pop for (and by) sampler-saavy postmodernists. Or, as one friend said, "it's a bunch of cut-rate competent musicians fucking around with delay pedals." Either way, it's hardly the kind of music that invites intense reactions.

Which is precisely why it's so dangerous. Animal Collective are not only a symptom, but an enabler of a contemporary American youth culture that is vapidly hedonist, politically uninterested, and libidinally solipsistic. AC's oeuvre at once reflects and amplifies these revolting traits: their music is kindergarten-teacher chipper, their voices like an animated musical, their subject matter twee and nonsensical. (I'm repeating myself there.) I don't begrudge any band born of the Bush era the urge to retreat from reality (at least a little), but AC have made careers out of a near-psychotic infantile escapism. Following in the footsteps of their forebear Brian Wilson, they're not just offering tuneful respite - they've dropped acid and buried their heads in the sandbox.

But whereas Wilson's contemporaries captured the dynamic & tumultuous zeitgeist in anthemic melodies, a dismaying number of AC's fellow travelers are echoing their chirpy, saccharine nonsense and childish self-indulgence. This could be a result of indie neutering itself of its anger, in an astigmatic move to distance itself from the truly dangerous anger of jingoists & imperialists following 9/11. It could also be that scores of bandwagon-jumpers attempted (and are still attempting) to follow the template for "success" in a Web 2.0 world that AC helped construct.

But either way, we're stuck with this ramshackle sonic sugar-rush by politically glaucomal, narcissistic man-children. If a band is going to drag a whole generation this far up their own ass, they could at least write a memorable tune to whistle as we plough through the shit.

(*) - Zone Styx mentions considering hip-hop as his hate-object du jour. Just the other day, I was having a conversation about how hip-hop could be to blame for the dismally regressive state of music as a whole - but that, clearly, is a big fish better fried at another time. For now, suffice it to say: hip-hop and hauntology share a specific kind of culpability...

(**) - I often think that the best move of Kevin Shields' career has been, despite the incessant pleas from his fanbase, not to release the eternally in-progress follow-up to Loveless.

Procrasturbating

Upon further reflection... during a recession, a gesture far more revolutionary, defiant, and indeed practical than burning legal tender would be to print/draw/construct bills of original design without prescribed value. Blank cheques, born of an artist's hand, that can be denominated in exchange, labour, or user value as the transaction demands. A bank built on the corner of artistic endeavor and financial flexibility.



Bit of a strange one last night. Had a dream I was visiting my sister's new house, which looked uncannily like an abandoned psych ward where I worked on a film shoot last year. I was grateful to come in from the snow outside, and even more pleased to see some familiar faces from Halifax - among whom, unaccountably, were at least two members of the Black Lips. The room was festooned in typical retro-mod bobo claptrap - plastic lamps, puke orange rugs, and such. There were also various vintage instruments hung about the walls, familiar in their form & function but disfigured like inanimate victims of Chernobyl. I pulled down what appeared to be a 3/4-scale Fender Jaguar hand-crafted by a drunk with a glass eye; the whammy bar was in an odd position that required the instrument to be played more like a dan bau zither, but it produced the crystalline, swooning drones of a lap-steel.

A voice in back of my head complimented the unrecognisable version of "Candle" I was bashing out (Thurston's part). I turned to see a gaggle of women pacing somnambulantly around the fridge. In appearance and garb, they all looked evenly split between the kind of Brazilian club furniture Lenny Kravitz might marry for a weekend and the girl in high school whose romantic overtures I totally botched translating.

I blinked hard, was back on the couch, and saw Frank Pembleton staring back from the TV, my own stress reflected in his stony expression: that suitcase ain't gonna pack itself, you lazy bastard. Coffee first, Frank. We're not barbarians around here, after all.

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: When satire doesn't go far enough...

Is This Not Ideology At Its Purest?

I gotta stop doing this: taking the bait on someone else's blog by responding to someone far over my political horizon, hijacking the comments thread and generally being a bloviating bore. But man, did I blow it this time - I raised the hackles of a 9/11 Truth evangelist. Yeah, one of these guys. And now my keyboard is paying for it in exponential wear 'n' tear.

