Le Monde, 24.06.08, carried an obituary of a novelist, Albert Cossery, aged 94, living in Paris, as he had done for 50 years, in a student’s single room in the Hotel Louisiana.

The report began:

“Just a few days ago, you would bump into him in the streets of the quartier de Saint-Germain-des Pres.

“Silhouette thinner and thinner, gait slower and slower, but always dressed like a gentleman, coloured kerchief in jacket top-pocket, head held up, with a roguish eye … often on the arm of a young friend, a blond.

“… He did nothing but think, dream, observe, have a siesta, and saunter in the streets. To be alive was enjoyment enough, his silence sufficed him, he was happy.

“Someone asked him one day if he wasn’t bored with own company. Since he could still speak, he responded: ‘I couldn’t be bored, I’m with Monsieur Cossery’.”

In Cairo he had been educated by the schools of the Christian brothers and in love with classical French literature; he arrived in Paris after the war, and never left.

He lived it up a lot, dancing and hanging out at the Tabou and at the Montana with Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Juliette Greco or Henry Miller, accompanied by his wife, the actress Monique Chaumette, escaping from filming with Jean Vilar’s TNP.

He was proud of being a writer. “Look at these hands, they have not worked for the past two thousand years,” he’d say, a courteous reference to ancient Egypt.

He wrote a book of stories and seven novels, the masterpiece being Mendiants et orgueilleux, Proud Beggars — in which a homosexual policeman investigates the murder of a brothel servant by a fifty-year-old professor; made into a film with an Arab cast and director in 1991.

But in each the writer never left the near Orient which forged his wisdom. He gave a voice to the wisdom shared by all those on the edge in the gutters of the East, penniless vagabonds and visionaries, hash sellers or amputees, beggars, outcasts, layabouts and wiseguys.

To continue catching up with last week’s le Monde, a comment piece (23.06.08), more in sorrow than in anger, one hopes.

“The return of Fidel Castro, after one had almost forgotten him, in a strange Adidas tracksuit, white top, orange neck, blue-banded epaulettes.

“The press talks of his ‘célèbre survêtement’, and this expression alone suffices to signal the scale of his fall: formerly, one celebrated the strength and length of his speeches; today, one scans his odd appearance. He resembles a startled owl. Cheeks sunken, lips half-open, deep facial creases, grizzled grey hair, and struggling.”

” … He stated for the press, of which, for a laugh we quote: “I have lot to say, but that is enough fortoday. I do not want to impose, simply I am alive and I think.”

“This is beautiful, it is strong. to understand all this, it is enough to try to take again these sentences on his account without bursting out laughing.

“In reappearing in this way, Castro is politicking without measure such that his image betrays him: the image of an old leader worn out to the point of looking like a scarecrow for sparrows.

“Castro, cultivated dictator, should have followed the example of Caesar.”

We are then reminded that recently a marble bust was pulled from the Rhone which archaeologists are convinced was sculpted from life.

“Truly, [the bust] seems to look at us … you are frozen, judged by a sovereign.

“… And it is thus that the dead are sometimes are very alive, and the alive very dead.

” … And Francoise Sagan, with her smiling sadness, makes us forget all the years gone by and the time lost.

“With her, we are always in the middle of reading the opening of her first book. Her masterpiece. The taste of life and death in struggle.”

Footnote: The picture above reminded me of my father when fatally ill with cancer.

However, the Guardian reported last week:

Cuba has approved what is believed to be the world’s first registered lung cancer vaccine and is offering it to Cuban and foreign patients in its hospitals.

The therapeutic vaccine CimaVax EGF extends life with few side effects… It has been shown to boost survival rates by an average of four to five months, and in some cases much longer. It does not prevent lung cancer.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/britishorientalistpainting/

British Orientalist Painting will explore the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930, offering vital historical and cultural perspectives on the challenging questions of the ‘Orient’ and its representation in British art.

Below are some postcards of the paintings on view; the others are in the catalogue, or even, in this digital world, to be seen in real time at the Tate — in the instance of the sign, signifier, and the referent, the latter exists as a painting as well as the scene it captures if, indeed, it ever existed.

If there had been certain other postcards I would have chosen them: a beautiful scene of an encampment in the desert by moonlight by a man who is said to have already embarked on the madness that caused him to kill his father and end in an asylum; a stunning huge standing figure of an Egyptian peasant young woman surrounded by the signs of the Nile’s fertility, in a style and with a face that is the absolute spitting image of Frieda Kahlo; and landscapes and locations I myself have visited in my own Oriental wanderings — Aya Sophia in Constantinople, the Great Mosque in Damascus and a view of the city from way up above on a mountain, the temples at Edfu and Philae and the Valley of Kings in Egypt, and Beirut and, the big one, Jerusalem, although in the case of the two latter my holiday in one was cancelled because the Israeli airforce was bombing it, and for the other it is to come, God willing, though if I said “Next year in Jerusalem” it would not be for that reason.

This is Byron of course.

