The Contestant

Attacking the avarice of banks is like criticizing a vulture for being hungry, but such is the thematic nut of "El Concursante". In his debut feature, writer-director Rodrigo Cortes fails to take the premise anywhere interesting, but the pic has a madcap, contempo energy that could find it offshore fans -- especially among younger auds who can find art in videoclips and identify with the spirit of rebellion.

from Variety

MP arrested using terror laws

from PJC Journal - by IanPJ

Jersey is $491bn tax haven

By the end of last year the international super-rich had stashed assets worth $491bn in Jersey in order to 'illegally avoid tax', according to a new report.

This staggering figure - nearly five times the annual global aid budget - comes from authoritative US-based financial think-tank Tax Analysis. It will heighten concern that the UK government is failing to crack down effectively on international tax evasion.

Nick Mathiason - the Guardian

Disco's lost superstar

Arthur Russell was a musical wanderer best known as a disco producer, but understanding his place in the history of disco calls for a renegotiation of terms. For one thing, Russell followed an unlikely path to the dance floor. Before moving to New York in 1973 at the age of 22, he had lived in a Buddhist commune and studied Indian music in California. His early years in the city included a stay with Allen Ginsberg, an East Village address shared by punk maestro Richard Hell, and collaborations with Philip Glass and John Cage. He ran with filmmakers, painters, performance artists. His most beloved instrument, then and throughout his career, was the cello—not the first instrument one asks to dance to.

from Slate.com

Thinking the unthinkable

For 30 years, any suggestion that the liberal order might be amended to improve the living conditions of ordinary people, for example, met with the same stock responses: the Berlin wall has gone, didn’t you notice?; that’s all ancient history; globalisation is the order of the day now; the coffers are empty; the markets won’t stand it.

by Sergei Halimi - Le Monde diplomatique

You can't howl a gripe!

Review of Kerouac's "On The Road"

In three hundred pages these fellows cross America eight
times, usually camping on friends or relatives; and they have
kicks. The narrator tends to become saddened by it all, but
gives little evidence of understanding why. The fellows seem
to be in their middle or late twenties ("not long after my wife
and I split up") surprisingly, for the kicks are the same as
we used to have less solemnly in our teens, between terms.
Mostly they are from the middle class. Many other young
men in their twenties and thirties call this book crazy and the
greatest, as if it were their history: they were there. So let's
look into it.

To an uncritical reading, On The Road seems worse writ-
ten than it is. There are hundreds of incidents but, through-
out most of the book, nothing is told, nothing Is presented,
everything is just "written about." Worse, the narrator seems
to try to pep it up by sentences like, "That night all hell
broke loose," when the incident is some drinking sailors re-
fusing to obey an order; "this was the greatest ride I ever
had," but nothing occurs beyond a fellow getting his pants
wet trying to urinate from a moving truck; "this was excit-
ing, this was the greatest" but it's not exciting. Soon, when
the narrator or some other character says "The greatest," we
expect that he means "pretty fair"; but alas, he does not
mean even this, but simply that there was some little object
of experience, of whatever value, instead of the blank of ex-
perience in which these poor kids generally live.

For when you ask yourself what is expressed by this prose,
by this buoyant writing about racing-across-the~continent,
you find that it is the woeful emptiness of running away from
even loneliness and vague discontent. The words "exciting,"
"crazy," "the greatest," do not refer to any object or feeling,
but are a means by which the members of the Beat Genera-
tion convince one another that they have been there at all.
"I dig it" doesn't mean "I understand it," but, "I perceive
that something exists out there." On me as a reader, the ef-
fect is dismay. I know some of these boys (I say "boys"; Jack
Kerouac is thirty-five) .

Last summer I listened to Kerouac's friend Allen Gins-
berg read a passage from his Howl; it was a list of impreca-
tions that he began pianissimo and ended with a thunderous
fortissimo. The fellows were excited, it was "the greatest."
But I sadly asked Allen just where in either the ideas, the im-
agery, or the rhythm was the probability for the crescendo;
what made it a sequence at all and a sequence to be read just
like that. The poet was crestfallen and furious; this thought
had never occurred to him. And yet, during those few min-
utes they had shared the simple-minded excitement of his
speaking in a low voice and gradually increasing to a roar; it
was not much of a poetic experience, but it was something, it
was better than feeling nothing at all that night. What
Kerouac does well, not just writes about, is his description of
the jazz musician who has hit on "it" and everybody goes wild
shouting, "Go! Man! Go!" But they cannot say what "it" is.
These boys are touchingly inarticulate, because they don't
know anything; but they talk so much and so loud, because
they feel insulted by the existence of the grownups who
know a little bit.

