Archive for August 2007

I used to say I was born in the wrong century. The way overly dramatic kids claim to be old souls living in the present day, I was convinced I was secretly an impressionist painter, meant more for turn of the century’s demi-monde opulence rather than today’s world of animators, illustrators, and monster movie artists. I didn’t go to art school. I don’t know all the proper techniques. I learned colour theory by doing graffiti, but the story of the graffiti-artist-turned-fine-art-painted has been played out since the mid-’80s. My own life seemed to be working against me. I was convinced I should have been born in 1850.

Then I realized that I was approaching everything wrong. I live in Hollywood, this century’s den of inequity and excess. I have eccentric colourful friends that rival the models of Degas and Renoir, I spend nights at Los Angeles bars that could rival those painted by Monet, and as this is 2007 I have access to neon pink and hot orange that I imagine even Van Gogh wouldn’t know how to utilize. I am a contemporary painter interested in historic themes. There isn’t anything wrong with that. I don’t have any art school loans to pay back. I primarily paint women because I’m tremendously influenced by Klimt – and really focused on beauty.

Joshua Petker
http://www.joshuapetker.com/
(from this month’s Juxtapoz Sept 07 n 80)

This reminds me that the people of the ancient world were physically tinier than we are.

Source

Richard Morgan, from Black Man (UK) /Th1rte3n (US) (Amazon) pages 87-90:

‘So,’ he said..’if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?’

‘Variant thirteen?’ Jeff have him the crooked grin again. ‘Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood’.

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.’

‘You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there either.’

‘So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and super-virility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which is the end is suicide, just slower and bit more fucking fun.’

‘I thought they criminalized that stuff.’

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Oh, yeah and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.’

‘I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk show genetics, Jeff.’

‘Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a singly social biologist who doesn’t count alpha male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood’ – the grin again – ‘so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas want to be soldiers, because, hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes’ – and Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody – ‘they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking, the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep and breath hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with the. See, a feminized open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.’

‘I didn’t ask for a class on the secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen’.

‘Yeah, getting there.’ Jeff took another chunk of his arrack. ‘See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down there where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked and shut down with a halfway decent black market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a big-hearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship programme at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us with knowing it. […] You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.’

‘Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson’.

‘They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.’

‘I know.’

‘Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?’

‘Variant thirteen?’

‘Yeah, variant thirteen. Pre-civilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.’

‘Now you you sound like the feeds.’

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. ‘Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.’

‘I fail to see,’ said Norton acidly, ‘how that gives us back our manhood.’

‘That’s because you live in New York.’
Norton snorted and drained his arrack. His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done.

‘I’m serious, Tom. You think secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?’

‘Among other things, yeah, it was.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside of quantum specialists really understands, Co-Operation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table is pointing towards a future so feminized it’s just downright unAmerican.

Digital Bin Laden by Timothy Comeau

The current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: ‘Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam “fundamentalist” except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’ Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘original thought’ and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist ‘return to tradition’ is really a new invention.

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be understood, then, not a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. [Shah’s Iran, Attaturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt] ‘If modern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period,’ Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism.’ Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory – postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes ‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western … Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’ Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense ‘anti-Western’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution. (Hardt & Negri, Empire [2000] p. 148-149)

White Jesus amongst the White Aboriginals (from the Book of Mormon)

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movement against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long US tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the ‘uncivilized’ world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous ere, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem. […]

The ‘traditional family’ that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street USA at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The ‘return to the traditional family’ of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order. (Hardt & Negri, Empire pages147-48)

From William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003):

‘How do you think we’ll look,’ Bigend asks, ‘to the future?’
[…]
‘They won’t think of us,’ Cayce says … ‘Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.’
‘I think they’ll hate us,’ says Helena.
‘Souls,’ repeats Bignend. […] ‘Souls?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, on in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.’
‘Do we have a past then?’ Stonestreet asks.
‘History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,’ Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. ‘Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.’
‘The future is there,’ Cayce hers herself say, ‘looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.’
‘You sound oracular.’
‘I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.’ (pages 57-59)

[…]

‘Have you seen the guerrilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [Star Wars Ep I] […] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films. Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s a though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else. (page 70)

From Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918):

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

From my Michael Jackson Project image (2003):

I want this painting to be in the AGO in 2116. I want kids on art school trips at the gallery to be bored while the underpaid instructor explains that a hundred years ago there lived this freak who commissioned a painting of himself surrounded by cherubs. She will say, ‘He had delusions of godlihood.’ Maybe she’ll even use big words with the kids, and say, ‘He aspired to an apotheosis in both physical and the musical forms’.Some might be interested, and they will go home and download Billy Jean and Thriller and watch the quaint 20th Century music videos and think, Thank God I didn’t live back then!

As interested as we are in mad Caligula, or the incestuous Lord Byron, most will go to their soy milk and cookies and not give a shit.