JAWS

Readers, we made this incredible shot minutes before the intrepid shark killer Kim Dot Dammit bit the great white in half, thusly saving countless Californian swimmers from certain death in the jaws of the malevolent predator. We grabbed a moment to ask Kim about the secret of her amazing art:

KIM: Well you see as an American-Italian I was brought up to fend for myself, and I took that lesson really seriously. I have lean muscles, a resilient immune system, I can fix the plumbing, climb Mount Everest and kill great white sharks with my bare teeth. There just isn’t anything that a man could do better than me. Or a woman for that matter. If you want me to wax poetic, it’s a shark eat shark world out there and I think I’ve done Darwin one better in this game. I’m on top of the food chain and I’ve stayed there for over 45 years!

PARODY CENTER: That’s amazing, Kim. But HOW do you manage?

KIM: Anybody can become a great survivor, really. All you gotta do is drink some raw eggs in the morning and when you hit rock bottom, just watch some ego-boosting Italian movies like the latest remake of RAMBO. Trust me, it’s as simple as that! But hey wait… that guy over there is about to be attacked!

The phenomenal Kim sprang to the rescue of yet another unfortunate Californian swimmer. Surfing against the wind towards the shark fin that suddenly appeared in deep waters, Kim grabbed the shark two inches away from a fatal bite to the swimmer’s leg. But just when we thought she would rip the animal apart, Kim let the great white shark swim away to safety.

THE BLOG BUZZ, 12-5-2008

”Pretentious, pretentious, pretentious”, writes Comrade Fox as a blawg motto, I guess in hopes of doing a meta meta number on the Parody Center’s endlessly elusive and by all means multi-faceted parody. And we do appreciate Comrade’s sincere efforts, readers, it’s just that already in the text below, Comrade can’t help but sink into adumbrations - again:

i) To think Number “in its being” is to nominate an ontological schema in which numbers (whole, real, infinitesimal…) are given. There is no way to “think Number” without such a gesture of nomination: attempts to derive the being of Number from some other given (the extensionality of concepts; the totality of the thinkable; the permutations of a syntax) either founder in contradiction or yield only a castrated, procedural numericality. A novel axiomatic is required.

I dare not at this point visualize just what a ”castrated, procedural numericality” would look like, let alone why and how it would lead to a ”novel axiomatic”. Whatever Hell Comrade Fox is going through, it must be a consequence of too much subjectivation! That Comrade enumerated the adumbration with an i) only makes the whole thing even more meta-pretentious, my dear sweet readers!

***

My cognitive-positive dad Clysmatics finally got a taste of the subversive power of psychoanalysis when he managed to upset dr. Jodianne Fossey in relation to a confessional where dr. Fossey, again, whipped herself majestically thinking that she must be not only a Perfect Teacher, a Prolific Writer, but also, and simultaneously, a Perfect Mum. The problem with Marxist Feminists, readers, is that these women end up abusing themselves, and no amount of male schauvinism can rival that sort of auto-masochism. The other Marxian readeries of dr. Fossey’s comments acted as soothers, and here, readers, you see the difference between a psychoanalyst and a priest. The priest tells you what you want to hear; the psychoanalyst tries to interrupt your jouissance so that you may gain insight into the functioning of your Desire. This makes me think, again, that blawg confessionals are pretty impotent in that they perform this priestly function more than they actually help people sort out their issues. Thinking further about the subversive power of art, I do think it can play this sort of an interruptive function.

***

Readers, my parody correspondent has been evading his tasks again. He shows up on other blawgs, which clearly means he has the time and the space to do his work. If you see her meandering about tell Jonquille that if this continues for another week, I am going to seriously consider cutting her salary!

MALEVOLENCE

Le Colonel Chabert, the Praying Mantis of Paris, dispenses with competition.

WHY ZIZEK DOESN’T MATTER

ARGGHHH readers!

When I last re-hired my parody correspondent, I was thinking: finally, a Parody Center without dr. Zizek! We can turn off the surveillance systems, cut the gossip watch, leave dr. Fossey some breathing space to write dr. Zizek-adoring comments, give the whole damn thing a rest, and concentrate on local issues, such as Comrade Fox’s subjectivation, or Liberal Woggia’s process of Becoming. After all, accusations were flying all over the place that the Parody Center was engaged in slander instead of a responsible, structural critique of the Slovenly bitch.