"You can't howl a gripe, Allen. You can howl in pain or in
rage, but what you are doing is griping." Perhaps the pain is
too sore to utter a sound at all; and certainly their justifiable
rage is far too dangerous for them to feel at all. The entire
action of On The Road is the avoidance of interpersonal con-
flict.

One is stunned at how conventional and law-fearing these
lonely middle-class fellows are. They dutifully get legal mar-
riages and divorces. The hint of a "gangbang" makes them
impotent. They never masturbate or perform homosexual
acts. They do not dodge the draft. They are hygienic about
drugs and diet. They do not resent being underpaid, nor
speak up at all. To disobey a cop is "all hell." Their idea of
crime is the petty shoplifting of ten-year-olds stealing ciga-
rettes or of teen-agers joy riding in other people's cars. But
how could it be otherwise? It is necessary to have some con-
tact with institutions and people in order to rebel against
them. It is necessary to want something in order to be frus-
trated and angry. They have the theory that to be affectless,
not to care, is the ultimate rebellion, but this is a fantasy; for
right under the surface, obvious to a trained eye, is burning
shame, hurt feelings, fear of impotence, speechless and pow-
erless tantrum, cowering before papa, being rebuffed by
mama; and it is these anxieties that dictate their behavior in
every crisis. Their behavior is a conformity plus royaliste que
le roi.

One kid (age twenty-one) visited my home the other night,
carrying his copy of On The Road. The salient feature was
his expressionless mask-face, with the squared jaw of uncon-
scious, suspicious watchfulness, the eyes in a fixed stare of
unfelt hostility, plus occasional grinding of his back teeth
at a vague projected threat. Even the hostility was hard to
make overt, but his lips cracked in a small childish smile
when he was paid attention to. "But nothing can be inter-
esting from coast to coast, boy, if you do not respond to it
with some interest. Instead all you can possibly get is to
activate your rigid body in various towns, what you call
kicks." He explained that one had to avoid committing one-
self to any activity, lest one make a wrong choice.

It is useful to place this inexpressive face and his unoffend-
ing kicks in our recent literary genealogy. Great-granddaddy,
I guess, is the stoical hero of Hemingway: Hemingway's
young fellow understands that the grown-up world is corrupt
and shattering, but he is not "Beat," for he can prove that
he is himself a man by being taciturn, growing hair on his
chest, and shooting elephants. He has "values" and therefore

can live through a few books. His heir is Celine's anti-hero, a
much shrewder fellow: he sees that to have those "values" is
already to be duped by the corrupt adults, so he adopts the
much more powerful role of universal griper and cry baby,
to make everybody feel guilty and disgusted. The bother with
his long gripe is that it is monotonous, there is a lot of oppor-
tunity for writing, but not even a single book. The next hero,
and I think the immediate predecessor of being on the road,
gives up the pretense of being grown-up altogether (a good
case is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye') : he is the boy in the
very act of being mortally wounded by the grownups' cor-
ruption. This terrible moment is one book. But you can't
cry forever, so you set your face in a mask and go on the
road. The adolescent decides that he himself is the guilty one
this is less painful than the memory of being hurt so he'd
better get going. The trouble is that there is no longer any
drama in this; the drama occurred before "my wife and I
split up" before I lost my father.

Sociologically, the following propositions seem to me to be
relevant: (1) In our economy of abundance there are also
surplus people, and the fellows on the road are among them.
There is in fact no man's work for them to do. (2) We are
inheriting our failure, as an advanced industrial country, to
have made reasonable social arrangements in the last cen-
tury; now when there is no longer a motive to work hard
and accumulate capital, we have not developed an alterna-
tive style of life. (3) The style that we do have, "Madison
Avenue," is too phony for a young person to grow up into.
(4) Alternatively, there is an attraction to the vitality (by
comparison) of the disfranchised Negroes and now the
Puerto Ricans; these provide a language and music, but this
culture is primitive and it corrupts itself to Madison Avenue
as soon as it can. (5) In family life there has been a similar
missed-revolution and confusion, so that many young people
have grown up in cold, hypocritical, or broken homes. Lack-
ing a primary environment for the expression and training
of their feelings, they are both affectless and naive in the sec-
ondary environment. (6) The spontaneous "wild" invention
that we may expect from every young generation has heen
seriously blighted by the anxieties of the war and the cold
war. (7) The style of life resulting from all this is an obses-
sional conformity, busy-ness without any urge toward the
goals of activity, whether ideal goals or wealth and power.
There is not much difference between the fellows "on the
road" and the "organization men" they frequently exchange
places.

