REBELS ARE WE, ETC

Where are the anthropologists? The Cargo Cult of Real Income is in full flower! We need insight into this primitive, innocent society ruled by an enigmatic priest figure  
known as the C.P.A...

The overrated hit the stage
Overpaid and over here
And their idea of counter-culture's
Momma's charge account at Sears
And they're wondering why we can't connect
With the ritual of the trashed guitar
One more paltry empty gesture
The ashes of a burned out star
Yes here they come, both old and young
A contact low or high
The gathering of the tribes descending
Vultures from a caustic sky
The rotting carcass of July
An ugly sun hung out to dry
Your gorgeous hippy dreams are dying
Your frazzled brains are putrifying
Repackaged, sold and sanitized
The devil's music exorcised
You live, you die, you lie, you lie, you die
Perpetuate the lie
Just to perpetuate the lie
Yes yes yes it's the summer Autumn festival
The truly detestable
Summer Autumn Festival

AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND

We love them
We mourn for them
Unlucky boys of Red

I wish I'd gone down
Gone down with them
To where Mother Nature makes their bed

We miss them
Every night we kiss them
Their faces fixed in our heads

I wish I'd gone down
Gone down with them
To where Mother Nature makes their bed

They can't hurt you
Their style will never desert you
Because they're all safely dead

I wish I'd gone down
Gone down with them

No, it's not a scene from Sokurov's re-boot of Rollerball, it was the fantastic, phantasmic, memorial to the "tragic" Lokomotiv Yaroslavl: The living players shooting on the empty goal, the dead transmuted into sandwich boards, or hygienic pyramids, the crowds looking on the ghosts with a wistful envy -- truly we live in a golden era of permanent funerary mobilisation! The civic religion is in great health. We are so frantic in our grief we can hardly recall what it was we lost. A minor point. What Warhol ought to have said was...
in the future everyone will be dead, and therefore, politically useful, for 15 minutes!

Time's up.

PERIPETIAL REPLAY

The textual richness of the “event” which unleashed a veritable ninja-tsunami of sublime racist cliches about The Murdoch’s Guoanbu Controller, Dame Wendi Murdoch (I’m kidding, kidding! Or am I?) needs to be unpacked. Everyone agrees, I think, that its spectacular interest is high. Why?

1. The men of the clan, so focused on projecting their defensive alpha authority in the frontal mode, that is toward the camera, that they are vulnerable to attack from the periphery. This is perhaps a cognitive occupational blindness of media workers, the fatal assumption that the periphery doesn’t exist. Not only does it exist, but that is where things happen. A debordian rule: Always Look Where the Camera is Not.

2. The image-fact that The Murdoch is both in need of defense, and defensible, inevitably humanizes him. That his defender is a Chinese woman is beautifully metaphoric, something that sino-atavists are naturally not taking lightly. A subtle prismatic inflection of the master image, that is, of the Fall of Murdoch, has occurred. If it were a corporate goon slapping aside the intruder – we’d think, sure, business as usual. In that case we could perhaps with justice speak of “ninja reflexes” – but in this case it is a capitalization on an opportunity that always exists in potential, something that people versed in the languages of strategy and power should always be on the lookout for: the convertible event, the event that can be turned or crystallized. That husband and wife should be equals and peers should surprise no one, but in this case, strangely, it does. 

3. The discussion of mediated events inevitably takes on the phenomenology of the sporting event – an idiotic instant replay style of criticism that amounts to a minimal sort of aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of the move, and did it work or was it a noble failure in the accounting. Did it result in a win, etc? Did it lead in a linear way to the next circumstance recorded by the Spectacle? But there are at least Seven Beauties hidden in any mediated event, each more profound and interesting than the efficient discussion. 

NOT ALL THE FACTS ARE IN, BUT...

(How dull. Another one on spectacular grief:)

Attractive Representative of the People's Regime is shot.

Mass Grief Event ensues, naturally, spontaneously! Like is customary and usual with any state martyrdom.

Miracle Bullet -- the very one that missed us all, enshrined in bed of velvet.

Kronos Quartet commissioned to perform The Gabby Giffords Requiem for strings and auto-tune, despite the poor woman being inconveniently alive. And in a long distance relationship with an Astronaut.