And then, readers, it happens again: a resurgence of Zizomania in the Marxian blawgosphere!!! Really I wonder if the Parody Center will EVER be able to go on vacation.

One of the many recent panegirici is by the fairly brainwashed but otherwise talented Haughty Thought, who writes in his post WHY ZIZEK MATTERS:

What makes Žižek important is the simple fact that he approaches the topic of subjectivity and freedom (among other issues) by using psychoanalysis as a lense to examine German Idealism, and that this analysis allows for, and even encourages, a theory of the subject that takes into account but manages to narrowly escape, the scientifically fueled determinism of our age.

And readers, the fact is that whether dr. Zizek approaches the topic of freedom through the psychoanalytic lens or not, whether that lens provides an accurate view of reality, whether all that does or doesn’t make sense, dr. Zizek IMPOSES the psychoanalytic lens on subjectivity, notably by means of his salivated corpulence. Because every asshole is a petit objet a staring back at you, and every conversation turns cross-referential vis-a-vis popular culture, and the Slovenlian Volksgeist shines through all of Hitchcock’s opus, a fetishistic standpoint is created that has NOTHING to do, readers, with Lacan’s original idea that his own thought was in permanent flux. As that handsome Texan cat amply explained, Lacan’s discourse itself was permanently evolving: the Master didn’t want the slaves to take him for granted!

I know that this thought might have a devastating effect on Haughty Thought’s pimples, but being in an especially uncharitable mood today, readers, the Cultural Parody Center doesn’t give a flying fuck!

HARD CANDY

Readers, newer mind what that sourpuss of a parody correspondent de Camembert says, the new Madanna album ”Hard Candy” is just delicious!

Yes Madge does have an old, worn-out cunt and her attempts to look twenty years young appear increasingly ridiculous, but somehow she is able to temper it with enough self-parody that she looks more convincing than the Botox starlets of Jonquille’s favorite L.A. On her new party announcements, the Queen sports an amusing Marlene Dietrich - Garbo look that is bound to send airwaves of delight all across the worldwide gay scene. Michael Musto is already peeing in his lingerie, readers!

The presence of new hip-hop artists like Timbaland infuses Madanna’s disco sound with interesting hauntological reverberations, genre mixages and Deleuzian fractals. The album opens somewhat disappointingly with ”Candy Store”, but gets almost immediately brilliant with ”Four Minutes” and ”Give it to me”: a song so breezy it almost rivals the brilliance of Madanna’s 25-year old masterpiece, ”Get into the groove”.

And it gets even more interesting as Maddy turns to Lacanian ballads, where one is tempted to think back on Madeleine Dollar’s book (A VOICE AND NOTHING MORE). In that book, readers, Madeleine showed us how voices exist in a spectral dimension between reality and fantasy:

Voices start to ring in your head / Distant echoes from another time start to creep in your brain / First you say love me, then you wanna leave me/ how can I refuse you when you’re so into yourself / but who is the Master, and who is the Slave?

THE BLOG BUZZ, 6-5-2008

Hi-de-hi readers!

The Cultural Parody Center is not very happy with the meager response to the Size Queen Contest ™. Perhaps the Phalluses are not as big as the Academia tends to portray them? Look into your pants, readers, and have some confidence in yourself. After all, it’s really a matter of technique, not of size, isn’t it, as Marxists would claim…it is the CONTENT, not the FORM that matters!

I finally slept with dr. Sinthome and readers the muscled Texan doctor fucked my brains out, leaving me with a deep impression that I’ll never make it against somebody as intelligent, articulate and knowledgeable as the narcissistic cat. With just a few well-chosen remarks he showed me how much I am still a slave of Modernism, clinging to Grand Ideas when they have clearly collapsed into Deleuze’s happy clappy world of endless and total transformation, evasion, mutation, viral proliferation, evolution, and the lines of flight. Again I had to ask myself the question that Lenin asks Milena in Makavejev’s WR MYSTERIES OF ORGASM: ”What kind of a Revolution is it that never ends?” Well, for Milena, readers, it ended in castration, and castration is something I have simply refused in life - I demand total jouissance. And if dr. Sinthome isn’t able to provide that, because he is too fatigued to fuck me ten times per night, I am just going to change my online therapist!