I've never thought the narrative offered by the US government was entirely satisfactory; I'll even hazard there was actionable intelligence about the terrorist plot that was deliberately neglected by the Machiavellian vampires in PNAC. (Condi could probably back up such a claim.) But every alternate telling of the event - including though not limited to controlled demolition, squibs, stand-down orders, missiles, remote-controlled drones, and, of course, the Jews did it - is equally pockmarked by inconsistency, pseudoscience, and circumstantial evidence. Not that this dulls the fervor of the 9/11 Truth crowd, no sir! The great irony of the "Truthers" is that, as much cross-examination to which they subject the official account, they never betray the slightest doubt about their own conclusions. The last time I saw someone so brassbound of his own convictions, it was, uh... that retarded cowboy fellow who's been running the country for the past eight years.

I can't discuss the 9/11 Truth movement without hearing Slavoj Žižek's de facto motto ringing in my ears: Is that not ideology at its purest? The 9/11 Truth weltanschaaung is a meticulously fantastic, all-encompassing construction to which exceptions or contradictions only prove the rule, which in turn denies the exceptions or contradictions as being such. It's as impregnable and self-affirming as any other ideology, from Adorno's miserablist Marxism to Catholicism to Scientology. In short, it's fucking impossible to entrust with even a modicum of self-skepticism.

So why am I giving more airtime to this armchair-CSI lunacy? Well, I originally intended to use this space to continue the demagogic ping-pong match without co-opting any more of Jodi Dean's comment thread. But I'll save my breath and instead refer you to the article that kicked off this whole melee: the Biblically-long debate between Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin hosted by Alternet. Grab a cup of coffee, 'cuz it's over thirty pages long (though the fur doesn't really start flying until Part II). Almost any argument that was made at Dean's blog (or could be made here) is covered somewhere within the article, so give at least a little of your time.

I'll admit my bias out of the gate: Taibbi is one of the most thorough and viciously funny journalists on the beat, though his increasingly frenzied, nouveau-gonzo style reveals (as Tim Krieder noted) "a man whom coverage of national politics has driven to the brink of utter and irredeemable loathing of mankind." But I also have to give Griffin his due: he presented himself as diplomatic, patient, and attentive, ditching histrionics for investigative scrutiny. This is in stark contrast to the usual spittle-hail and witch-hunt hysterics through which Truthers deliver their arguments. Perhaps the 9/11 Truth community might make more headway if their massaged their PR a bit. The hectoring tone, juvenile monitions to "wake the fuck up!", and smug sighing over having to thanklessly point out "the blindingly obvious" aren't exactly endearing.

The mistake Truthers make is like confusing Bush with Batman: the forensic microscopy and fanciful dot-connecting ignores the complete picture. The day the WTC was destroyed, that very afternoon, I was already more terrified about what Bush's response would be. I'll borrow some words from Žižek to avoid sounding monstrously callous:

The U.S. just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York snipers and gang rapes, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

The attacks were like punching a gorilla in the nose: an irrationally bold gesture of defiance that would temporarily stun the beast, but then set its blood to boil. Run to the hills, motherfuckers.

Bringing this back to my initial point on Jodi Dean's blog, it's not as though any of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories need be proven true to indict the Bush (and Blair) administrations for their heinous offenses. The whole of the American & British cabinets could be dragged into the Hague right now and receive the same charge dispensed at the Nuremberg Trials: planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace. This is without considering the plethora of other disgusting transgressions that are sufficiently well-documented that I needn't recount them all here.

The question might become one of priorities: do we want BushCo. punished for being the amoral, imperialist hegemons they are, or do we want to bicker endlessly over incomplete and corrupt evidence? From a legal standpoint, a 9/11 Truth prosecution of the Bush Administration is unfeasible: in the Taibbi/Griffin article, Griffin's courtroom analogy posits himself as a defense attorney, who needs only establish the shadow of a doubt, which the official 9/11 narrative is certainly not beyond. But then neither is the 9/11 Truth version of the event.

