Friday, September 08, 2006

"I survived. Mum took me to my Gran and Auntie in a village near Hamburg. I've been clean for 18 months. It frightens me to think of Detlev. I often think of him. I'd like to give him some of my strength, and help him. But first I need the strength myself."

Christiane speaks from beyond the grave, over an image of the countryside in winter. At the end of Christiane F we see her in a toilet cubicle injecting herself for the last time before her head slides down the tiles and out of frame. The scene fades and reopens over snow-covered fields. The recovery is moving because it comes out of nowhere and is in no sense already implicit in the events we have seen or the psychology of the characters. It's a sort of millennial redemption fantasy, moving because we know in real life, as presented on screen, it could never have happened. What is more moving than a beautiful untruth?

"And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."

(Luke 23, 42-43)

There is a complete break between the film and its coda, the same inapprehensible gap as between the squalid earthly life of the thief and his future in heaven. I find this moment of fantasy the only moving part of Christiane F. As for the rest of it, its mission is to demystify addiction, to force it to strip, in a way which leads to nothing in the end but bafflement.

In Charles Bukowski's short story Something About a Viet Cong Flag, the sadness of the washed-up drifter protagonist is conveyed all the more affectingly by describing what could never have happened, the fulfillment of his meanest hopes.

"Red pulled his switchblade and hit the button. The blade was flat across her nose, pressed it down.
'How do you think you'd look without a nose?'
She didn't answer.
'I'll slice it off.' He grinned.
'Listen,' said the guy with the flag, 'you can't get away with this.'
'Come on, girly,' said Red, pushing her towards the rocks

"... Red was fucking Sally. Leo watched. It seemed endless. Red went on and on.

"... There was a patch of shade and Sally sat between them.
'You know, though...' she said.
'What?'
'It wasn't so bad. On a strictly sexual basis, I mean. He really put it to me. On a strictly sexual basis it was quite something.'
'What?' said Dale.
'I mean, morally, I hate him. The son of a bitch should be shot. He's a dog. A pig. But on a strictly sexual basis it was something...'"

Or compare John Norman's chronicles of Gor, which so many intelligent people find endearing. They bring to mind the inadequacy and sadness which adults feel if children are unmoved by attempts to frighten them. The slave-women have names like Audrey and Barbara.

"'I will try to please you,' she said.
'In Port Kar,' I said, 'a girl who is not pleasing is not unoften bound hand and foot, and thrown naked, as garbage, to the urts in the canals.'
'I will try to be pleasing,' she smiled."

from Beasts of Gor, pg. 440

Suburban loneliness is powerfully conveyed by John Norman's long elaborations of its compensating dream. In the same way, Bukowski, in stories like Rape!, Rape! and The Fuck Machine describes the sordidness of socially-constrained fantasy and its secret yearning for love.

"Yes I like being raped. I knew you were following me. I was hoping. When I got on the elevator without you, I thought you had lost your nerve. I've only been raped once before. It's hard for a beautiful woman to get a man. Everybody thinks she's unaccessible. It's hell."

from Tales of Ordinary Madness

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Pol Pot on the dialectic

"Everything is interrelated. This means that all things always have influence on one another. It further means that nothing can exist by itself and has never existed by itself. Observe activities in our revolution or problems outside of the revolution. They are all in the domain of this law.

"Example: In the situation of a person who has injured a buffalo's leg. We must analyze. If we do not, the buffalo will be put in the stable and the next morning it will be let out to pasture. We must ask if the child or the old man who tends the animal injured it, or who else did; and if it was done, why? Was it unintentional, or was it to oppose the cooperative. Look for a person who has something to do with this matter, the person who tends the animal and the places where he tended the animal in order to find out if anyone other than the cowherd himself could have injured the animal. The cowherd, what composition is he, what class stand, what political stand, which milieu is his stand in contact with? If the cowherd did not injure the animal, ask him if anyone came to the place where the animal was, etc. We follow up. Following up is a measure. If we cannot find out in one or two days, we will find out in three or four days.