* * *

The Cultural Parody Center is proud to announce two new additions to our blawgroll: The Vole Dyke, a lesbian history teacher from dr. Sinthome’s circle, whose prose is sharp as the needle and witty to boot. The Dyke being associated with some of our parody targets, we did not hesitate to include her on our blawgroll. In this way we are able to obtain intelligence, as well as boost our competitive position on the blawg market.

Our other addition is Skaaaaanskansgaard from Norge, a whale hunter by daytime, and a Swedish drag queen at night. Though we don’t speak any Danish, Skaaanskansgaard’s blawg is full of handsome & intelligent-looking Scandinavian men, so the Parody Center immediately felt an inclination to join their world. After all, in our career, it was the Northern Light that always shone on the Parody Center’s horizon. We liked the luxuries of socialist capitalism, and we followed the Light all the way to her Dutch Majesty’s public funds for fornication. (DISCLAIMER: whether the men come from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland or Estonia is completely irrelevant readers, for the men look hot)

* * *

In addition, the Parody Center is proud to announce a new comic book character: Liberal Woggia, Marxist-in-Becoming. As my parody correspondent is (hopefully) finishing up the design at our New York headquarters, we are preparing the marketing for an upcoming series of comic books where Liberal Woggia saves the world with the help of the little animals from the forest: the Marxian Cobra, the Rabbit Clit, Kenoma Kretinoma and Childie Klein Vu, the Chinese snake-dragon. In the process of saving the world, Woggia undergoes an exhilarating process of Becoming, from simulation to simulacra and beyond. We are hoping to strike lucrative deals with ice cream retailers, Halliwud studios and female vaginal care producers, all of whom could use our wonderful characters to make heaps of MONEY in the process!

SIZE QUEEN CONTEST (TM) - UPDATED WITH FIRST RESULTS

Dear readers, the Cultural Parody Center is proud to announce the Size Queen Contest ™. We are going to choose the Biggest Academic Phallus on both sides of the Atlantic including the Old Continent. Please send in your measurements, preferably with a picture, in the following format:

length/thickness/size and shape of the head/radius of testicles

All entries should be followed by a 100-word essay on why you think you have the biggest Phallus in the Academia.

Contest winners get free tickets to Comrade Fox’s upcoming SUBJECTIVATION tour by THE FOX (see poster below).

Readers, the first entrant has sent in his information: here you see the huge cock of Le Colonel Chabert (www.lecolonelchabert.blogspot.com), who is not technically a member of the Academia and who didn’t send a submission letter, but whose measurements (24cm/6cm/rouge and rounded/10cm) impressed us enough to include her entry.

5:44 GMT Amsterdam - readers, a second entrant sent in his formidable data: 22cm/7cm/dark and pointy/8 cm from Dr. Sinthome in Texas! It already looks like the competition will be, erm, tighter than we expected, ho ho ho readers! In his accompanying letter, Dr. Sinthome (www.larvalsubjects.wordpress.com) writes: ”I am honored to be a part of the Cultural Parody Center’s productive contest. It is of course immodest and a little rude to brag about one’s endowment, but I believe that I am an especially suitable entrant due to my cock’s thickness, matching my fairly rigid academic temperament.”

0:39 GMT Amsterdam - readers, we received a strange letter for an academic who signed the letter ”Angelina Paulina Smith” saying the following: Dear Cultural Parody Center, I know this is a contest for the biggest academic Phallus, but since every big Phallus needs a soft juicy ass, I decided to be creative and send you a snapshot of my butt. In this way I am hoping that one of the very well-endowed academics might get in contact with me. I have a special interest in horses. Readers, being in an especially charitable mood, we decided to help Angelina in her search (although she may not participate in the contest).

THE ORGY SCENE

Readers, just as it’s a little-known fact that the French makers of ”Four Minutes” collaborate with top Serbian designers - the French link with Serbian culture runs much deeper than in the Anglo-Saxonic world - so it’s lesser know that the Juliard prodigy Jocelyn Pook developed this lovely piece for Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT on the basis of Christian Orthodox chants. Just two in a sea of examples that show you how Serbian genius is systematically repressed by the New World Order because Serbs, like Russians, constitute a dangerous element.

