Month: May 2010

Back last year, the Telegraph thought the Phantom MEPs would be on to a cushy number:

the European Parliament has decided to give the MEPs only “observer” status from next year.

The deal will mean they can draw full salaries and allowances at an annual cost of over £6 million without any legislative duties to carry out.

The 18 MEPs, from 12 EU countries, including Britain’s West Midlands region, will be paid more than £76,000 a year, with staff and office allowances worth £210,000.

[That is, I was under the impression that the Phanton MEPs weren’t being paid. As usual, there’s a strong possibility that I’m just totally wrong]

One of many, many things I love about Zero Books is their continual willingness, even eagerness, to call out the cultural and intellectual conservatism of the time. Take the blurb to Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman:

That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn’t seem too concerned about this coincidence. This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today’s positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.

Have just ordered the book (and narrowly restrained myself from simultaneously ordering Militant Dysphoria); massively excited to see if it’s as good as Capitalist Realism.

John Harris tears into the right-swinging idiocy of the Labour leadership candidates:

“After so many years of ever tightening welfare entitlements, and with the City elite seemingly as untouchable as ever, to focus any argument about distributional justice on welfare claimants is borderline obscene.”

Somebody at Crooked Timber adds:

Roy Hattersley quite rightly observed that Labour used to appeal to (or reflect) the best instincts of working people: New Labour appeals to their worst. but that’s a direct consequence of their rightwing economics: not that they have to go with horrid social politics (often they don’t) but if you’re making your pitch to working people and you’re not appealing to their better instincts, which are going to be egalitarian, you’re going to have to appeal to their resentments instead.

And another; I’d be interested to know if there’s any hard data to back this one up:

It’s a generalisation, but there are a lot of working class people who would be reluctant to move even 20-30 miles away from their home for a job – their support networks and roots are in a particular place and they want to remain there if at all possible. They thus have no personal benefit from the possibility of being able to go and work in Portugal or Germany. It is predominantly the middle classes, with a culture of moving away from their community for education or work, who can take advantage of this kind of labour mobility.

And one final comment:

Clinton and Obama. Blair and Schoeder. Why do the left parties of the developed world keep selecting leaders and platforms that betray the economic positions that have always been the most characteristic concern of the left? It seems to be happening in different contexts. Is there a unified field theory of why Labour cannot seem to get to the Left of Brown

I don’t

quite

believe it’s just the left. Sarkozy constantly outflanks the PS on the left, although he mixes it up with plenty of right-wing populism. IMO it’s less about the leaders (all leaders batter the fringes of their parties, as electoral necessity), but the weakness of the wider left. There was no serious resistance to Blair.

k-punk on top form

“Azzellini and Ressler’s daring hypothesis is that Latin America is not some atavism, a residual space yet to be subsumed into global capital, but the vanguard – the first area of the world to adopt neoliberalism and the first to seriously propose an alternative to it.”

I’m not sure I’d count this as

daring

, quite; the collective ability of Latin American populations to see through, around and beyond capitalism is a wonder to behold.

Also:

it is important at this point to stress the aesthetic dimension of capitalist realism, its echoes of socialist realism’s disdain for abstraction and montage, and its similar preference for the homely, the populist, the familiar: that which pushes already-existing emotional triggers.

This is in superficial conflict with the usual understanding of neophilia capitalism in general, and within the culture industry in particular. But at a deeper level, I suspect it really is true; much surface change, but nothing fundamental.

Quiet saturday, slowly working in a mostly-empty office, catching up after a week of Doing Stuff every evening. No great loss in missing a weekend; we still have no summer, only weather than entices you to the park and then dumps rain on you.

Now settled in yet another new room, the 6th this year. Room-hopping has been fun (if intermittently terrifying), but this time I might manage to stay put for a few months. I’m no longer quite so full of optimism and indecisiveness, and I seem again to be acquiring more possessions (i.e. books). Besides this latest home is a good one. It’s full of stereotypically-chatty Latin Americans, giving me a much-needed shove towards properly learning Spanish. Plus the big sitting room, with a constant stream of visitors, makes it feel like I’m living out some Ibsen drama.

The office has meanwhile sprouted a workshop. This month they’ve mostly been getting excited by making plastic out of cornflour. It’s great fun, in a nostalgia-for-primary-school way — even for me, with my instinctive discomfort at anything playfully creative.

Also exciting atm: Henry Miller. Nabokov. MIA. Edmund White. Cinnamon in coffee.

Nick Clegg is now promising “

the most significant programme of empowerment… since the great enfranchisement of the 19th century. The biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy.

”

er…you don’t think there might have been a few important bits of empowerment since then, Nick? Like, votes for women? Or, for that matter, votes for non-rich men? Or education and healthcare; IMO the opportunity to be literate and not dead is reasonably empowering. I’m all for libel reform and regulation of CCTV, but they’re hardly comparable to universal suffrage.

Harold Wilson: ““I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.””

This is a great NY Times article, very much in the tradition of bringing in whichever outside expert knows plenty about the subject, and (presumably) giving them very thorough editing for language and comprehensibility.

The subject is aelf-tracking, automatically gathering data about your health, mood, daily activities, storing it in a form which allows you later to analyze it and unpick the interactions between aspects of your daily life:

A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.

The project most interesting to me was one of the simplest, the moodscape mood-tracking system. And even there, it’s less for the interface itself than for the list of mood elements, which I may well incorporate into a spreadsheet and skip the online elements entirely.

Cowardice, national and personal, allows me to present articles like this only if they’re safely enclosed in ironic bubble-wrap. Can’t think of any, so do it yourselves:

work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed bullshit, say “maybe,” focus on action, and always always commit yourself to a bracing daily mixture of all the courage, honesty, and information you need to do something awesome

My attitude to Hunter S Thompson is that of the owner of an overindulged rottweiler, calling him a harmless softie while barely restraining the beast. For sure, much of the HST mythos is true: doubtless he was a drug-addled psychotic bastard who you wouldn’t want to turn your back on. Posterity may have literally turned him into a cartoon — both

Transmetropolitan

‘s Spider Jerusalem and

Doonesbury

‘s Duke are based on him — but there was plenty of crazy lingering there from the get-go. Beneath it all, though, there’s a touching melange of disbaused idealism and a surprising affection for those working less dramatically from within the system.

Even

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

is, Duke keeps telling us, a search for the American Dream. The intrepid heroes purgatory their torsos, strain themselves to the point of breaking, and through this mortification uncover the nature of their world. The apparent nihilism is the aftermath of broken dreams, the realisation that the chnage which had appeared to be beginning in California in the 60s had come to a juddering halt:

[in the mid-Sixties] there was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high—water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

This sense of disappointed idealism, and the quest to regain it, appears much more strongly in

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

. his report from George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He’s striking in his affection for the young staffes and volunteers fighting for McGovern from within the system, even when their positions are far more centrist and pragmatic than anything Thompson would himself countenance.