"A skinny cow is handled similarly. We must find out what is wrong with it. Why is it skinny, what material reason, what reason of consciousness? We raise this matter in order to illustrate the law of dialectical materialism in order to accustom our analyses to follow this law."

from Sharpen the Consciousness of the Proletarian Class to be as Keen and Strong as Possible (1976), translated and reprinted in Cambodia 1975 - 1978, ed. Karl D. Jackson

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Sonic Youth (what was it anyway)

I remember as a student walking through a sun-bleached park in London and having just bought a tape cassette of Dirty and it having made no great impression, when suddenly the imstrumental section of either Sugar Kane or Teresa's Sound World rolled wondrously into my mind out of what seemed like nowhere, and Sonic Youth's music seemed utterly vital and transforming and I rushed back to my bedroom and listened to the whole album through. I remember queuing up at 08.30 outside HMV to be the first to buy Experimental Jet Set, half-worried in case it sold out - of course I was the only person in the queue. To my dismay the assistant in HMV told me that although it had been delivered, they probably wouldn't start unpacking it until after lunch. I came back in the afternoon and it still wasn't on the shelf. But anyway.

The first thing that annoyed me about Experimental Jet Set was the quote on the back cover - Once the music leaves your head it's already compromised - surely the whole problem with commodification is that it renders one's inmost thought compromised from the outset - the quote seemed like a sly way of dismissing the fact and of excusing what I feared might be a shabby compromise. Added to which I felt irritated by the artful imitation of shaky handwriting on the back cover as if the "writer" were too wasted to form a straight line on the "D", say. But the main reason for hating it was Self-Obsessed and Sexxee, Waist, and all the other songs by Thurston on the album. His obsession with strung-out teens had its full flowering on Psychic Hearts, but the worst of it began here along with the even more tedious male voyeur figure, who narrates both the above. There is something eerie and (as the ads say) wonderfully satisfying about someone - especially an attractive girl - becoming frail and wasted and gradually sinking into oblivion*, and it's a subject that Royal Trux approach with compassion and insight on Cut You Loose. But there's something nauseating about the way Moore foregrounds his voyeurism as if that alone were a sufficient self-condemnation, and something not fascinated enough about his star-struck observer. The thing I rather dislike about Christiane F is the journalistic distance the camera keeps from its subject - it's extraordinary how uncompromised the eye of the director seems to be by the attractions of his subject. Christiane has sex or shoots up before the camera and the camera watches like a waiting paramedic or a half-comprehending bystander. Although doubtless the product of great directorial tact, it's unsatisfactory somehow. Of course Moore's persona of a leering voyeur is no artistic solution either. Someone who gets it exactly right (aside from the Trux) is Paul Morrissey*** in his Trilogy and in particular in his silent short films All Aboard the Dreamland Choo Choo and Like Sleep, both available on the Flesh/Trash/Heat box set. In the first film a young man draws a Violet Wand along his body before stabbing himself in the thigh with an engraving tool; in the second a black couple inject themselves - with an old-fashioned dropper - leaving a thin trail of blood along each arm. Both films are about 10 minutes long but the action in each is extremely slow. The camera is clearly fascinated by what it sees - not only by the rituals of self-harm or addiction, but by everything in the frame, by the light and by the surface of objects. Morrissey's slow, patient observation, his fascination with the act of viewing, be it a rumpled sheet or a line of blood, gives his work not only a critical distance, but the capacity for pity. The truest compassion has its origin in the material, in the objective gaze. Compare Hippocrates, who writes in On The Sacred Disease,

"Such as are habituated to their disease have a presentiment when an attack is imminent, and run away from men, home, if their house be near, if not, to the most deserted spot, where the fewest people will see the fall, and immediately hide their heads. This is the result of shame at their malady, and not, as many hold, of fear of the divine. Young children at first fall anywhere, because they are unfamiliar with the disease; but when they have suffered several attacks, on having the presentiment they run to their mothers, or to somebody they know very well, through fear and terror at what they are suffering, since they do not yet know what shame is." (trans. WHS Jones, Loeb Vol 2)

Hippocrates wants to be among the diseased, he observes their condition and their suffering with the same rapt interest and reserved care as Morrissey exhibits in his films.

*Compare the aimiable sadism with which an anaesthetist tells his patient to count to ten as he injects the anaesthetic** while the nurses and ODAs stand around grinning. The patient never gets further than three.

**The milk makes them doll-like. Propofol is the anaesthetic of choice and the beautiful thing is that it looks exactly like milk, not surprising as it comes as 1% propofol in a soya emulsion.