Anyhow I regularly come back to this scene because it touches me deeply, as I think about the diabolical power of the rich and how they know not what they do. When the kindly woman tries to save Tom Cruise, it’s the proper Act of Christian sacrifice as envisaged by the Orthodox church: despite the fact that the whole world has gone to Hell, despite everything, there has to be a non-negotiable space of mercy. Otherwise, readers, we are really really lost.

CUMMING ATTRACTIONS: THE BOY WITH THE MATCHSTICKS

Readers, we are happy to inform you that we have not managed to strike a deal with Comrade Hatherley for a starring role in the upcoming buggery of the Hans Christian Andersen classic, THE LITTLE GIRL WITH THE MATCHSTICKS. This is why we decided to cast Comrade Hatherley ourselves. Comrade glistens, shines and sizzles as a destitute Marxist activist in post-Apocalyptic East London; Comrade’s only solace comes from the socialist matchboxes he is able to pinch off the affluent burgeoisie that he services for sustenance. We are eyeing Le Colonel Chabert for the role of the kindly philanthropist D’Artagnan, who tries to help Comrade Hatherley financially but is met with stubborn refusal as Comrade chooses idealism over survival. There’s more glum, abuse and glam, readers, in this story than in Charles Dickens’s collective opus, but the light of the Marxist Utopia shines through Comrade Hatherley’s firm belief in the return of Soviet architecture…

THE GREAT WHITE SHARK

Readers, throughout the years I’ve had a precarious and ambivalent web-relationship with Kim Dot Dammit, but while that seemingly comes from her perception of me as an aggressive male - she confuses my performance with her own aggression - it really comes from a deep psychological similarity between the two us (we even have equivalent names, Nicolini and Nikolic). Sometimes I read Dammit’s confessionals and I nod as if the same things happened to me, in a parallel reality. Yet another interesting example of how blogging creates these multi-dimensional Doppelgangers and refractions. I really don’t know how I and Kim would get along if we really knew each other in person, but that doesn’t matter because our interaction on the web created this new personality, the Kim-Dejan, who sometimes feels like he’s traversed all the dimensions of Kim’s abusive experiences.

We already talked about this, via K-punk’s intriguing article on blogging as Doppelganger-creation. But this recent example really stunned me: the great white shark.

As Kim was putting into words exactly the castration fantasy that has obsessed me all my life - being eaten alive by a great white shark - I suddenly felt an almost telepathic connection with her visceral experience of the creature. And the great white is a Lovecraftian apparation par excellance, readers, for her endlessly fascinating mouth both stands for the Lacanian Hole and the vortex into which the hero of ”Dagon” gets sucked in as he realizes his primordial connection with the world of beasts. Mind you I’m not exactly talking about the IMAGE of the shark, I am talking about the feel of her rough flesh and her sharp teeth penetrating my skin. My confused realization that I am in the grip of something big and uncontrollable, horrifying beyond words, as I simultaneously fear dread and desire the blackness staring at me from the shark’s small lifeless eye. The quality of this representation, if you could call it that, is more material than a mere image. It has organic qualities, as though existing in some parallel dimension between reality and fantasy. Maybe that’s what Deleuze considered to be the time-image?

All this comes in reaction to the unfortunate demise of a Californian swimmer, thought to have been devoured by the great white shark. I really can’t bring myself to feel any sympathy, readers, especially because the image of Steve Irwin is branded in my brain. Steve was the type who should have been told by his clinical psychologist that perhaps smoking would be a more sociable way to commit suicide.

ADUMBRATION OF THE WEEK

Badiou opts for mathematics as the ultimate seduction: the mind “subjectivating” a proof is as far as can be from the mind captivated by opinion.