Dismayingly, I suspect the real question at the root of this interminably dull argument is: what do we care about more, 2751 dead in New York City, or (as of today) 4180 Americans, 314 other coalition members, and an estimated 1,273,378 Iraqis? Do we care more about our fellow middle-class Starbucks customers, or a bunch of gun-toting pseudo-barbarians fighting over a beige wasteland? Are we more disturbed by a traumatic schism in our quotidian Western comfort, which we must fill with whatever fragmented fantasy we can possibly cobble together from material scraps, or by an ongoing, slow-burning slaughter of colossal scale that nonetheless is out of our empathic view?

I don't particularly want the answer to those questions - but then, that's probably exactly what a 9/11 Truther would've said about me anyway.

Pop the cork and join the chorus!

Well, never have my own words tasted so succulent. As I was writing about unwarranted hostility and being "in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood," the Lehman Brothers financial-services firm filed for the biggest bankruptcy in American history - and the crowd goes wild! Now the word is that the US gub'mint is about to pull AIG off the ledge and wrap it in an $85 billion security blanket to avoid an immediate sequel. I suppose one $691 billion giant biting the dust will have to do for our September dose of schadenfreude. I wonder if, once I roll my wagon eastward at year's end, I won't be followed by hordes of refugee financiers and carpetbaggers flying the flag of F.I.L.T.H. - "failed in London, try Hong Kong."

As good a sarcastic chuckle as this has been, there is a shadow cast across our little anti-capital celebration, as a grim spectre was invoked on the campaign trail. Eric Rauchway knows the seance:

Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this week, John McCain reassured us, "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct. 25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, "The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

As Ezra Klein duly elaborated, "This is a guy who has said, proudly, 'I'm always for less regulation' and ...who, three years ago, wanted to turn Social Security over to Wall Street." And should you, even for a moment, find yourself deaf to the echo of Hoover, I'd point you in the direction of Lenin's Tomb for a swift reminder: "This crisis is rooted in the fundamentals."

Anyway, my modest goal for the week is to make a mix of musical misanthropy before I'm back off to Berlin. Currently in the capital is an art exhibition called Exactitudes, "a taxonomy-in-progress of street style," according to Momus. In spite of my sartorial ineptitude, I actually fit into one of the project's tidy tribal pigeonholes - archetype #19, Vagabonds, within which I am frighteningly similar to this guy. Were he wearing a John Lennon mask, he'd be a friggin' dead-ringer. Ignoring that whittling the breadth of the human guise to 96 "tribes" is still woefully insufficient (I know about three people who could conceivably be found in the Exactitudes chart), I'm a little disturbed by how the project casts appearance as an elected self-symbolisation, not as a product of circumstance & lifestyle. As though everyone from the religious devout to trustafarians, from yuppies to genuine street people, put equal consideration & effort into how they present themselves - and have access to the same kinds of tools & accessories to sculpt their exteriors. This looks awfully like more condescending poorism, though since it's billed as an "art exhibition" instead of a glossy multipage advert, I doubt it'll ignite the appropriate level of ire.

End On End

That I'm posting this four days post-facto only extends my reputation as a master of delayed reaction (my excuse comes later), but as soon as I thought the discussion had ground to a halt, K-Punk enters the fray to heap disdain upon disdain upon disdain upon the Adbusters anti-hipster "Jeremiad." More specifically, Mark slaps around Momus' defense of the amoebic subculture, taking particular note (as I did) of Momus' seconding ex-Vice-roi Gavin McInnes' schoolyard dismissal of hipsters' critics ("chubby bloggers who... are just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable"). However, Mark rather oddly misreads this remark, proclaiming

I would say the opposite: the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries.

Uh... well, yes, that is precisely the problem with hipsters, no argument there, but this in fact is in firm agreement with McInnes' assessment of anti-hipster sentiment. Minus the "chubby blogger" snipe, of course.

But this puzzling misstep aside, Mark gets it absolutely right and cuts to the chase far quicker than I did: that such blasé hedonism & luxuriant narcissism can't possibly produce any worthwhile art. "The very seamlessness," Mark writes, "of these unalienated, guilt-free lives leaves no material for sublimation." Which, again, would put us in agreement with McInnes: yes, we are angry with these kids for getting wasted, having fun, and being fashionable because their vapid bacchanalia will give birth to sweet fuck all.