Chastened Media Demagogues Of All Stripes Recognize Themselves Mirrored in Angry, Low Status Schizophrenic Language Obsessive. 

Try hard to stutter moral tales out from the bowels of the unhappy event, with little success. Invent new grammars of ever-muted outrage.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

INFORMATION IS ANODYNE. THE INFORMANT MUST BE INTERPRETED.

It is generally believed that those who have displayed the greatest incapacity in matters of logic are precisely those who proclaim themselves revolutionaries. This unjustified reproach dates from an age when almost everyone thought with a minimum of logic, with the striking exception of cretins and militants; and in the case of the latter bad faith played its part, intentionally, because it was held to be effective. But today there is no escaping the fact that intense use of the spectacle has, as we should have expected, turned most of our contemporaries into ideologues, if only in fits and starts, bits and pieces. Absence of logic, that is to say, loss of the ability to perceive immediately what is important and what is insignificant or irrelevant, what is incompatible or, inversely, what could well be complementary; all that a particular consequence implies and at the same time all that it excludes -- high doses of this disease have been intentionally injected into the population by the spectacle's anaesthetists/resuscitators. Protesters have not been any more irrational than submissive people. It is simply that in the former one sees a more intense manifestation of the general irrationality, because while displaying their project, they have actually tried to carry out a practical operation -- even if it is only to read certain texts and show that they know what they mean. They have given themselves diverse obligations to dominate logic, even strategy, which is precisely the entire field of the deployment of the dialectical logic of conflicts; but, like everyone else, they are greatly deprived of the basic ability to orient themselves by the old, imperfect tools of formal logic. No one worries about them; and hardly anyone thinks about the others.

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Thus it is not surprising that children should glibly start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they still do not know how to read, for reading demands making veritable judgments at every line; and is the only access to the vast areas of pre-spectacular human experience.

For your garden variety megalomaniac, poor Jules Assange seems to have only an elementary conception of propaganda. Ellul says that the texture and ground of propaganda is facts, facts and images like the ones Assange puts out there like sparkly lemmas. Drawing on the myth of Daniel Ellsberg and the hacker’s maxim that information wants to be free, he invokes this pretty fancy pants explanation of what he’s doing, which is playing bass for the Sex Pistols. Assange is literally a Theorist of Conspiracy, which he sees in the usual technocratic way as a NETWORK or a brain… of knowledge/power multiplied through a technological/electrical system. Foucault meets Tom Swift. But he’s not worried about Google or Facebook, naturally, he’s tilting at a far more worthy adversary: the 19^th century corporatist nation state. How fucking punk rock, man!

Assange: We can deceive or blind a conspiracy by distorting or restricting the information available to it. We can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating. A conspiracy suffciently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action.

Now leaving aside that intelligence gathering operations already are victims of their own data mining agendas -- remember “Nigerian Yellowcake”? it would seem that an outfit like wikileaks is superfluous. If the ambition is to set up as a sort of Switzerland of Information, affecting an anarchist neutrality and equal opportunity hatred for all power systems, it seems inevitable that wikileaks will soon become a godsend for all the bad guys: a turnstile for all sorts of orphan information that while being technically correct, doesn’t indicate the private agenda behind its revelation, that is, it doesn’t tell you what key to play the notes in, or the tempo, to finally make the music.

In the Spectacular everyone is reduced to the condition of the spy. That is, the omniscient who in truth knows only what he has been given to know, or more precisely what he desires to be the case. The visible “matter” gives way to the dark matter of the invisible, and that is where the real work begins. Espionage is a landscape of mirrors. Angleton. Paranoia. Espionage is like zen poetry -- both "sides" work in unison to create the meaning of events. The real work of spycraft happens in the paranoid mind. A garden of forking quantum paths -- each alternative at every step must be considered as true/false, until that ever deferred moment when it is specularized, crystalized eternally in the non-history of the era.

In these terms, it seems to me the idea of an anarchist spymaster is insane and absurd.  At best Assange is a propagandist who doesn’t really understand how to do it, and is, granted, an unstable and mesmerizing figure because of it. 

He promises some novelty, but he may not deliver it.