(Comrade Dominique Fox at Dr. Sinthome’s blawg)

MEDIA PHILOSOPHY

Readers, that the internet is a kind of a Babylonian tower, an attempt to bring the world together by speaking the same language, is already evident from the similarity of its abbreviations and neologisms to the language of Esperanto. As we get further into the analysis we notice that there is a kind of an invisible authority behind the internet which imposes an uniform coda. For example, certain so-called ”widgets” in Word Press are designed so that they must necessarily find links between your article and other articles in the blogosphere. Because the sole purpose is the rhizome-like spread of ”blogging”, more as an affective force than anything really insightful and smart, the mechanism will stupidly link your article to articles which have absolutely nothing to do with your text. And this ,readers, is exactly how self-managing adumbrations work. They are plugged into a perpetuum mobile, circular statements and doublebinds that multiply in viral fashion. The result is this annoying cross-referencing fetish where of course the references lead up to exactly nowhere. Where would they be leading up to, anyway, when the internet is clearly organized as a rhizome around an empty core? But as my hero and cyberpunk icon Shaviro wisely remarks in his article on THE DIARY OF THE DEAD, this is exactly the point: the internet has taken on a life of its own, the new flesh has crossed over into reality, so now the internet is reality and not the other way round. We must find a way to use its self-managing adumbrations against it, keep looking for those rabbit holes to jump in and out of.

Then when you think of ‘’spam” it gets really interesting. The sheer amount of communication refuse you receive on a daily basis makes the whole internetting process completely unproductive, for by the time you’re done cleaning up the communication mess created by the spam you didn’t even have time to respond to some commenter or correspondent who truly had something to say or might have had an interesting angle on things. This is all perfectly understandable when you think that computers are still essentially stupid, for they can neither create nor do they have emotional intelligence. They are in other words still not designed for human beings. Yet the marketing and military hacks who invented the internet knew very well that the force of propaganda is in its constant repetition, the relentless Drive of repetition, and so the power of spam comes from its cumulative effect rather than its content.

BREAKING NEWS

Readers, Kamarad Lenjinino officially announced his bisexuality and polymorphous perversity, inviting us to be QUEER with him.

I’m with Foucault and Gore Vidal in disparaging the gay-straight dichotomy. Like the vast majority of humanity, I am bisexual. Doubly perverse, I stick the oar in all currents. On the Kinsey scale, I am about a two I think. So if it walks and talks, I will do it to it. (Notice I said ‘talks’. I’m not interested in pre-linguistic creatures, not even the attractive ones.)

That aside, Lenin’s Tomb will be going queer again shortly as I discuss the contribution of Oscar Wilde to gay liberation and socialism. So kindly remain deviant, criminal and insurgent.
lenin | Homepage | 25 Apr, 22:15 | #

The Parody Center applauds Kamarad’s coming out in public, and invites him in for a series of Marxist gang bangs taking place in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Kamarad Nymphomania is especially invited to help us with a few more concrete aspects of group sex. The media performances will include Makavejev’s WR MYSTERIES OF ORGASM and a special appearance from LE COLONEL CHABERT performing a belly dance to the tune of Simarik.

DVD REVIEWS: HELLBENT

Quite a good poster, readers! It makes an allusion to Bunuel´s UN CHIEN ANDALOU, the first cinematic punishment of voyeurism that set the tone for both Hitchcock´s PSYCHO and David Lynch´s BLUE VELVET. In PSYCHO, there is an analogous scene of Norman Bates watching Janet Leigh in the shower through the peephole. In BLUE VELVET, Kyle MacLachlan is hiding in Isabella Rosselini´s closet. But because the eye of the character being depicted is ARTIFICIAL, the knife does not really penetrate through the iris. The retina is already dead! Behind the lens there is only a black socket. When in the end the eyeless character imagines the killer swallowing his artificial eye, this is clearly Oedipus dreaming about the bloody punishment that follows when you go to bed with your Mom.

Readers, HELLBENT could easily have made the mistake of telling you why its serial killer, the mysterious hunk in a Devil´s costume, kills almost all gay characters in the film. Instead, the movie lets you sense how the queens´ castration anxieties come back to stalk them! Pretty cool movie, readers, especially coming from the art director of ´´Who Shot Andy Warhol´´, an exquisite Lacanian reading of Valerie Solanas.

(In relation to this I was thinking about American Stranger and Shaviro´s recent musings on character. Seen from their perspective, it is precisely because the killer´s psychological motivation isn´t explained, PSYCHO-style, as a reaction to parental abuse, precisely due to this emptying of character, that the channel opens for a deadly gay affect. There is a hilarious scene wherein the queens are making assumptions about the killer´s identity and one tranny remarks that he could be decapitating men so that they´d suck him off better. The scene is a great parody of the ´´psychological motivation´´ school within the slasher genre.)

