An amazing, hypnotic video for “A Time of Happening” by The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, a new project by former Coil member Peter Christopherson:
The video is apparently of a Buddhist ceremony in Krabi Town, Thailand. The boy is ‘possessed’ by a spirit and is worshipped as a god for the duration of the possession. It is a part of the Ginjae Festival. Look at his eyes.
Remember that post I made about vegetarians a while back? Well, now its time for Pythagoras to fight back! I came across these beautiful lines in Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is a ’sermon’ by that ancient Greek Pythagoras, who, along with his followers, were among the first to espouse a vegetarian philosophy:
…He was first
to say that animal food should not be eaten,
And learned as he was, men did not always
Believe him when he preached “Forbear, O mortals,
To spoil your bodies with such impious food!
There is corn for you, apples whose weight bears down
The bending branches; there are grapes that swell
On green vines, and pleasant herbs, and greens
Made mellow and soft with cooking; there is milk
and clover-honey. Earth is generous
With her provision, and her sustenance
Is very kind; she offers, for your tables,
Food that requires no bloodshed and no slaughter.
Meat is for beasts to feed on, yet not all
Are carnivores, for horses, sheep, and cattle
Subsist on grass, but those whose disposition
Is fierce and cruel, tigers, raging lions,
And bears and wolves delight in bloody feasting.
Oh, what a wicked thing it is for flesh
To be the tomb of flesh, for the body’s craving
To fatten on the body of another,
For one live creature to continue living
Through one live creature’s death.
…
One crime leads to another: first the swine
Were slaughtered, since they rooted up the seeds
And spoiled the season’s crop; then goats were punished
On vengeful altars for nibbling at the grape-vines.
These both deserved their fate, but the poor sheep,
What had they ever done, born for man’s service,
But bring us milk, so sweet to drink, and clothe us
With their soft wool, who give us more while living
Than ever they could in death? And what had oxen,
Incapable of fraud or trick or cunning,
Simple and harmless, born to a life of labor,
What had they ever done? None but an ingrate,
Unworthy of the gift of grain, could ever
Take off the weight of the yoke, and with the axe
Strike at the neck that bore it, kill his fellow
Who helped him break the soil and raise the harvest.
It is bad enough to do these things; we make
The gods our partners in the abomination,
Saying that they love the blood of bulls in Heaven.
So there he stands, the victim at the altars,
Without blemish, perfect (and his beauty
Proves his own doom), in sacrificial garlands,
Horns tipped with gold, and hears the priest intoning:
Not knowing what he means, watches the barley
Sprinkled between his horns, the very barley
He helped make grow, and then is struck
And with his blood he stains the knife whose flashing
He may have seen reflected in clear water.
Then they tear out his entrails, peer, examine,
Search for the will of Heaven, seeking omens.
And then, so great man’s appetite for food
Forbidden, then, O human race, you feed,
You feast, upon your kill. Do not do this,
I pray you, but remember: when you taste
The flesh of slaughtered cattle, you are eating
Your fellow-workers.”
Oh ho! That was harsh dude…
dipperwell has a good post about the ongoing CUPE 3903 strike at York. I don’ think anyone has actually examined the media/PR side of it too much, and she touches on one of the things that has been bothering me for some time. Namely, just how insidious and calculated and bold the university’s disinformation campaign actually is. The various documents’ tricky strucure and wording pits the University’s wage increase offer of 9.25% against the Union’s demands of 41%, and with nary a further statisitc to be found, one can be forgiven to come away with rather sensationalist anti-union sentiment. The site doesn’t state what the percentage increases of the overall settlement package are, nor the union’s actual wage demands. So is it any surprise that a significant portion of the undergrad population feels alienated and pissed off?
No one will ever love you for everything you are,
and so you build up layers of deception,
and you leave out things to alter the perceptions
of the ones you love, who would never love you back
if they knew all about you, every solitary fact.
And the sadness of your life is built upon this lack
of really knowing anyone, of having them know you.
It’s the sadness of the world, there’s nothing left to do.
And so just go to sleep, just let the hours pass.
Sleep it all away, none of it will last.
Soon it’s all over, you’re under clover
and none of it matters anymore.
- From the lyrics to “Song for Caden” by Deanne Storey
Well, I am going to to submit you to yet another explication from one of Franzen’s essays, just because they’re so damn good. I love it when the right book comes to you at just the right time in your life. I had been sitting on this one for a good five months now – it was given by a dear friend, Erin-Marie, before she left for BC married, and I hope, happy. Anyways, this small (I promise) excerpt is from an essay called “Why Bother?”, about the state of the American novel, and the novel in general, in these troubled McTimes.