Someone who is happy to be taken into confidence is hardly likely to criticize it; nor to remark that in all the confidences, the principal part of reality will always be hidden from him. Thanks to the benevolent protection of the cheaters, he knows a few more of the cards, but they can be false; and he never knows the method that directs and explains the game. Thus he immediately identifies himself with the manipulators and scorns the ignorance which in fact he shares. Because the scraps of information offered to the familiars of a lying tyranny are normally infected with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. They are, however, pleased to get these scraps, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing. They only know better than the rest so as to better approve of domination and never to actually comprehend it. They constitute the privilege of first-class spectators: those who have the stupidity to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed to them!

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The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of the success obtained by spectacular domination.

-----------------------------------

History's domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. Inseparably, history was knowledge that must endure and aid in understanding, at least in part, what was to come: "a possession for all time," according to Thucydides. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty; and those who sell novelty at any price have made the means of measuring it disappear. When the important makes itself socially recognized as what is instantaneous, and will still be the other and the same the instant afterwards, and will always replace another instantaneous importance, one can say that the means employed guarantee a sort of eternity of non-importance that speaks loudly.

--------------------------

For every imbecile who has advanced spectacularly, there are only the mediatics who can respond with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations, and they are miserly, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's general authority and the society it expresses, makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be damaged. It must not be forgotten that all mediatics, through wages and other rewards and recompenses, has a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.

----------------------------

Nothing remains of the guaranteed relatively independent judgment of those who once made up the world of learning; of those, for example, who used to base their pride on their ability to verify, to come close to what one called an impartial history of facts, or at least to believe that such a history deserved to be known. There is no longer even any incontestable bibliographical truth, and the computerized catalogues of national libraries are well-equipped to better suppress the traces. It is disorienting to consider what it meant to be a judge, a doctor or a historian not so long ago, and to recall the imperative obligations they often recognized, within the limits of their competence: men resemble their times more than their fathers.

All sensible quotes from Debord’s Commentaires. Read the whole thing. Here:

http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

THE COMMUNISM OF CAPITALISM

Yeah, let's build a smarter planet! I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but I feel smarter just thinking it. 

The diffusion of class antagonism into a pneumatic system which must maintain an optimal PSI, as though constrained by some law of statics. This pressure is maintained through the auguries of necromancers, that is, professional economists, and a relentless variety of exhortatory propaganda which is like catnip for the educated classes.

Every citizen in good standing knows in her private marrows that she must consume the widgets produced by others so that those strangers in solidarity, in their turn may purchase the widgets that she produces. Widgets being defined as those rather useless images of currency, icons, transmissible software, what the ancients called dreams -- that were once sluggish, "hard" economic goods.

Their uselessness is in fact their virtue, because economic activity is far more frenzied when it is fundamentally irrational. For example: a maker of chairs in a village, as a rational economic actor, would determine the net amount of chairs needed by his village, allow for attrition and set his prices and rate of production accordingly. In this way, he would have a sustainable livelihood. Now his modern counterpart would have no interest in sustainability or rational economic activity; he would understand that he was trading in images, and that in a system where everyone was compelled (as if by black magic) to consume, he only has to be an excellent marketer. Because, there being no necessity for anything but CONSUMPTION, the object of consumption is accidental. In this limited way, consumption and production are poetic, almost surrealist endeavors. (in parenthesis: the equivalent of the Mad Chair Maker in cultural production would be the theorist, of course)

The neo-capitalist citizen also intuitively realizes that, like the feudal lord of old, the relative increase of one's own wealth requires a positive distribution of that wealth (as a Veblenist potlatch) over the greatest area (in the way of "goods" and "services") that also serve to indicate one's status. In this eternal cold war, the things we buy are the medals and merits we earn for our wounds. Thus a satisfactory sort of community is enacted through masochistic bondage.

We can conceive this modern commune as a series of overlapping feudal kingdoms where all people are simultaneously both lords and serfs in the system of spectacular production. For this reason we can't help but heroize demigods like Berlusconi or Murdoch. They are us, but to a far greater degree, they who must bind themselves over completely in their service to the spectacle. They are the ultimate patriots of the spectacle, as they have the least leisure of any.

CIELO DRIVE

(another one on spectacular grief, and its uses)

A publicist is murdered. First thought...it must be Oscar season in the City of Nets.

When it becomes clear that this is no ordinary publicist, but the St. Bernadette of publicists -- the anti-Sidney Falco -- the "community", such as any polity of thieves
and sex-soul-murderers can be, is struck with a rare, unfamiliar emotion: Awe.