The first two queens who get killed engage in oral intercourse. One of them gets the knife straight into his mouth before he is decapitated. The next victim is a slave boy, comically in denial about his masochistic desires, who tells people that his leather outfit was ´´borrowed´´. Then we get a drag queen, similarly apologetic about his female jouissance, losing his head at the very same point he´s about to give up on the drag. And in the film´s most potent parodic scene, all the queens are offering up their asses to the stalker because they see the contours of a very large cock.

The killer is the Imaginary Phallus that neither of the characters owns, would like to have, but the possession of which continuously evades them. He is also clearly homophobic and macho, a father figure like George Bush, which explains why all the queens in the movie want to sleep with him.

The film´s parodic format is inspiring because on the one hand, it equates the queens with dumbhead blonde bimbos from slashers like ´´Friday the 13th´´, and on the other hand, because everyone and everything in the movie seems to be queer. HELLBENT takes place in a dimension akin to Samuel Delaney´s sexotopia from ´´Phallos´´. But this delirious fantasy of queeny bliss keeps getting interrupted by the Phallus, causing recurrent castration.

The movie´s slogan says, when the night belongs to the devil, the party goes to Hell. What really goes to Hell in HELLBENT, readers, is the gay fantasy of uninterrupted jouissance.

THE BLOG BUZZ, 26-4-2008

Readers, the narcissistic cat dr. Sinthome erased my comment again (he must have thought it was rude). It’s been almost two years now readers and our analysis is still bogged down in counter-transference. I tried to explain to readership that the S&M cabaret with Angelina Paulina Smith is unfolding again. Angelina comes in with a critical comment against some grand pronouncement by the cat - this time, stuff about icons and idols - which serves as a cover-up for Angelina’s masochistic desire to be bound and gagged by dr. Sinthome. The cat begins to preach, revealing a curious similarity of her discourse to the form of the Christian sermon, after which Angelina tries to provide an unconvincing excuse for her bad behavior, hoping to get yet another one from the muscled Texan doctor. Just goes to show, readers, the Academia is all about fist-fucking. (Update: readers, the narcissistic cat was kind enough to republish my comment, but this doesn´t mean that our analysis is anywhere near completion, for I just refuse to end my obsession until he sleeps with me. Only when I am properly destituted by the cat will I accept that there ain´t no Big Brother in Texas!’

***

Thanks to the efforts of our positive dad Clysmatics, the Cultural Parody Center decided to extend Jonquille de Camembert’s contract for another year. Clysmatics managed to clysmatize a brilliant review out of de Camembert’s literary masterpiece, Cinemusique, and our parody correspondent immediately felt in his element, what with all the spotlights directed at HER. Jonquille will be adding her usual dose of sly wit to the Parody Center’s brilliant hilarity and critical insight. It was about time, readers, because there are rumors that the Marxian Cobra is returning - with a vengeance. Roger of least Viagra taken by a gay or straight Parody Oscar fame is excited beyond words: Hooray, you are back! Although I know that, like D’Artagnon, you sometimes have to leap over the parapet, ride off on a foaming horse, and gather your forces together in some blooming grove to plot your next adventure.

***

In the midst of all the global warming, climate change and rampant capitalism, dr. Jodianne Fossey is spilling her kind Marxist guts to adoring audiences all over the Bolshevik blogosphere. On dr. Fossey’s list of good intentions, the most remarkable item is certainly that she made a list about making the world a better place. Now readers, every forty-something diva whose idols are fading - and let’s face it, after the Parody Center’s intervention, dr. Zizek can’t convince anyone that he doesn’t need Viagra - usually ends up singing for Malawi -so we are personally unsurprised. We hope for dr. Fossey’s sake that in a decade she will do philanthropy with a bit more grace than taking a canvas bag to the grocery store.

FOUR MINUTES TO SAVE THE WORLD

 

Readers, Madonna may be passe, but she apparently has enough money to work with the most talented experimental artists of Me-Tee-Vee; I respect that in a wimman. His ugly WASP snout aside, Justin Timberlake still comes up with things innovative in an increasingly cloned world. My hero and cyberpunk icon Shaviro is right about most things, but it has to be underlined: I came to this conclusion on Timbalake thanks to Shaviro only.