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's practically
all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nu-
tritious and it was delicious of course. (Page 15.)

On other occasions, they eat franks and beans. More rarely
hamburgers, malted milks, of course. That is, the drink-down
quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the pre-cut meat
for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten
or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for
animal energy, but not much solid food to grow on. I sup-
pose that this is the most significant observation one can
make about On The Road.

For nearly two-thirds of this book one is struck, I have
said, by the lack of writing; the book is nothing but a con-
versation between the buddies: "Do you remember when?"
and, "Do you remember how we?" "That was the great-
est!" Here is confirmation that they, like Kilroy, were there;
but not much distilled experience for the reader. But then
(page 173) there is a page of writing, not very good and not
original it is from the vein of rhapsody of Celine and
Henry Miller nevertheless, writing. The situation is that the
narrator finally finds himself betrayed, abandoned, penniless,
and hungry in a strange city. The theme of the rhapsody is
metempsychosis. "I realized that I had died and been reborn
numberless times but just didn't remember" and this theme
is a happy invention, for it momentarily raises the road to a
plane of metaphysical fantasy. And this is how the passage
climaxes:

In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.
... Let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws.
There were places where they specialized in thick red
roast beef au jus or roast chicken basted in wine. There
were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the cof-
fee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow
mein . , .

Here, at least in wish, is a piece of reality that is not just
kicks and "the greatest"; he wants to eat this food. Silone
was right when he said that we must learn again the words
for Bread and Wine.

Paul Goodman,

From Midstream, Winter, 1958.

The String Puppet

Chancellor to delay repossession orders, homeowners to get vital support in the Pre-Budget Report

Alistair Darling will tomorrow throw a critical lifeline to homeowners facing repossession this winter.

from the Daily Mail

Director breaks French taboo with film tackling Algerian war

While Hollywood produced dozens of Vietnam war epics and is now tackling Iraq, the French film industry has shied away from making gun-toting action movies about its own recent war history.
But one French director is attempting to redress the balance, giving the action-film treatment to the bloody saga of Algeria's war of independence against France between 1954 and 1962.

from the Guardian

Shackleton

When I see the towers fall,
It cannot be denied that,
As a spectacle,
It is a realisation of the mind.

Blackdown

As the voters trickle back, readers stay away in droves

from the Guardian

Knotweed and Gold

How many spondoolicks did Gordon lose us in gold sales?

The House of Lords last week, according to Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail

Community Support

As our organised system perfects itself, there is less "open" environment. It is hard for a social animal to grow when there is not an open margin to grow in: some open space, some open economy, some open mores, some activity free from regulation and cartes d'identite. I am referring not to a war between the "individual" and society, or to a wild animal that has to be acculturated - for there is no such individual or animal - but to a deepening sociologiacl flaw in the modern system itself. A society cannot have decided all possibilities beforehand and have structured them. If society becomes too tightly integrated and pre-empts all the available space, materials and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible. This almost formal cause importantly drives young people out of the oranised system altogether and makes creative adults loath to co-operate with it. When time, clothes, opinions, and goalsbecome so regulated that people feel they cannot be "themselves" or create something new, they bolt and look for fringes and margins, loopholes, holes in the wall, or they just run.
Our society pre-empts literally too much of the space. For instance, it is impossible in the Eastern United Statesto pitch a tent and camp for the night without registering with the National Parks and its list of regulations. You cannot go off somewhere for a sexual bout without paying rent. Almost any stone that a kid picks up and any target that he throws it at, is property. People hygienically adopt a permissive attitude toward the boisterousness and hyperkinesis of children, and meantime we design efficient minimum housing. Under modern urban conditions, it is impossible for an old woman to be a harmless lunatic, as was commonplace in country palces; she would hurt herself, get lost among strangers, disrupt traffic, stop the subway. She must be institutionalized. If you roam the street late at night doing nothing, and looking for something to do, the cop who is protecting you and everybody else doesn't want you to be going nowhere and to have nothing to do; and you ask him, Does he have any suggestions?

from "Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman

Slumdog Millionaire - a film by Danny Boyle

Review from NY Times

Only in Germany: The Captain of Koepenick's Historic Coup

One hundred years ago, on October 16th, 1906, a German impostor named Wilhelm Voigt masqueraded as a Prussian military officer. He had purchased parts of used captain's uniforms from two different shops. In the Berlin district of Koepenick he went to the local army barracks, stopped four grenadiers and a sergeant on their way back to barracks and told them to come with him.

from Atlantic Review

Putin's Winning Hand:

Once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered, America's lifeline to the world is kaput.