“…Superficially, at least, regionalism is still thriving. In fact it’s fashionable on college campuses nowadays to say that there is no America anymore, there are only Americas, that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian have in common are the English language and the federal income tax. The likelihood, however, is that both the New Yorker and the Georgian watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both have jobs that are threatened by the migration of employment overseas, both go to discount superstores to purchase Pocahontas tie-in products for their children, both are being pummeled into cynicism by commercial advertising, both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman. The world of the present is a world in which the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, the drama of regional specificity succumbing to a commercial generality. The American writer today faces a cultural totalitarianism analogous to the political totalitarianism with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine…”
Apart from a few dated pop-culture references, the statement still holds, perhaps more so now. So that got me thinking, how exactly does technological consumerism cultivate cynicism and apathy among the conscious? Because for a long time during high-school and in the first years of University, I was both. I was gradually beginning to realize just how much my values and preferences diverged from that of mass culture. I became depressed. I agonized over difference, and then, thinking that the only way to supplant depression was by becoming angry, became both depressed and angry for a goodly time. I secluded myself, and it was only after I began to learn that there were others who felt as I did, and that I could trust them, that I began to come out of my shell.
I am aware that this has been done to the death by cultural critics and philosophers in much more in depth ways, but I feel that I need to formulate things on my own terms. So it appears to me that the prevalence of commercial culture – and by that I mean advertising, television, radio, and even to some extent the net – desiccates the idea of free choice into a wan shadow, wherein the primary and immediate method of indicating preference and values is to spend money. We are told, in a very alluring manner, that the only choice we have, and indeed the only choice that can make a difference, is where and how much we decide to spend our hard-earned dollars. The sophisticated, image-driven free-markets of today envelop our culture so completely that counter-cultures, to the extent that they are even marginally effective, no longer exist. We have the choice to spend either on organic food or chemically treated food, fair-trade or free-trade, Mac or PC, charity organizations or multi-nationals. To spend or not to spend, that is now the question. So now you have a whole group of people who believe that they can buy themselves out of personal responsibility, that by simply choosing where to put their money, they will have taken that brave step towards both the emancipation of society and themselves. This is not news. In fact, the culture even proudly admits to it. You have probably seen the new organic cereal ads in the subway stations that go something like “Milk goes well with environmental responsibility” or some such crap. This transparency is essential for maintaining the status quo; it is an old trick that states the most effective lie is the admitted lie.
Yeah I know, old hat. But sometimes I forget, and begin again to wonder at why we are so depressed and cynical. By limiting effective action to the simple binary of spend/not spend, by voting for values with dollars, we have effectively destroyed that portion of ourselves that does not conform to this binary, that emphatically upholds its socio-political values in more complex, unmediated, and human ways. We have eliminated the ability to think and act in ways that directly embody the changes we want to see. We are forced to negotiate not with what we spending on, but simply with what we spend. So is it any surprise that we have become a binary culture in other ways? We are either happy or depressed, content or miserable. We buy it, or we don’t.
So am I still depressed? Well, I am sometimes depressed and I am sometimes angry. But I also smile, and I also laugh. I feel horribly alone and beautifully connected. I am hopeful. Franzen calls this transition one from a depressive reality to a tragic reality. Yeah, I suppose I could live with the fact that my life is tragic. And as with all good tragedies, there’s a whole lot of laughter going on in the wings. After all, that is what makes it tragic…
I have been snacking on Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, “How to be Alone“. There are some real gems here, and I heartily recommend the book to anyone looking for measured, rational and most importantly, sane, responses to the travails of our time. One of the essays, “Sifting the Ashes”, is about cigarettes and smoking.
Of course, as most of you probably know, I have been a smoker for a long time. In fact, I don’t think that anyone reading this blog who knows me personally has ever known me not to be a regular consumer of those sublime death-sticks. I cast my mind back to a time when I knew the virtues of a full lung of air, and I find only a muddled boy recently immigrated from a country almost antithetical in its difference, a boy with a rather fuzzy conception of the world and himself, content to indulge in dreams and fantasies while blissfully disengaged from his desires. Franzen’s essay cuts to the core of the smoker-consciousness, while also digging deep into the cultural milieu that could have produced it. It is a fascinating read that touches on history and psychology, lawyers and activists, and I just want to quote a couple of pertinent passages here.
“If nicotine addiction were purely physical, quitting would be relatively easy, because acute withdrawal symptoms, the physical cravings, rarely last more than a few weeks. At the time I myself quit, six years ago, I was able to stay nicotine-free for weeks at a time, and even when I was working I seldom smoked more than a few ultra-lights a day. But on the day that I decided that the cigarette that I’d had the day before was my last, I was absolutely flattened. A month passed in which I was too agitated to read a book, too fuzzy-headed even to focus on a newspaper. Another month went by before I could summon the concentration to write so much as a casual letter to a friend. If I’d had a job at the time, or a family to take care of, I might have hardly noticed the psychological withdrawal. But as it happened nothing much was going on in my life. ‘Do you smoke?’ Lady Bracknell asks Jack Worthington in The Importance of Being Earnest, and when he admits that he does she replies, ‘I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.’