So in this clip something happens with time that reminds me of David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE. The protagonists have fallen through the looking glass to find themselves in a place where things are apposite, rather than opposite. Time is not exactly slower and faster than usual, it’s become liquid - like the liquid protrusions of DONNIE DARKO that haunt his journeys in the fourth dimension. And the atmosphere is not exactlty hypnotic; you don’t sense a circular movement, rather a distortion. The clip neither moves nor stays still, it appears to unexist in some Moebial universe where time and space have been turned out of joint.

Then you have the Deleuzian forays into the flesh, making it seem both transparent and endlessly malleable; perhaps animation taken to the extreme of its potential to undermine the Carthesian universe. These contortions remind me a lot of the way flesh turns uncontrollable in both David Cronenberg’s films and Jan Svankmajer’s animations.

Now readers both Madonna and Timbalake are Americans, so you can’t expect them to have good taste. Timbalake’s poseuring with machismo remains as repugnant as his coquetering with black people’s rap art. Especially because he looks like a young gigolo in the service of an old French courtisanne. As for the courtisanne, she wears a corset fused with the superstar’s skin in the manner of a slutty Body Without Organs. To put it bluntly, whether on TV, DVD, CD, web or in some k-punk branded spectral format, Madanna is a cheap tart.

 

THE BLOG BUZZ, 12-4-2008

Readers, call me a cynic, but I really can’t get enough of satirizing British Marxists! (And don’t tell me you don’t like it, readeries, for every time I publish some gossip on our favorite continental group, the blog statistics skyrocket!)

This time round Comrade Fisher is wailing about the stupidity and uselessness of call centers, and it’s very impressive altogether, that is UNTIL you think about Kamarad’s underlying assumption, which must be that socialism contained some kind of an efficient call center. In reality, though, socialism didn’t have ANY help for the customers, because it was assumed that being free human agents, the consumers would help themselves. This is why the better-off citizens of socialism went shopping in oppressively consumer-oriented capitalism, while the self service was left to the proletariat. When you compare the two evils, readeries, I really wonder which one is worse, and then to what extent Comrade Fisher’s complaint is inspired by Osbourne’s ”angry young men”. Anycase if we’re going to critique neoliberalism I’m afraid this is not the cleverest of ways. It is certainly not up to the standards of my brilliant dark Doppelganger.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Kamarad Infinite Nymphomania went through much of the United States, making piercing remarks about the gap between the rich and the poor. Ultimately Nymphomania found her American utopia in what sounds like the poshest most comfortable hippie county in California. Apparently socialists are exempt from the plight and suffering of capitalism’s victims! They can form weed-smoking communes in opulent places funded by the capitalist Californian economy, or something. Needless to stress Kamarad Nymphomania did NOT miss the opportunity to visit lefty dyke bars where - this is the best part- they still play Leibach! She also singled out the Disney Concert Hall, and readers, I have long suspected that Comrade Nymphomania is pretty much a Disney person.

I made an honest attempt, readers, to understand Comrade Hatherley’s fascination with Ostalgic matchboxes, but he didn’t answer my queries with anything substantial other than utopic musings about the need to persuade people that Soviet blocks weren’t really depressing. Now it’s quite understandable that lacking any sort of counterbalance, capitalist design - like social realism before it - tends to get overly uniform, so I can understand why people would be interested in crappy Communist paraphernalia. Still the Parody Center is officially against Comrade Hatherley’s attempts to bring this particular monster back to life; 26 years of living in drabness was quite enough to put us off to that crap FOREVER!

In Texas our favorite narcissistic kitten dr. Sinthome is bitching again, this time something about excessive bureaucracy in schools and how that gets in the way of creative thought. The cat has many good tricks to grab our attention, but here you see his best one: portraying himself as Lacan’s descendant who suffers because he sees more and deeper than other people. This is usually followed by an impossible demand to the Big Other, conveniently left dangling in the air as a question that we, and not dr. Sinthome, must answer.

 

THE GREY COCK

Readers, though he clearly had a runny nose when he recorded this, I must admit Comrade Fox swept me off my feet with his gentle performance. I swear it readers if I didn’t get an embarrassing erection I would only have had the most romantic thoughts about this up-and-coming superstar. Who would have thought, readers, that such a clear and luminous voice is being muffled by Badiou’s adumbrations?