Because these are the people who usually think that driving a Prius (and wearing ribbons and uttering protective slogans, making spectacular good works, and mostly just having money,) can protect them from the systemic violence that their, uh, creative labors work so hard to hide. And a genuine tragedy in the hollywood (multiple gunshots, like they say on CSI, and in BEVERLY HILLS, dear God...) is more than the usual bourgeois rupture that rocks a small town when bad news hits the evening news. It's the twilight of the gods. For just a moment.

But it is only right that the fearmongers should feel fear once in a while.

In fact one should ask if the perpetual manufactured sunshine, the fine ideological project of a dazzling cinematic Potemkin Culture, of "good examples" and "happy endings", that these Woodlanders specialize in, actually gives rise in perpetuity to the suppressed shadow (THAT WHICH CANNOT BE SHOWN, ONLY LIVED) and sticks them perpetually on the bloody other side of the coin, which is the mechanism that feeds the primal fear that is the true currency of show business.

The Quaids will certainly NOT be refused lunacy asylum in Canada now.

THE SPECTACULAR CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN

"I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first... It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction."

The interesting thing about how these little Stakhanovs function in the spectacle is that they have to walk a dangerous and non-sensical line which is beautifully represented by the Damien Hirst-lite hoodie.

A complete creature of the spectacle, drumming away in his room, waiting for the moment to APPEAR and be recognized as a citizen demigod.

And then suddenly the Ragged Dick thing gets EXHORTATORY, recycled and fed back into itself, his story is displaced onto yours and the subject is frozen into a permanent loop.

The Inspiring True Story of an Ordinary Kid 
YOU discovered.

"He's such an inspiration -- he came from such a small town -- he gives us hope."

"He's living an extraodinary life, but he's just like you or me..."

"There's gonna be times when people tell you you can't live your dreams, this is what I tell 'em: never say never."

CRUISING

The proliferation of special interests fostered by multiculturalism is [...] conducive to a politics of 'divide and rule' that can only benefit those who benefit most from the status quo. There is no better way of heading off the nightmare of unified political action by the economically disadvantaged that might issue in common demands than to set different groups of the disadvantaged against one another. Diverting attention away from shared disadvantages such as unemployment, poverty, low-quality housing and inadequate public services is an obvious long-term anti-egalitarian objective. Anything that emphasizes the particularity of each group's problems at the expense of a focus on the problems they share with others is thus to be welcomed.

The devil's deal that was struck when some on the left chose to pursue "the politics of identity" as a quixotic revolutionary strategy, when the certainties of the Soviet and Maoist wave functions collapsed, was more or less adaptive & opportunistic. They, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps cynically, viewed people as consumers in an ideological supermarket, no longer bound to each other by hard class boundaries, class being an unsexy, limiting idea in the consumerist spectacle. The whole impetus became spectacular, to make certain sub-classes visible as an end in itself, to create ever-fluid Coalitions of Visibility that never had to achieve any actual political goals. The too-clever Era of Brechtian politics had begun for reals.

Brecht: "They include an expectation which is justified by experience but, in the event, disappointed. One might have thought that ... but one oughtn't to have thought it. There was not just one possibility but two; both are introduced, then the second one is en-stranged, then the first as well."

And so politicians became producers and actors of epic theatre, because after all, the play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. This, of course, only becomes a problem when faced with certain ideologies that are NOT KIDDING or post-modern about anything, like for example Chinese Capitalism or nativist neo-fascism, and who have minimal interest in the traditions of epic theatre.