There is no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured. The mentally ill and the indigent are also members of this class. We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine, suspended in an aerosol of hydrocarbons and nitrosamines, because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure-bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for this structuring might be “self-medication”; another might be “coping.” But there are very few serious smokers over thirty, perhaps none at all, who don’t feel guilty about the harm they inflict upon themselves. Even Rose Cipollone, the New Jersey woman whose heirs in the early eighties nearly sustained a liability judgment against the industry, had to be recruited by an activist. The sixty law firms that have pooled their assets for a class-action suit on behalf of all American smokers do not seem to me substantially less predatory than the suit’s corporate defendants. I’ve never met a smoker who blamed his habit on someone else.
The United States as a whole resembles an addicted individual, with the corporate id going about its dirty business while the conflicted political ego frets and dithers. What’s clear is that the tobacco industry would not still be flourishing, thirty years after the first Surgeon General’s report, if our legislatures weren’t purchasable, if the concepts of honor and personal responsibility hadn’t largely given way to the power of litigation and the dollar, and if the country didn’t generally endorse the idea of corporations whose ultimate responsibility is not to society but to the bottom line. There’s no doubt that some tobacco executives have behaved despicably, and for public-health advocates to hate these executives, as the nicotine addict comes eventually to hate his cigarettes, is natural. But to cast them as moral monsters – a point source of evil – is just another form of prime-time entertainment.”
And later on:
” ‘Perhaps’, Richard Klein writes in Cigarettes Are Sublime, ‘one stops smoking only when one starts to love cigarettes, becoming so enamoured of their charms and so grateful for their benefits that one at last begins to grasp how much is lost by giving them up, how urgent it is to find substitutes for some of the seductions and powers that cigarettes so magnificently combine.’ To live with uncontaminated lungs and an unracing heart is a pleasure that I hope someday soon to prefer to the pleasure of a cigarette. For myself, then, I’m cautiously optimistic. For the body politic, rhetorically torn between shrill condemnation and Neanderthal denial, and habituated to the poison of tobacco money in its legal system, its legislatures, its financial markets, and its balance of foreign trade, I’m considerably less so.”
Check out this interview with Huxley made in 1958. The things this man said were and are prophetic. He talks about political campaigns, propaganda, drugs, advertising, the gradual methods and reasons of the totalitarianziation of society.
In regards to political campaigns, the interviewer quotes from an essay of Huxley’s: “All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere; political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.”
Gee golly willikers, does this sound familiar at all?
Allow me to go on a rant a little. I was at the Drop Fees student protest organized by the CFS yesterday. The demonstration itself was successful, if a little short. I think the whole thing must have lasted about five hours, and while we were in front of the Queen’s Park Legislature building, we didn’t stick around for the entirety of the parliamentary session. We did, however, occupy the intersection of College and University for a little while, which had the desired effect of pissing off the trail of cops who were following us. Of course, the demo had added undertones of the CUPE 3903 strike that, as most of us probably know by know, is well underway at York University. The climate was upbeat and energetic. However, this is not what I was upset by. I was upset by the number of people trying to hijack the rally into an Obama love-fest. Don’t these people realize that the world is, by and large, going to remain absolutely the same? Obama backs some of the same failed ideological principles and foreign policy fronts imposed by Bush, especially in regards to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran. He is also a proponent of the same Zionist propaganda mill that legitimizes the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Not to say that there aren’t going to be some changes. There will be a review of the embargo on Cuba and the existence of Guantanamo Bay; there will probably-hopefully-I-really-fucking-wish-there-will be a shift in racial politics in the States and elsewhere; and (judging from how the rest of the world responded – probably due to the fact that CNN is the most widely broadcast TV news station in the world), there will be some salvaging of national relationships. Yes, there will be change, but it is not, as his campaign so proudly states, “Change we Need”, but “Change we are Making as a Conciliatory Token in Order not to Make the Change we Actually Need”. But that probably isn’t as catchy a slogan…
SO, in regards to yesterday, I just want to say, please do not fucking take a protest chant about eliminating student fees and turn it into a misguided and ignorant defense of, as a friend aptly put it, “a black face on American Imperialism”.
Thank you.
But the protest, as I said, was awesome. It was wonderful to see so many students and supporters show up. Hopefully this will snowball, becoming bigger and bigger until not even the “monopolizers on the legitimate use of force” can do nothing but concede.