 

 

ON THE ALIEN GOD

Readers, I promised this post in February but never managed to get round to it. Apologies for that, and let me repeat that my neglected theological readership is welcome to start a debate. Long-absent readers such as Mind of Fire and SLP could grace us with their presence as well.

So in John Carpenter’s unduly forgotten sci-fi romantic STARMAN, we have a repetition of Spielberg’s EXTRATERRESTRIAL narrative, but there is a crucial twist: the alien who has lost contact with his Mother Ship returns by cloning himself out of the cells found in the hair of Karen Allen’s deceased husband. You must be guessing already it’s a hauntological situation, especially because in the process of cloning, the Alien transforms the dead husband into a divnity. In a retro-futuristic movement, the Alien God resurrects the past so that He may develop the potentialities that existed (but were never fully used). So in a sense, He undergoes a process of Becoming.

STARMAN plays out like a cross between Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Frank Capra’s IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; few movies manage such a weird mix without losing their breath. Had Carpenter played the story straight, it would just be an E.T. for adults, but being a brilliant director, he makes sure to underline that the Alien is an incarnation of Karen’s Unconscious just as much as He is a divinity. In his underrated performance, Jeff Bridges brilliantly captures the alien´s discomfort, his ambivalent position as an entity simultaneously occupying a human body and intrinsically detached from it, ex-isting in a state of permanent flux. This way there is no ”either or” duality between the Spirit and the Body, as you’d have it in a Christian narrative. What we see comes very close to the description of Whitehead´s God, recently given by Shaviro:

We need God in order to move from the potential to the actual:

in order to make the wave function collapse, so that quantum indeterminacy can

give way to a determinate physical outcome. Whitehead devises his own notion

of God in order to resolve the problem of how a concrete and limited “actuality”

can coherently exist “in essential relation to an unfathomable possibility” (174).

(…)

On the highest level of generality, then, Whiteheadian “coherence” has to do with

the way that things – or, more precisely, events – are entirely interdependent, yet

also mutually independent. The world is both a disjunctive multiplicity of discrete

entities, and a continuous web of interconnections.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I´m very curious, readers, what thoughts you have on the subject…

 

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

What has been made obsolete is not Baudrillard and Jameson’s mordant anticipations of the monotony that would ensue in the name of viewer and consumer ‘involvement’, but those positions which claimed that eroding the privilege of the author and the artist carries a subversive charge.

Comrade Fisher brilliant again in FRIEZE

Indeed readers, this ”participatory culture” increasingly bores me to death - all I see on youtube are resampled bits of old stuff. The makers don’t even make an attempt to bring a fresh angle to the remake. It’s a deadening mental activity, and it’s not helped by the vertiginous accessibility of everything on youtube.

Seems my much-loved-and-missed parody correspondent de Camembert did have a point when she said that young people don’t appreciate authorship anymore.  

Just take a look at the top of the pops and you’ll see what I mean:

Duffy - this gal seems to be going back to the Swinging Sixties in London town, giving it some kind of a hybrid R&B-hauntological spin, what with all those hypnotized dancers. It doesn’t sound bad, yet reminds me too much of ”My baby shot me down” by the rapidly fading Audio Bullies.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxr5Rg-Sotg) I still don’t know why we’re going back to the past, but at least we’re going back to the 1960s, not the 1970s, thank the Lord. There are echoes of Rosin Murphy, whose talents were best expounded by Comrade Fisher.

Estelle - the song might be pleasant fluff, but Estelle is still wearing Madonna’s old boytoy costume - why? And why is the clip interspersed with images of a white fashion model when the song seems to be about Estelle’s black boyfriend? I would further love it if somebody finally got concerned about the fact that R&B culture obsessively recycles the Pimp and the Whore as role models. Not because it’s pornographic, readers, but because this is the most prominent narrative of corporate America.

Leona Lewis - readers, people who can’t really sing usually sing from their throat, but that’s not the most deadening thing about Leona, it’s the resemblance of her voice style to Mariah Carrey, who is a clone of Whitney Huston. This makes me feel like my hero and cyberpunk icon Shaviro being forced by his kids to endure Alicia Keys in the car.