In her book La tentation obscurantiste, the French journalist Caroline Fourest presents an interesting hypothesis regarding the advance of what we call leftwing culturalism. She notes that the two great prototypical points of identification for the European Left during and after World War II were the anti-totalitarian struggle on the one hand and decolonisation and anti-imperialism on the other. For a long time they were able to co-exist without conflict; but, following the important growth of Islamisms in the Islamic countries and among Muslim immigrant groups, the Left found itself divided according to which of the two principal causes was considered most important. If the anti-totalitarian struggle was considered crucial, people tended to turn against Islamism as yet another form of totalitarianism from the inter-war period. But if the anti-imperialist struggle was considered paramount, the tendency was to support Islamism as a legitimate challenge to Western imperialism, at first in the colonialist version and subsequently in the globalised version. This latter choice naturally opened up the Left to culturalism. This turns out to be a twofold problem for the hardline, multi-cultural left wing: culture means at once too little and too much. On the one hand, it is very important, in that it provides an individual with an identity and therefore the right to political care and protection – conservatism built into the culturalist concept of culture. On the other hand, the Left has historically maintained that culture has no meaning, for it is economic and social conditions that are the critical determining factors. Yet at the same time, this Marxist doctrine is behind the multiculturalist idea that all cultures, irrespective of how anti-democratic and anti-liberal they are, can a priori co-exist in the same society. This duality is naturally a constant source of confusion for hardline leftwing multiculturalism. Culture is at once an immutable source of profound identity and at the same time a purely surface phenomenon based on economic determinants. It is naturally impossible for both to be true.

But why worry about it? Let's take that nice mediterranean cruise to Heideggerian quietism with Godard!

RUBBERNECKING!

1961. Rosi decisively re-invents the Process movie. Salvatore Giuliano is a film where a protagonist, even a story is mere pretext for exploring discharges and flux in a socio-political force-field, in history too. Protagonist-as-ghost, whose non-existence in conventional terms of narrative realist practice, is a structuring absence that makes other, more secret, things appear. The film is relentlessly anti-spectacular, wedging open spaces in its' narrative, even in Narrative itself. Rosi's film and the others that follow are ultimately poetically mysterious, a-definitive, requiring completion, even perhaps, action. 

“The raw material I had to work with when shooting Gomorrah was so visually powerful that I MERELY FILMED IT in as straightforward a way as possible, as if I were a passerby who happened to find myself there by chance.”

"I didn’t want to make a film against “the System,” but about “the System.”

2010. The process movie (Trafik, Zodiac, The Wire, Gomorrah, Che, The Social Network, Carlos) is now the fashionable realist symbol for complexity. These are coffee table movies, laced with moral and factual "demi-biguities" but whose energy, in the final analysis, is exhausting, neatly totalizing. They don't BURN, either. Their factualist fatalism is not earned, not a worldview, but just a style to meet and surpass their apathetic audiences. 

These movies make us zombie-voyeurs of zombie-systems. And what they absolutely can't show is their own fatal complicity in the only system that matters: the spectacle. 

more here: http://semtexfollies.blogspot.com/2010/12/rubbernecking-part-2.html

SUPERNATURING

One of the first functions
of realism in the cinema
is how the
money spent in the being there
(but never wasted)
upon conversion into image,
is refracted and reverberates
out unto real objects
manifesting or lacking a consequent allure.

This reciprocal charging of the non-space between image and real
benefits both in their natural (essential) poverty.

 
This is the obscure mysticism of money...

Bresson: Getting close to things may be the way to perceive supernatural things. The supernatural is always in reality, it is something real to which we approach as much as possible.

DEMAGAGARY

How many times do I have to tell you, joto, it's never Fascism if you AGREE with the idea...

PERIPHRASIS

Debord: The reigning deceptions of the time are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not deliberately been separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge. 

And more laterally...
 
Makers of images must fight the image's own desire to express a cliché or axiom of truth.

Reality is already a prolific forger of crystalline certainties, and these may be undercut by a judicious use of photoshop. In the instance above, the imager, brutalized by the image, which says look HERE and not elsewhere, did not resist sufficiently.

This was the willfully misunderstood point of Errol Morris's film on Abu Ghraib. The truth, the vertovian one, is there in the INTERVAL of the FALSE MOMENT and the TRUE MOMENT, but you must show both in articulation.

OSAMA THE SPECTANARCH

So, Osama bin Laden, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and Guy Debord walk into a bar...twenty seconds later, it explodes.

Detaching Islamic law from the grip of the nation-state and emphasizing its sacrificial nature, Osama bin Laden effectively transforms the militant's obedience of Sharia into an act of sovereignty. The law is no longer embodied in a set of institutions that must be submitted to, but manifests itself in militant acts that possess the force of law in their own right. Yet what makes these acts sovereign, more than their independence from institutional authority, is that they neither claim nor defend any interest, but rather destroy interest itself in spectacular gestures of sacrifice uniting both perpetrators and victims into a single humanity. In other words, militant acts are sovereign because they are spendthrift: deriding the protection that law normally extends to interests of various kinds and instead sacrificing life itself as the ground of all interest. In this sense, the militant act is law-making rather than law-abiding, albeit in the most anarchic of ways.

