A link at Dead Air Space led me to the film ,The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. That film and Nicholas Kozloff’s book ,Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left’ are the basis for what follows here.

It is interesting for me when my definition of the left is based largely on my experience in Australia, to come to a definition of the left in Venezuela that arises from redistribution of oil wealth among the nation’s poor. This is a noble and immediate concern. But that Chávez is in power on this premise alone I find somehow problematic: What would be left of his platform if (for example) the oil ran out? Or if the demand for oil significantly declined? Or if the value of oil significantly declined? Or even only if the demand from the USA alone decreased? And before dismissing these possibilities as purely hypothetical, remember that the Arctic might melt any year now, opening massive oil reserves.

What makes Chávez interesting to me is that the new Venezuelan concept of the left has little environmental component. Chávez is well aware of carbon, and Venezuela has ratified Kyoto, but by providing as much oil to other nations as it is doing, the picture of Venezuela’s impact upon the global environment is skewed. Chávez calls his platform „socialism for the 21st century” and Kozloff describes it as „neither communist nor capitalist but a mixture of the two.”

At Melbourne University I attended the ,Ideas to Challenge Capitalism’ forum, which is a Socialist Alternative event – i.e., a Marxist event. The idea of workers overthrowing their bosses I think is more farfetched in Australia now than in any country anywhere else in the world. Even in the United States phenomena like the subprime crisis could conceivably spark something. Where it is happening right now (for example, at the Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires) it remains legally unclear what the result will be. And yet here, where we believe in the law second only to the economy, the speaker at the Socialist Alternative event gives the example that Australian mine workers could overthrow their bosses. Now, mining bosses are, probably, overpaid. And miners are, probably, underpaid. But to claim that the miners could do the job of their bosses equally well is preposterous. And to claim that the difference between the value of the miners’ work and their wages objectively constitutes exploitation is questionable. Marxists claim that people can be exploited without ever realising it, which seems unclear until consideration is given to an example like WorkChoices, where people perhaps did come to realise it. Or did they merely come to realise something different?

What is the point of a blind, frustrated Australian socialism that aspires only to a redistribution of wealth, arguing that it is the right of the working family to be entertained by a plasma television at the end of the day? The frustration of he who wears a leather jacket and fills up his car at the bowser once a week is noone’s fault but his own. A socialism that can not even identify the absence of perspectivism about the economy as the main problem is utterly impotent. In Venezuela there are many projects of Chávez’s (like the women’s bank) which attempt perspectivism, but they are still ultimately economically evaluated.

What Australia requires is an environmentally conscious, rational left that aspires to consume less – and we already have one. The question is how popular it can become.

Last night I attended the public lecture at the University of Melbourne on ,The Future of Cities’, by Cassio Taniguchi („one of the world’s foremost experts on urban and environmental planning”).

After a gratuitous dreamlarge advertisement the event commenced with Taniguchi’s premise that since the proportion of people in the world living in cities has been rising for twenty years, it will continue to do so.

He may as well have pulled his pants down on the spot.

After revealing his ignorance of the problem of induction, he proceeded with a presentation which neglected to mention carbon emissions whatsoever. I think by now we all know what dreamlarge stands for.

Even granted his premise, however, he provided little that was constructive. He used his experience in the city of Curitiba in Brazil as a model – apparently put forward for us simply to duplicate. Curitiba provided few suggestions aside from more green areas, and a few ideas on road structures. Oh, and converting a gunpowder factory to a theatre. Good one.

Taniguchi littered his presentation with obfuscating powerpoint diagrams. He mocked a hierarchical diagram of a governmental structure, (saying „What are these – squares?”) and then presented a circular one, with arrows connecting it and terms and weasel words strewn everywhere – some of which included „Conquer Conitance” and „Affirm the Integrant.”

Never before have I seen such muddled thinking. His conclusion boiled down to a digression about Easter Island, and the mantra „Think global; act local." By running 20 minutes overtime he conveniently prevented the possibility of any questions being asked.

A realistic starting point for the future of cities and the environment is clear:

Our awareness of Carbon levels will (of necessity) increase. Commuting to work will become exceedingly expensive and increasingly acknowledged as detrimental to the planet. The rise of conference technology will make it possible for people to work closer to their homes, decreasing carbon emissions as well as individual stress from commuting.

I would like to thank the University for flying out Taniguchi and illuminating the dichotomy between dreamlarge and rationality.

The Australian Football League has opportunely chosen this, the time of the descending of thousands of national flag-wearing Catholic minors upon Melbourne and Sydney, to announce that it is considering granting an 18th license to a ,Sydney Celtic’ team in order to „bring an expanded television audience in Ireland and across Britain.”

That Mike Fitzpatrick is even giving consideration to introducing a Celtic team – with all that entails – into our supposedly non-denominational game, confirms him as the league’s latest psychopath elect. The lure of „opening a marketing bonanza given the international cache afforded the Boston Celtics (basketball team) and Glasgow Celtics (sic) (a soccer team)” seems to echo James Hird’s grandiose Manchester United–Essendon alliance of 2004. I don’t watch much Premier League any more, but I have yet to see any red sashes on the terraces at Old Trafford, (or, for that matter, in downtown Poipet).