The Gavin McInnes' quote presupposes that resentment against the Last Boys and Girls is somehow illegitimate. But it strikes me as a classic case of good resentment - precisely the kind of resentment that, unlike the hipster's studied weltschmerz, could motivate the production of interesting art and culture.

That is the 24-karat nugget of Mark's piece: "When youth culture was interesting it was because of alienation, not pleasure-seeking." Lack, want, frustration, anger, resentment - these are the tools of anyone seriously intent on ripping open a seam and seeing what spills out.

Douglas Haddow's article was hardly a groundbreaking bit of sociocultural journalism. It was badly written, researched worse, and (by the twist-ending switch from third- to first-person) percolating with histrionic self-loathing. But the sensational headline - "The Dead End of Western Civilization" - is a succinctly perfect damning of hipsterism's artistic sterility. So, being fairly confident that we can write off hipsterism as a source of sublimation, where do we turn? Mark suggests that "Metal, Goth and even, God help us, Emo, are still animated and enervated by that sense of abandonment and maladjustment." I'd add Punk to that list, though I'd consider this list a registry of foregone opportunities. Any revolutionary potential these subcultures once possessed has long since ossified into stylistic orthodoxies as uninnovative as hipsterism's gluttonous nihilism. Even Emo, by a decade the baby of the subcultures, has become so conservatively defined that it can be legally targeted with laser-accuracy by culture-warriors in the Duma. Absent the presence of some supermassive oppositional Other, what is rebelled against becomes smaller and more localised, eventually winnowing subcultures into sectarian bickering ("Death to false metal," East Coast/West Coast, etc.). The revolutionary impetus is replaced by codifying an aesthetic.

A friend who's been following the above furor agreed that the debate too often turned towards specific signifiers, accessories, fashions - a tunnel-vision that not only misses the bigger point, but gets really dull very quickly. In declarative all-caps, my friend wrote to me, "ANY FUTURE CONVERSATION MUST BE ABOUT THE THINGS WHICH ARE AT STAKE." This is the best tactic, as it keeps to focus above petty symbols and stylistic bias. No taxonomic nitpicking, no trend-oriented trainspotting. The revolution will not be symbolised.

"If you're out there, and you're beautiful, maybe you're cute... there's more of us ugly motherfuckers than you."
~Frank Zappa

Non-sequitorial Postscript: David Berman of the Silver Jews perfects the art of talking too much about your own art and makes the curious claim that he titled his new album What Is Not But Could Be If because "the language that looks really plain on the album is actually completely Google-pure." You sure about that, Dave?

Hip Is Not a Four-Letter Word (But Boho Is)

Well, about ten days have passed since the initial publication of the infamous Adbusters article; this lapse, translated from real-time, equals about 2.3 years of online-time. (Not insignificantly, this is the same ratio of Earth-time to Uranus-time.) Netizens ripped through the article like Norman Bates in a Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and I myself bore witness to about a half-dozen discussions in various bars. By now, the thematic terrain has been torn up and left as barren as the Somme - but that ain't gonna stop me from having one last waltz through the minefield.

Within a certain online cul-de-sac, the Adbusters article couldn't come at a better time, following a sudden flush of posts about how at-least-middle-class "creatives" have franchised a butterknife-dull brand of bohemianism. Both Simon Reynolds and Phillip Sherburne connected the dots between this nuevo-cosmo sprawl and the HUAC-like hysteria over hipsterism by way of one Mr. Nick Currie.

Momus... with his nomadic lifestyle and restlessly mobile aesthetic, his Japanophilia and his privileging of the faux/unrooted/"superflat", was very much a pioneer, an early settler on this post-geographical "terrain".

His CV bullet-pointed with such po-mo touchstones as Shibuya-kei, Wired.com, and Vice Magazine, few are better qualified than Momus to comment on all things au current. Indeed, his response did not disappoint, lambasting the article's theatrical tone ("Haddow comes over all purple, all 6th form apocalyptic") and its ankle-deep cultural analysis ("Haddow fails to get down to the serious business of art criticsm"). But the most fascinating moment of Momus' rebuttal is when he agrees

with my former boss at Vice, Gavin McInnes, when he says that disdain of hip subculture tends to come from "chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid", people who are "just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable".