All true of course, with the slight caveat that the LAW that bin Laden is in submission to is not Sharia, but the Law of the Spectacle.  He is as much a servant of the spectacle as Rupert Murdoch. A guerrilla of separation. And his "followers" want nothing else but TO APPEAR at long last as True Muslims of the Spectacle, even if that means their erasure-in-the-world as carbon based life forms. After all, the militant is always uncertain of his status, his commitment is always in doubt, he might in his heart remain a secret, asthmatic, debauched playboy revanchist. Such things can only be settled by suicide in the eye of the camera.

HOTEL JIHAD

“Clenching your fist for the ones, like us, who are oppressed by figures of beauty…” 

L. Cohen, Chelsea Hotel No. 2

Hey -- why the dickens do I have Hotel Chevalier (Wes Anderson, 2007) on my computer? Because it’s the Bugsy Malone of Fake Truffaut Movies™, of course! Well, that’s kind of a start. Because it proves without question, as it slithers so discretely past the Star Wars girl’s ass that les travelling are so, like, ah, une question de morale. That ass that sends Moustache Boy on a gazillion-thousand mile (No problem, I’ve verified the exact distance on google maps) orientalist funhouse quest back to mommy. Because Hotel Chevalier is transmedia that beautifully goes nowhere. Because it gives the eerie feeling of being an ad for itself. Because no one yet has had the moral courage to deal so incisively with the problems of rich people trapped with their iPods in a hotel room like Wes. 

And as we learned in Sofia’s oscarwinner, hotel rooms are a kinda sweet prison for the shambhalic, symbolic class, whose job is to just be nowhere and everywhere at once. Because the too-perfect Sarstedt song is a sonic analogue of the mise-en-scene – a travelling of a velvet list, where, rather than the shock of poetic invention, we instead find weak, blasé iconography and brand names ₍₁₎, not least of which is, pardon my French, the cul sacré. 

What about the really cool Louis Vuitton-Bill Murray-Alienation synergy, dude? Alienation sells suitcases. And suitcases are the very symbol of displacement, of alienation. You don’t have to be Sherlock Barthes to figure that one out. Specular marketing; a more commercial version of the final shoot-out in The Lady from Shanghai; displacing the real object of desire into other mirror-images: “I’m looking at the marketer in the mirror and I’m telling him to buy”.  When we watch something like Hotel Chevalier we are suddenly allowed to be part of the melancholic entourage of the shipwrecked₍₂₎  people of the hotel rooms (cf. Dylan & co. in don’t look back) and we remember that the lovely that Sarstedt wrote his song about died (this is too sublime to be anything but myth) in a hotel fire. 

The Hotel Room manifest as Debord’s crucial principle of separation - the basic means of state control over our oppressed artistic class – the gulag and juzgao of the spectacle. 

“After all the empty time, all the lost moments, there remain these endlessly traversed postcard landscapes; this distance organized between each and everyone. Childhood?  Why, it’s right here; we have never emerged from it.”                                  

 -- G. Debord. 

Ah, Childhood! What Hollywood most prizes is finding grown men (sorry, girls) who are hostages to their ruthless 12 year old selves. And so we must realize, aghast – that our author really means this, all of this, and that it’s not some absurd kitsch trifle but private, cryptic neo-realism! Wes Anderson’s The Scream. So that was the heavy and secret shit Henley and Frey were muttering about back in ’77 before they got drowned out by the politically naïve Clash. “…check out any time you like, but you can never leave…”  This is what it is like to live, be, get room service, even to die, nowhere. The price of entry to the Utopia of Celebrity, as El Señorito Cunanan found out, is a ghostly houseboat existence just within spitting distance -- the reverberant & blank wall of techno drifting over to tantalize -- from the real presences of SoBe. Again, the melancholy spirit of separation. 