The role of the governing body in any other franchise competition is to protect the member clubs. In this the AFL has colossally failed in deference to the pursuit of its own narcissistic objectives. I need not here juxtapose the turmoils of the Victorian clubs with the bizarre manifestation and inevitable rise of each of the teletubbie clubs since 1987. Caroline Wilson rightly identifies the Brisbane Lions as Wayne Jackson’s love child, and there may be two more bastard siblings to come.

I was lucky enough a few weeks ago to clap eyes upon a book on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore on Flinders Street. Unmarketable is both a tour of contemporary marketing strategies and a rare example of an attempt to escape them; to „find a disconnect between marketing and the marketed.”

The author, Anne Elizabeth Moore, identifies that marketing has now moved beyond mere branding and on to emotional connection. No longer is the physical product what is being bought; identical products with different logos will fetch different prices as determined by the market, and marketing is largely the science of this phenomenon. If you are interested, I highly recommend reading the book for the many examples of canny marketing strategies. For now, though, here are two particularly sentient examples that I like:

One emotional disconnect was captured in the PBS Frontline documentary The Persuaders during a segment shot at a market research firm outside Boston. A perky researcher questions a subject about a product. “I’m going to read you some different emotions,” the researcher begins. “For each one of them I just want you to tell me yes or no as to whether or not you think you feel that emotion when you’re eating white bread. The first one is accepting.”

The subject, a reasonable-looking man in a grey cardigan, looks slightly baffled, and rolls his eyes over the room. After a lengthy pause, he haltingly responds, “Yeah, I would say accepting.” It’s clear that it had never occurred to him that he might feel accepting of such a meal, but the suggestion that he might was persuasive. The researcher continues as if nothing is amiss. “Affectionate,” “lonely,” “disappointed,” “afraid,” and “trusting” all get negative responses, however, and it is not until “uncertain” is called out that our subject seems to clue back into what is going on.

“Yeah,” he responds. “A little uncertain – I’ve got a question,” he hurriedly adds, knowing this is breaking the rules established for the survey. “Have you found people to feel, to say yes, they feel lonely when they eat bread?” […]

That is the moment when the subject voices his emotional distance from the process of emotion based marketing.

The second example concerns the author and her peers going to see a Star Wars movie. In my own case the example would do just as well by replacing instances of Star Wars with The Simpsons Movie:

Star Wars is so deeply wound into the mythology of the underground – and the rest of our culture at large – that it is genuinely unthinkable that we wouldn’t attend and support every episode of the series. In this one case, the perfect formula for propaganda under democracy has been discovered: individuals may grumble mild criticisms but never question brand allegiance.

For example, I saw Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith because I was raised in a media environment that dictated I care how the series concluded. In other words, I saw it because it seemed inevitable that I would. In a way, it is inevitable – it might be on at a friend’s house one afternoon, background noise for some themed event, or just always already on somewhere. I didn’t have to run out within days of the film’s release and watch it in a theater for nearly ten bucks. […] A quick poll of sixteen individuals, mostly friends, who have worked hard to create entertainment and distribution systems entirely separate from the corporate world’s, and often under conditions of poverty, revealed a similar ambivalence. All but one of 16 of my friends polled had seen Revenge of the Sith – most in the theatres, and a shockingly large percentage on opening weekend. And they – we – went not with a sense of joy or anticipation, but with a sense of resignation knowing straight up that the movie was going to suck.

Here then, „Star Wars represents our ultimate advertising nightmare: that marketing can force us to act in a way that’s antithetical to our own interests. […] Good, smart, and not rich people are actively voicing displeasure with entertainment consumed seemingly of their own free will. They were convinced to consume not because their better judgement dictated they do so but because their emotional connection to the product and the mode in which it was marketed compelled them to. I know – I was one of them.”

It is clear that „if a disconnect between marketing and the marketed is going to occur, it’s going to have to be based on emotion.” But how? „Strategies that do not play directly into the maniacal logic of consumerism are difficult to locate and describe, precisely because doing so plays directly into the maniacal logic of consumerism.” We have all come across the dissenters, particularly on t-shirts, where Nike becomes Pike, Nestlé becomes Nasty, Ford becomes Fuck, and so on. But (and here’s where I started to learn), „rarely does an antimarketing campaign contribute to effective change… because strategies that rely on parody or other forms of image reuse directly reproduce what is being rebelled against.” Pike says Nike as much – or even more – as does Nike, because despite that the brand is obscured, it is still communicated. Moreover, the brand is strengthened because it is communicated without even being properly there! „The differences between mocking and mocketing are negligible if they exist at all.” Further, „Don’t drink Starbucks” is a little too similar to „drink Starbucks”. And given that marketers mine Naomi Klein’s No Logo for fresh marketing strategies, more broadly anything sounding whatsoever like „No Logo” is too similar to „Logo”. Worryingly, any „participant accedes victory by simply agreeing to play.”