This accord, between the dialectical and juvenile fronts against anti-hipsterism, is key in understanding anti-anti-hipsterism. (If there's such thing as pro-hipsterism, it's a better-kept secret than Merchandise 7X.) Momus has made a career of being the token outsider, an arch-Orientalist in a mobile bubble; meanwhile, McInnes (an anti-immigration activist with a history of racist outbursts) did more to define the parameters of irony in indie culture than anyone since Stephen Malkmus. In short, they are both Other-ers of the first order.

In spite of the avant-garde associations with the word, Hip rarely debuts any new ideas these days. (We'll come back to the this.) Instead, it traffics almost exclusively in irony, manifested typically as either hostile mockery, or deconstructive play-acting. Either way, the relationships created are oppositional, across lines of generation, gender, class, and race. But there's nothing ideological about these oppositional positions. Take everyone's favourite polyglot performer, Mathangi "M.I.A." Arulpragasam, for example. She named her debut after her Tamil Tiger father's nom-de-guerre, and her current single's chorus is a bald endorsement of armed robbery. She's posed herself as the voice of the developing world's vengeful animus - at least to the extent that everyone else agreed upon her role as such. Yet this former St. Martin's College film student panders to Western pop-cultural hegemony by relying heavily indie-orthodox samples (the Clash, the Pixies, etc.); she likewise denies supporting violence under any circumstance. Indeed, this is already several years after Robert Christgau succinctly argued against expecting a coherent political agenda, much less a revolutionary one, from a pop star - and yet his reasoning demands that the audience be possessed of a normative psychopathy:

The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda...

Just images. See? Nothing to get frazzled over. Naturally, that a signifier is hollow to some doesn't mean that it's universally null & void. Momus himself made this point in his riposte to Adbusters:

I'm sure that somewhere, as we speak, a Shining Path Maoist is being sold a Shining Path Maoist t-shirt via AdSense, thanks to a link between Shining Path Maoist keywords and Shining Path Maoist products being marketed in his area. This does not, however, invalidate the politics or philosophy of Shining Path Maoism. It just gives him the chance to proclaim what he believes in via a t-shirt, should he so desire.

By extension, anyone might buy a copy of Kala not because it's got a good beat, but because they want to express their hatred of Sinhalese Buddhists over the stereo at a house party. Call it Che Shirt Syndrome: as commodified and mediated by capital, all symbols are sold to one of two customers - either the True Believer, or the cultural scavenger who can afford such whimsically purposeless purchases.

That is, to either the ideologue, or the bourgeois hipster.

A twentysomething in a Che shirt may qualify themselves as a revolutionary Marxist, but until they grab an AK, storm the streets of São Paulo, and fight to nationalise Brazil's $517 billion industrial sector, then the symbol remains unfulfilled, necessarily empty. The now-intrinsic vacuity of bohemianism is a consequence of it being reduced to a spin-cycle of pop symbolic flotsam with a shrinking circumference. (The current sample-rate of the nostalgia feedback loop is down to a mere five years.) Very telling is that many discussions, both online and off, of the Adbusters article were petty turf wars over specific objects like the fixed-gear bike. I've no doubt that the fixed-gear bike is of great importance to anarchosyndicalist eco-activists, but if their only place in the conversation is as a rhetorical prop and not a participant, of what use is the bike beyond a stylish accessory? If artifice is its own reward, then there's no argument to be had. But the pretense that there's a bigger point has little to recommend it.

This debate is by no means new, and hipsters have been subject to ridicule by their own for decades. One Brooklyn Vegan commenter cited Marcel Duchamp's 1913 Armory Show as an early example of such infighting (though it was Wallace Stevens, not William Carlos Willams, who played Duchamp's nemesis). There's also been an implacable parade of slumming rich kids, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker up through Lou Reed to Lee Ranaldo and Gerard Cosloy. However, a crucial (if arguable) distinction between the hipoisie of generations past and now is that, before, some genuine sacrifice of comfort & entitlement was required to live down on the street - which isn't to deny that it's always been true that, "if you called your dad, he could stop it all." But there now exists an infrastructure, social and physical, to comfortably accomodate any & all who can afford to exile themselves from the straight world. And it's that word - comfort - which presents the biggest problem: its presence is anathema to art. As Leslie Feist recently put it:

Comfort is comfortable - there is no need to circumnavigate. Once you stretch your mind out to get around something, as it pulls apart, you see stuff in the cracks - things you wouldn't glimpse otherwise.