And here’s a further minor key tragedy for power, coming soon to a very small screen near you, that the melancholic artist-as-culture-hero is no longer much wanted nor required to produce the spectacular – free at last! -- because the average person is too busy producing and curating their own homely corner of the spectacle to actually consume it properly. The next perfection of separation is when we all get to move with our camera phones into The Hotel (which we earnestly hope won’t be too soon besieged by jihadists! ₍₄₎) But maybe Wes and Sofia₍₃₎  are onto a new genre: Hotel Regionalism. It’s a genre with spindly, restless legs in a bespoke suit – a genre that travels. Her next one, sadly, is to be a hotel picture too, I hear. ₍₅₎

And Hotel Chevalier remains, because, finally, I guess there really are some things that are more abject-ish than the tracking shot in Kapo. How much is this swell hotel room costing us, Wes? Only 750,000 million euros. ₍₆₎  The only bit of truth in this sick yellowy world.

Notes: 

1. From the beginning, Rock-et-Roll was always hawking shoes, who the hell knows why – but the whole thing went crazy by the mid-1960s, and even St. Lou was selling Dior by ‘67.

2. Los Naufragos de la Calle de La Providencia, the castaways of Providence Street, Alcoriza and Buñuel called them.

3. These people are my close friends so I feel comfortable using their christian names in a piece of serious criticism.

4. Let’s at least note the cynical perspicacity of the salafist jihadi Boxers in their choice of hotels as targets. They are noah’s arks, floating prisons for the technocratic, symbolic class. Merely signing the guest ledger is an admission of globalized guilt. Meanwhile, Hotel Chains needs must up-armor and make their prison architecture more explicit as a sort of enticement. Hotel managers: Watch 55 Days at Peking and teach the staff/guards to use Kalashnikovs.

5. I know, I know --  perhaps, there were masterpieces of mono no aware to be found in hotels once upon a time. Shimizu, Tati, Abel Ferrara. Non-transparent films shot as if through frosted glass that inscribe separation as loss, as the transience of stuff. The important thing is to choose well, that is, resonantly, in what you mean to mausolize -- to cast in amber in the film.

6. Price Includes VAT.

BLACK HAWK DOWN / SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

The basic work-problem of Globalization is to introduce spectacularity to the Favela/Colonia/Slum/Urban Interface. It is this vast “untapped” population which must be brought into cultural production of the spectacular.

FORGERY WITHOUT REPLY

The spectacle: power looking and admiring itself. 

Like the protagonist of La Jetee, we (the producer-consumer of the spectacle) cannot know that haunting and haunted image whose meaning is so desperately sought is the secret, static memento of our own fatal encounter with power. 

Also, Don Quijote having to deal with the false adventures of the false Quijote. 

Forgery without reply.

SKINNING AND THE LACK OF RUINS

"Skinning" as a feature of spectacular production -- a low cost structure, modular in nature, that can be skinned and re-skinned to meet a particular and consumable time-sensitive image. Such skins can be jettisoned as needed.

The eternal present results.

This particular excess expenditure is a sign of wealth -- as potlatch. Think in contrast of the homely poverty of the brick and stone 19th century building. It is pathetic in its immutability.  It is. It can't be re-imaged, only demolished. "Skinning" a building like that would only point up the tension between essence and image.

Being has a sort of resistance and inertia. History partakes in this as the evidence of being. Ruins.

The impossibility of ruins in the eternal present of the spectacle. Nothing can age. This is why the aged, with its grounding scars, must become invisible.

Today, things -- objects qua thingyfied -- are like quantum states rather than realities.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF THE INTEGRATED SPECTACLE

 Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.

                                                                                           -- Terry Eagleton

The concentrated part of the spectacle is becoming more Stalinist, more concentrated. Nothing in it can exist except as indexical reference to another part of the spectacle. Re-makes, pop-culture riffs, certifications of things on TV, The New York Times.

One could even say, mystically, that these image-artifacts of the spectacle can only be allowed based on some FUTURE referential substance that they may colonize in the imagination of people -- some future capitalization of their power -- that such images-to-come may inherit as children to the father. This operation performs the eternal present by sewing the past to the future. To which Bewitched do we refer to? It no longer matters. Hollywood's aesthetic strategy is enmeshment -- the opposite of ostranenie.

And at the same time, other aspects of the spectacle become more diffuse, as everyone is conscripted into the work of acting out the spectacle. We're back to Rousseau and Gesamtkunstwerk -- back even to the situationist dream of uniting actor and spectator.