Nir Rosen on, among other things, the international connections of rebels and demonstrators in Syria:

“Arabic satellite channels as well as Facebook allow exiled Syrian opposition figures to observe the slogans of demonstrators on the ground so that they can in effect be led by the opposition on the street and reflect their views to the rest of the world. As a result it is safe to say that of the opposition activists and organisers on the ground (those who demonstrate, fight or provide aid to activists), nearly all back the Syrian National Council (SNC) as their representative to the outside world.

…

Even Islamist leaders of the revolution look to Europe and the US more than they do to Arab or Muslim countries (with the exception of Turkey). Anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist causes have ceased mattering to the opposition on the ground. It is the death of ideology, in a way. It strikes me as the opposite of many Egyptian protesters who reacted to decades of a pro-American and pro-Israeli dictatorship by expressing anti-imperialist slogans. But the Syrian opposition associates notions of resistance and anti-imperialism with the Assad regime and therefore the causes themselves have been discredited and their enemy has been reduced to the regime and the daily struggle for survival.

The BFI is showing John Cassavetes’ film

Faces

, on 19th + 20th February.

I’m somewhat obsessed by the idea of this film. I’ve never seen it, never seen anything by Cassavetes. Every review I read makes his films seem more urgent and powerful and alive than anything else out there. I’ve even been avoiding watching them via internet/dvd, for the sake of getting the total trapped immersion of the cinema.

Unfortunately the reviewer who

really

makes me want to see Faces is just too overwhelmed to even write about it. She keeps on edging up towards discussing him, then retreating because it’s too much . But here are some simpler explanations:

John Cassavetes’ “Faces” is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: “Here!”….What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live. [Roger Ebert]

What emerges from the series of encounters it depicts is less a narrative than a succession of alternating intensities….Cassavetes films his characters with such deep compassion that even the crudest sally comes off as a gesture of love, a misguided bid for recognition. And when that recognition comes, in brief flashes…there’s a shock of emotional truth we rarely get to experience in life, let alone at the movies. [Slate]

Shot in black and white and overflowing with naturalistic, seemingly unscripted dialogue (Cassavetes films only sound improvised), [Faces] was a tour de force so radically different from American movies of the period as to be sui generis….Many critics prefer their art with subtitles or not at all. Cassavetes dared to believe that art and movies were not mutually exclusive, and he never gave up on the movies’ capacity to move us, to make us feel, to connect us to the world and to other people.

[New York Times]

Many of his films—as difficult as an abstract canvas—are flush with a primitive intensity that makes them, at times, an ordeal to sit through.

Watching a Cassavetes film, you feel like a witness to a familial intervention, or to an all-night orgy of dysfunctional louts. His characters—over-the-hill, alcoholic, depressed, and desperate—seem to be stabbing at life, trying to find a part of it that still breathes so they can kill it, His camera is never more than an arm’s length away from these cocktailhour dysfunctionals, pummeling them until they give in and tell us the truth [Movie Maker]

I love it when political manouvering becomes full-on Machiavellian. This (if true) is a beautifully contorted dodge from Kremlin strategist Vladislav Surkov, protecting his own position:

At one point he began to fear that success would be his undoing: there was speculation that he had presidential ambitions, a dangerous rumour, especially in political circles, and he immediately leaked the fact of his Chechen father, which he had previously kept secret, in order to rule himself out of higher office, or so it’s said. It was his way of saying ‘I know my place.’

I’d quibble with much of

this nettime post by Prem Chandavarkar

, but I entirely agree with the focus on attention as a scarce resource which is becoming perhaps the main target of capital:

If we are in the information age, the

one thing that information consumes is attention, and consequently

attention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantively

affected by those resources that are scarce and important, our lives

are now being affected by the quest for attention.

The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing nature

of alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earlier

characterized by distance – a separation from the normal routines of

life. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity to

everything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, which

were provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult to

come by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few are

willing to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived of

space for reflection, we face the challenge of being “reduced to pure

screen: a switching centre for the networks of influence”.