Contemporary boho inharmony has apparent little to do with dialectical self-critique. Rather, it's the sound of a corrosive boredom, of deracinated dilettantes whose ennui has metastasised into cannibalism. Make no mistake, their complaints emanate from the elevated strata of society. Whenever Pitchfork is derided as a Cliff Notes of Cool for dumb kids in Des Moines, or when Momus describes "the general population, which schlepps about in jeans and listens to shapeless, floppy music and sleepwalks through shapeless, floppy jobs" - there is no disguising the sneering, priggish contempt for the lower & working classes. I'd almost admire the gall with which Momus lets the cat out of the bag, comparing hipsters to "chivalric aristocrats," were he not so astonishingly smug and condescending.

Which brings us full-circle to the debate about minimal techno. What struck me as the key phrase at the time was this observation by Owen Hatherly:

One often got the sense... that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake.

In light of conversations since, this would be the keystone of anti-hipster sentiment: above and beyond all else, hipsters are inconsequential and ineffectual. Momus (again) has a point in remarking that "maybe this 'smashing' [of conventions] has always been mostly gestural," but wouldn't it be better if a gesture were revolutionary as opposed to self-consciously empty? Shouldn't there be a more noble goal than staying one step ahead of the advertising agencies by ceaselessly subdividing into smaller & smaller subcultural cliques? Or does "what's at stake" have be of greater urgency than something gestural? Does the cold hand of actual catastrophe have to slap us across the face before we become bold? Because, right now, there's a whole lotta standing around and talking shit behind each other's backs - which is hardly the recipe for refinement, let alone revolution. "When," Christopher Hitchens once wrote, "a precious and irreplaceable word like 'irony' has become a lazy synonym for 'anomie,' there is scant room for originality."

Fasci(oni)sta

A couple of days ago, the popular expat-in-the-Orient blog 不良外人 (a.k.a. Furyogaijin, a.k.a. Fucked Foreigner) excavated a talkshow excerpt of military history enthusiasts dressed in Nazi regalia. As the doe-eyed, helium-voiced hobbyist insists his fetish is pure fashion, a panel of international Japanese residents rips into him for being so blind to the substance behind the symbols. The end of the clip is particularly surreal: one of the exiting hobbyists taunts the audience by snapping off a quick sieg-heil salute (disproving his claimed ignorance), prompting an enraged Frenchman to spring from his seat with intent of something stronger than a verbal reprimand. After he's physically dragged back to his chair, a German (!) panelist admonishes the Frenchman for overreacting, saying, "It's just a symbol, it's okay!"

Now, following their defeat, both Germany and Japan were culturally reindoctrinated and forced into schizoaffective reconstruction by a foreign occupier. The significant difference is that, in Germany, the reindoctrination became the keystone of domestic policy; Japan, on the other hand, has remained at best unrepentant, at worst revisionist with regard to its crimes during WWII. Yet, in spite of these opposite approaches to ingesting (or not) history, hard-right & fascist movements persist in both nations in apparently equal measure. It's harder to track the prevalence of hardcore nationalist & xenophobic group in Japan, if only because there are no "hate crimes" from which to derive statistics. But Japanese fascists (uyoku dantai) are boisterous and blustering enough that they'd needn't turn to violence to influence the nation's internal dialogue. Meanwhile, their German counterparts appear to have been gaining ground with each year since reunification: not only are racists attacks reaching record numbers (to the point of becoming a permenant fixture of quotidian life in some parts of Germany), but neo-Nazis are a growing presence in legitimately-elected governing bodies.