In one example that does identify a disconnect with emotion-based marketing, Moore encourages children to „send letters to corporate entities as a first step towards engaging in critical dialogue with the faceless businesses that dominate our world. [Her] suggestion was that should a response fail to come we could perhaps decide that our emotional attachment to these corporations was misplaced and undeserved.” (Compare with Dave Eggers' wonderful Letters from Steven, a Dog, to Captains of Industry in The Burned Children of America.)

But the promise of her book – a model of a disconnect between emotion based marketing and the marketed – disappointingly boils down to a few paragraphs at the end. Her proposed model she describes as „perfectly appropriate for our dirty, messy underground." It is „a stain. A slight flaw. A little failure. A mark imperceptible to most, and difficult to locate but impossible to remove, a stain looks very much like everything that surrounds it, until you notice its fundamental difference. And by then you can’t get rid of it.” Huh? A stain? This all sounds too abstract, and her only working example is a band called HeWhoCorrupts, who I am not familiar with, but who, despite their talk of „demographics” and their „ridiculously well-conceived merch” and moreover that „their goals are pure profit,” she somehow cliams are different because they „fail to pursue profits over passion.” I can’t make any sense of this, and I am not prepared to familiarise myself with the aforementioned hard-core punk band. But we need not think for too long about Moore’s abstract criteria for a disconnect in order to find a model of our own, and it happens to be a band as well. Who gave away their music for nothing? Who performed in London at short notice and for free? Whose worldview is „imperceptible to most, and difficult to locate but impossible to remove?" Do I need to spell it out in a cipher code?

How and why the underground can not articulate its objections to guerilla marketing, or consumerism, or capitalism, is only a small instance of the wide phenomenon in which the subtlety of the anxiety of the left can not combat the unambiguous goals of the right. Everywhere „we think the same things at the same time / we just can’t do anything about it.”

In the end, for Moore, „as long as you are still working on stuff – building communities of resistance and politicizing culture and actively making meaning on your own terms – you are still powerful.” It’s not a bad start, but it remains that „YOU ARE A TARGET MARKET”...

I thought Radiohead’s position on football was clear in light of Stanley Donwood’s (very) short story Sky Sports which featured in the Scotch Mist webcast:

One day I found out that my urine was acting like a powerful foaming agent. I thought that I could take advantage of my ability by hosting piss-scented foam parties in the pub toilets, but the landlord wasn't keen. He didn't think that people would be interested. In fact, he said that it was a disgusting idea. I said I'd rather go to a piss foam party than watch the fucking football, but he said that I'm in a very small minority and the big screen stays.

So it was a big surprise to me to find in an interview that Ed O’Brien is a Manchester United fan:

Ed O'Brien is a happy man this Thursday lunchtime. Not only did Radiohead play two fairly flawless shows for the BBC yesterday but his beloved Manchester United beat Roma 2-0 in the Champions League at the Stadio Olimpico. "The football was better than the gig," he beams. Being Oxford-born and now resident in north London, Ed clearly fits the description of the Man U fan to a tee but at least he went to Manchester University. He still knows "a few boys" at Old Trafford who get him tickets, and is concerned that Mani of The Stone Roses/Primal Scream has defected to the breakaway anti-Glazer team AFC Manchester. […]

When we made our first record, Sean and Paul [producers Slade and Kolderie] said I was sort of like the keyboard player. I took great offence at the time but now I realise it's kind of true. I see myself as a bit of a sweeper – bit of rhythm, can play up front or in the hole. I'm not a Ronaldo or a Rooney: that's Thom and Jonny. But in my dreams I'm a Paul Scholes."

Surely this isn’t for real! And yet now the cryptic title ,Ed Becks McLaren’ that appeared above a photo of Ed with a newspaper that appeared in January on Dead Air Space makes sense.

Perhaps I shall attempt to source and forward to Ed one of the Manchester United shirts overprinted with torture victims from Abu Ghraib prison that I saw at the pinko screenprinters on Sydney Road a couple of years ago!

A group of Australian cyclists training for the Olympics recently crashed when the driver of a Ford Falcon purposefully swerved in front them and abruptly slammed on the brakes. In the aftermath of the accident, as the cyclists attempted to discern whether any of the group had been killed, motorists in other vehicles yelled abuse as they passed, including „Get a car, tightarses.”

That the driver of the Ford was frustrated at driving his Ford is not surprising. I see drivers all the time flooring the accelerator, screaming round corners, and mounting curbs, and they are almost invariably in Holdens or Fords. This mode of driving is symptomatic of a recessive malaise with the vehicle in suburbia.

I am reminded of a quote by Max Bruinsma I saw in the design journal Open Manifesto. He says, „in today’s visual communication there are, bluntly speaking, two operative strategies for a designer; to sedate consumers or to activate citizens.” It is due time for such dichotomies as these. We have lived in consumer society long enough to know where we stand. It is about time for we sympathisers to rail: Act upon your suspicions.

„You’re either in the club, baby, or you’re not.” The lines are drawn.