Adam Curtis, in an intriguing post about cruise ships, explains why so many ships sail under flags of convenience:

All this happens because of The Flag of Convenience. It was an idea that the Americans came up with in the early days of the second world war to allow them to send help to Britain. Roosevelt was worried that Hitler might declare war on the US – so a law was passed that allowed American ships to be registered either in Panama or in Liberia.

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism, but it is now used for purely selfish reasons. Many of the cruise companies register their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia, this mean they do not have to pay corporate taxes in the US and aren’t bound by many labour regulations.

Charles Stross reports on the destruction of British libraries. As an author, he earns a few pence whenever a British library lends one of his books. Judging by this, his income has fallen by 27% in the past year:

Libraries are substantially but not exclusively used by children, the unemployed, and pensioners: mostly people without the discretionary spending power to shrug and go to a bookshop instead.

And note the first group I mentioned. I’m not a children/young adult author, but if the drop in my PLR loans reflects library closures, then we have just slammed the door in the face of a new generation of readers. I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren’t easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don’t believe any good will come of it.

Academic publishers’ restrictions on usage are one of those things that wind up both outrageous and commonly accepted. Here, a Cambridge academic describes his project of mining the Chemistry literature and extracting structured information on the chemicals and reactions involved. This kind of work has

big

potential to improve research — but it also harms the short-term business model of Elsevier. Hence, it remains forbidden.

At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews two films filled with sex.


Shame

depicts the life of sex-obsessed Brandon, a New Yorker who fills every free moment with fucking. And in

Sleeping Beauty

, student Lucy earns cash by taking a sleeping pill and making her unconscious body available for the use of paying customers.

Though neither film is explicitly about fantasy, each describes a kind of fantasy. That of Sleeping Beauty — from the viewpoint of the client — is of easy control, availability. That of Shame is about extremes of emotion. It’s Apollo and Dionysius, transposed to a world where Apollo is getting in on sex.

Sex, here, isn’t necessarily sex — it’s a McGuffin which could stand for any activity which is coveted, or extreme, or intense. Anything which becomes an object of desire, which is fixated on and fantasized about, becomes twisted in a similar way. One kind of mind layers on organized parades of passive partners; another craves extremes of expressed emotion.

Nothing is so neat, of course. For a start, the taming of emotion has an apepal all of its own. Lane, coincidentally, suggests this of Shame director Steve McQueen. His earlier film Hunger:

was imperilled by the coolness of its own gaze. The wall of a jail cell, smeared with excrement as an act of protest, was filmed with such compositional care that it became, in effect, a work of abstract art, allowing us to forget what it actually was: human waste, applied with human rage, and surely unbearable to the human nose. McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

And if the more you think about it, the convoluted all this gets. Not a breakdown, so much as epicycles upon epicycles, an Apollonian OCD trying to leave its grip on the chaos of human passion.

Momus argues that Berlin doesn’t even have the money for its subcultures to sell out:

Berlin sometimes seems like a museum of youth culture styles we invented in Britain: punk, goth, Spiral Tribe crusty. In Britain there’s a perpetual dialectic between alternative lifestyles and the money system, which means that within a couple of years any given subcultural style will have been turned into a big business club scene, and then, shortly after that, will be the soundtrack and the style of a bank commercial, and, just after that, will be utterly naff, dead and unmentionable. But in Berlin it seems that punk, goth, industrial and rave looks are adopted for life by people who live them as permanent subcultural styles, entirely apart from the money system. Nobody hypes them up, buys them out, and flogs them dead. The styles are “timeless and eternal”, the visual corollary of a life of protest and tolerated companionable deviance. Their adepts resemble post-protestant monks and nuns who’ve taken lifetime vows (“I will own two big dogs and make sculpture out of junk”). It’s touching but also somewhat appalling.

Momus:

Mediterranean cultures—and I’d include that whole tranche of peninsulas from Greece to France—tend to avoid the extremities of subcultural style, and I think it’s because these tend to originate in Protestant and Post-Protestant cultures (the US, UK, Holland, Germany) and be an expression of “protest” values, a permanent “reformation”. French, Portugese, Spanish, Italians, Greeks tend to be much more family-oriented and, as you say, conformist, either Catholic or Greek Orthodox culturally, Classical-Catholic rather than Romantic-Protestant.