A climate of general intercultural ignorance in both countries works very much in favour of these fascists - but, of course, intercultural ignorance is the stock-in-trade of xenophobes worldwide. But if forced to pick between Germany and Japan the country with the greater potential for a racially harmonious future, I'd say: Japan. This is not to excuse the obvious extant problems (not the least of which are the racist cops), especially in light of Japan's minuscule foreign population (approx. 1.6%) and its extensive history of deliberate isolationism. But Japanese nationalists aren't even the looniest goons in the neighbourhood. The irony is that Japan's lack of contrition for its wartime acts has produced a particularly spineless, neutered stripe of nationalism. Not facing the active popular & institutional opposition that, say, the NPD does means that the uyoku dantai are never forced to exercise any real conviction in the face of adversity. It's the same brand of laziness afforded to Manchester United or NY Yankees fans: when there's no serious opposition, nothing need be sacrificed to the cause. On the other hand, German fascists, racists, and nationalists are as opposed a constituency as it's possible to be (without resorting to crimes against humanity, that is) - and still they persist with psychotically deep-seated defiance and dangerous dedication.

(Also, Japanese fascists are pussies. Seriously. I've had my picture taken striking goofy poses next to them, which earned me a bunch of red-faced rhetoric over the lance-voix but nothing more. It was also two years in Japan before I'd met a foreigner who'd been physically attacked simply because they were foreign - as opposed to five days in Germany. But would I pull the same goading pranksterism on Deutsche skinheads? Hell no.)

There's a grim punchline to all this. Japan is likely the only country where someone strutting around dressed as an SS officer could (maybe) convincingly argue that they're doing so apolitically - not that I'd excuse it. As po-mo manifest, Japan specializes in deconstructing, (mis)appropriating, and refracting symbols. (This is doubtless one reason for the anemic nature of its "hardcore" nationalism: the icons & figureheads of imperial Japan have seen their substance either rotted or gutted.) While European cultures similarly disbelieve in a symbol carrying any innate power, there's a reinvestment in reappropriated symbols here that gives them (often terrible) new life and new meaning. Thus, witness the German neo-Nazi incorporation of the Japanese imperial flag into its design arsenal (skip to the 3:48 mark for a full view). Of course, this is hardly a huge twist, though even if it were strange, strange bedfellows are scarcely so strange under closer scrutiny. I wonder what Momus would make of this...

Speaking of whom, I realize that a full week has already passed since the Adbusters bourgeois-boho flamewar came and went like a five-alarm fire in a toilet-paper factory, but I've been slowly tacking away at some kind of a thoughtful response. Extend your attention spans, and your patience will be rewarded, my friends.

* * *

Elsewhere online, Alan "I Started A Joke" McGee waited out the initial wave MBV-mania before reiterating his too-cool-for-shoegaze contempt for Kevin Shields & Co. In a MySpace bulletin, McGee wrote:

THE NEW MOGWAI ALBUM THE HAWK IS HOWLING VERSUS THE ''NOSTALGIC CABARET'' OF MBV LIVE IN 2008

Finally got time to listen to it and it's even better than the last two Mogwai albums which to me have both been wonderful... Their [sic] is a beautiful irony that the ''nostalgic cabaret'' that is my bloody valentine are throwing at people in 2008 gets critical acclaim in the easily pleased UK press with MBV still playing the exact same set they did 20 years ago and the only trick Kevin Shields has anymore in 2008 is actual volume and double extra pa to numb you and zero new songs.

Hear the new Mogwai record it's beautiful.Mogwai are 2008 My bloody valentine were a joke signing in 1991 maybe they got better..

Maybe as a token of gratitude, Mogwai can hire McGee a proofreader. Nevermind that to hail the genius of Mogwai in 2008 is as bold & iconoclastic as to do the same for, say, Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988. This flailing contrarianism is to be expected of an aging, conservative rockist. Given that, in signing Oasis, McGee may have single-handedly launched the reactionary atavism of Britpop; in that regard, it makes sense that he'd hate something as blurrily sublime and genre-obscuring as Loveless (to say nothing of the macho posturing that he sank a quarter-million quid into a "joke"). I'd even be willing to take him at his word, had he not allowed himself the pusillanimous emergency exit, "Maybe they got better..."

* * *

So it's 88 Boadrum day. I don't actually care, and not for the knee-jerk anti-appropriative reason. Honestly, the Boredoms fuckin' bore me these days - which sounds silly, since they've been doing the same orthodox drum-circle schtick for the better part of a decade now. But please, examine Exhibit A, followed by Exhibit B and tell me that Seiichi Yamamoto's meteoric guitar doesn't make all the difference.