By Mike Whitney - Information Clearing House

Crisis Bites Art Market as Sale Raises Less Than Third Estimate

By Scott Reyburn and Katya Kazakina

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Lot after lot by contemporary-art stars such as Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince failed to sell in London last night as Phillips de Pury & Co's auction raised less than a third of its expected total.

The 70-lot sale fetched 5 million pounds ($8.6 million) with fees, against a lower estimate of 18.6 million pounds. Forty-six percent of the lots failed to find buyers.

``It's a turning point,'' said Nicolai Frahm, a London-based art adviser. ``The estimates were fairly high and the financial markets are so tough at the moment.''

Bloomberg.com

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

From the Onion Issue 44•45

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

Introducting Putin!

Anarchists

EU unveils plan to reduce Russia’s grip on energy

The European Commission on Thursday proposed building new pipelines to the Caspian region as the centrepiece of an energy security plan that seeks to reduce member states’ reliance on Russia.
The proposals, released on the eve of Friday’s EU-Russia summit in France, envisage a corridor of pipelines that would carry gas from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan into the EU, and the possible creation of a European consortium to purchase gas from the region.

Joshua Chaffin - FT.com

In defence of CDS

Huh??

According to the Economist, that bastion of perennial impartiality and nameless journalism:

'Some of the criticism heaped on credit-default swaps is misguided. The market needs sorting out nonetheless..'

Read on, if you can be bothered. It begs the question, who are these people and what world do they live in?

Trick or Treat!

Anarchism

They talked much of the State—the State.
I had never seen the State, and I asked them to picture it to me, as my gross mind could not follow their subtle language when they spake of it.
Then they told me to think of it as of a beautiful goddess, enthroned and sceptred, benignly caring for her children.
But for some reason I was not satisfied.
And once upon a time, as I was lying awake at night and thinking, I had as it were a vision,
And I seemed to see a barren ridge of sand beneath a lurid sky;
And lo, against the sky stood out in bold relief a black scaffold and gallows-tree, and from the end of its gaunt arm hung, limp and motionless, a shadowy, empty noose.
And a Voice whispered in my ear, “Behold the State incarnate!”

Ernest Crosby

From the New Pentagruel - by Bill Kauffman

Silence is Golden - or for at least one day of the year it is

Author, prankster and founder of the KLF Bill Drummond explains why he won't be listening to any music at all on 21 November - and why you might want to try it too..

from the Guardian

Lenin was a Mushroom

Russian intellectual Sergey Kurehin relates his fascinating hypothesis about the October Revolution.

Divine Styler - Ain't Sayin' Nothin'

Critics alarmed as Medvedev reveals plan to extend Russian presidential term to six years

With Medvedev's predecessor, Vladimir Putin, looking on, sometimes nodding approvingly but mostly inscrutable, the Russian president told his audience in the Kremlin that "we have no problem with the American people". He said he hoped that "our partners, the US administration", would choose to have "full-fledged relations with Russia".

At the same time he said Moscow had to respond to the security challenges posed by the US and Nato's expansion right up to Russia's borders. "These are forced measures," he said, referring to Russia's new nuclear deployment, adding: "We have told our partners more than once that we want positive cooperation ... but unfortunately, they don't want to listen."

Luke Harding - The Guardian

The Containment of the Technological Project

In a world where all matter is, however quantifiably vast, finite, that there should operate a finance mechanism based on a limitless expansion of credit currency is not only contra naturum but certifiably suicidal. It is, even as the front page headlines of newspapers around the world are saying, A GLOBAL CRISIS DRIVEN BY GREED of unconscionable speculators and gamblers who, having lost their investor’s money (while all of the top directors and CEOs of the major lending and insurance companies that have declared bankruptcy had the visionary foresight to sell their stocks as early as 2006), have thrown the affair back into the hands of the ignominious politicians to provide a tax-payer bailout of the very Market they so emphatically insisted that government must stay out of to let business run.

By Robert Luongo for Globalia Magazine

Union Med to be based in Barcelona

More than 40 countries from the European Union, the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East agreed on Tuesday to base a new Union for the Mediterranean in Barcelona, ending a dispute that had held up the project for four months.

By Tony Barber - FT.com

The Medium is the... Massage?

Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title was supposed to have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age."

FAQs on Marshall McLuhan - from marshallmcluhan.com

The truth about South Ossetia

After the west heaped blame on Russia for the conflict, it ignores new evidence of Georgia's crimes of aggression.

Seumas Milne - Guardian, Comment is Free