***Morrissey thinks Christiane F is an excellent film. I think Kurt Cobain did too.

Despite their reputation as experimentalists, Sonic Youth have always preferred to work with traditional song structures - sweet, repetitive melodies held in conformist alignment by Steve Shelley's slick and unscary percussion. (They should never have got rid of Bob Bert!) Indeed their moments of violence and dischord serve only to accentuate the predictability of the songs, which stand out from the background noise, edge-enhanced and sentimentalised. And the rebarbative elements are in any case no more than cool-sounding effects, kids making a mess, chosen not for their truth value**** but on the basis of whether or not they sound good. Which is why they get dropped into the most inappropriate contexts (Diamond Sea) or turn silly (Becuz). Milton Babbitt draws a distinction between "music", the work of a serious composer or interpretive artist, and mere "aural pleasure", in which musical choices are made in terms of the immediate gratifications they afford the listener. Well I love Milton Babbitt and have long mooted writing him a fan letter, and this distinction is as outrageous as it is liberating. It more or less disposes of Sonic Youth's entire output and that of most other rock bands, although I maintain that Kurt Cobain in songs like Radio Friendly Unit Shifter was trying to capture something far more exact with his effects and distortions. And Washing Machine is a grand track.

****So can a musical choice have a truth value? And what is a truth value anyway?

Well it was a pity. The signature waves of ecstatic dischord - creatively exhausted by Diamond Sea and reduced to an idle jog by Sunday - lost all capacity to inspire me until they seemed merely like tame replications of a drug high. The only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it, but Sonic Youth have always preferred to stand back from the edge of temptation without ever abandoning the thought of it or refusing its terms entirely (though to be fair I've heard nothing since A Thousand Leaves, not even Goodbye 20th Century). Their studied remoteness from situations they're not really remote from (on the cheaply judgemental Skip Tracer for example) seems snotty and dishonest.

This post was inspired by the example of Carl at The Impostume and his analysis of what exactly he disliked so much about Saint Etienne. Actually I always wondered whether Saint Etienne's records weren't a satire directed at the type of people who enjoy Saint Etienne, nostalgic for a time they never lived through or a life they never had*****. Compare Teenage Riot, the worst song on Daydream Nation - street action as retro fashion show. And could there be a worse political song than Youth against Fascism? I can't believe it was recorded in earnest by these smart, well-connected New Yorkers, and though I understand the anger that made Crass record White Punks on Hope, I wouldn't have thought anti-fascism was a very worthwhile subject for parody.

*****I preferred the Generation Game with Larry Grayson.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

I love Ruggero Deodato, he's so evil












A Yanömamö girl picks lice from the hair of a man with club-fight scars

Last night I attended a focus group for Extreme Films Research and discussed House on the Edge of the Park in a group of four. The BBFC certificated copy has been cut by 11m 43s for scenes of "gross sexual violence and humiliating nudity". However the clear judgement of the focus group was that we all liked the film for its "class politics". We had each experienced something like a journey from addiction to recovery, a private shame transformed by discovering that one's debilitating preoccupations mirrored the codes and structures of capitalism. A conservative critic might frame the whole grounds for discussion in terms of the "problem of human evil", a classic non-problem from a Marxist perspective. At any rate Trotsky's view was that atrocities are more likely to take place when soldiers are fighting for a cause they know to be unjust. It may be we get up from bed and walk to work each day in the service of an unjust cause and by punctuating our lives with staged atrocities we recover something of the will to live. Films like House on the Edge of the Park were compared to a drug, or to the way the Yanömamö Indians like to brain each other with enormous clubs until they form hard welts on the surface of their heads; young men stagger around after each blow, returning for more until they finally collapse to the ground. The wonderful thing is after a few days when the mind starts to clear - one knows one has recovered enough to get back on the trip again.

Four more thoughts from Pol Pot


















If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

"Lenin" in Cambodian rhymes with quinine.

The sick are as sly as rabbits, and can swallow a whole pot of rice.

If you do not complete your task during the day, you will complete it by night.

Work is a fight: you blaze like fire and reduce tree stumps to ashes.

The two vowels of "Pol Pot" are different in Cambodian; "Pull Port" would be a vague approximation. The grotesque, fairy-tale quality of the name in English is also absent in the Cambodian, in which "Pol Pot" is - or at least was - a quite anonymous-sounding name; "Jim Jones" might be a fair translation.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Who said the revolution wasn't going to be pretty?


















The pornography of a long black skirt and what aren't actually little white ankle socks. Kim Jong Suk as a partisan.

from "Pol Pot's Little Red Book"

"There are no Sundays; there are only Mondays."

further quotations from Pol Pot will litter this blog.