The hero, or the dissolute, of Missalonghi in Greece who wrote home in 1824:
“We shall have work this year, for the Turks are coming down in force; and as for me, I must stand by the cause.”

Need I say more? The riches and pleasures of the East.

A somewhat softer kind of sensuality, in fact love, gentleness, and learning

This reminds me of the inside courtyard of a house we visited in Damascus.

A little bunch of English tourists with a learned and empathetic Arab Christian guide, inside the mosque I had chatted to an Iranian Shi’ite woman on pilgrimage to visit her saint’s tomb who told me about her relatives in Bayswater. Outside an old man vociferated at our party in Arabic, well, he would, wouldn’t he, as if to say “What are you lot doing here at this holy site?”

As our guide took up off into a warren of narrow streets into the old city, a couple of guys in mufti tagged along discretely until we arrived inside the house and stopped to relax and dring lemonade; I guess they must have been from the equivalent of the Mukhabarat just to see we came to no harm.

Anyway, the point is, in all the countries of the East, what with the heat, you have a cool shady courtyard in which to enjoy the open air.

Similarly, inside there are screens like these, as was explained to me by Ali, my friend and also Friend of the Tate host, whose family live in Pakistan. Rather like venetian blinds they let in the light and the breeze without the glare and the heat, and create a mirror effect of multiple patterns of shadows on the interior walls of the rooms.

TE Lawrence. 352087 A/c Ross. Aircraftsman Shaw.

Actually, I am a member of the TE Lawrence Society. In Syria and Jordan I toured the Crusader castles which brought him to the East as a student.

At Krak des Chevaliers, below, it was so hot I wanted a hat and at the little shop in the castle they insisted on me having a proper Arab headscarf and band — I’m ought to know the name for it, but it was red and white. One man put it on for me, and I had my photo taken, with everyone laughing and joking and saying “Orens, Orens!” Unfortunately, I no longer have that photo.

But I do have the scarf and band. I wore the scarf going to Brussels for the weekend, when, unknown to me, there was a meeting reported later in the press of exiles from one or other Arab state; I don’t remember offhand.

Anyway, coming back through border control at Waterloo I was stopped for nearly half an hour while the Arab stamps in my passport were examined, and I had polite chats with one officer and then his boss about who I was and what I did, and why I took trips abroad.

At length I lost patience and reminded them I was a British citizen but also a journalist on a certain newspaper that takes a dim view of infringements of liberty.

When I told the friend in Brussels about this, he retorted: “What do you expect, going round wearing a PLO scarf?” I suppose he has a point, and I have to ask myself if I was trying to do something beyond, in either instance, stay cool or keep warm.

I have visited Aqaba, the Red Sea port which he captured after a desert march the Turkish army thought couldn’t be done — a stunning victory that set the Arab Revolt on its way, and I have traced some of the track and visited one of the stations of the Hedjaz Railway he attacked.

At this station in the desert, there is the house, built for himself by the German engineer who supervised the railway’s construction, and then a reception lodge for guests of the Jordanian royal family, much as it was 100 years ago but turned into a little museum and surrounded by a graveyard of defunct rolling stock.

I even have some of the beautiful Ottoman arabic script certificates given to pious Moslems, from Bosnia to Indonesia, who subscribed to the Caliphate’s fund to build the Hadj pilgrimage rapid transit innovation — while simultaneously setting up a military supply and reinforcement network to secure the Ottoman empire.

It was Lawrence’s guerrilla war innovation, repeated from Algeria to Vietnam, to have the brilliant idea to tie down vastly superior forces in defending what appear to be formidable assets but which, as fixed points in a war of movement, turn out to be fatal millstones. if the French will not forget the Battle of Algiers, they will never, ever, forget the disaster of Dien Bien Phu.

But here we come to the dark side of Orientalism.

While Pontecorvo laid bare how General Massu tortured his prisoners to get information (and things haven’t moved along much, in this respect, in 50 years — although the present government of Algeria is no slouch in this game), Lawrence in his amazing Seven Pillars of Wisdom told the world how, while pretending to be a Circassian to spy on the Turkish army, he was interrogated in Der’aa and then mysteriously released.

In truth the whole episode is mysterious. No doubt you remember the scene in David Leigh’s epic film (which I saw when 16 and the vast desert and searing skies must “have put the hook in me”); anyway, Bill Fraser played the sinister, oily Turkish officer with a waxed moustache who questions the Christ-like white man Peter O’Toole and then beats him savagely.

The subsequent rape is not shown but unmistakably stated. But did it ever take place? There is no evidence whatsoever Lawrence was captured or even there at that time.

It is a sadistic homoerotic fantasy, pure and simple, projected onto the figure of the wicked, all-powerful Oriental potentate, the flip side of the seductive, submissive Odalisque or servant girl — the word’s meaning in Turkish.

This brings me to other instances which show Orientalism is very much alive and kicking.

One is the recurrent demonisation of Turkey over the so-called Armenian genocide. This is a difficult subject, made harder by resistance today, nearly 100 years later, among some Turks and in the Turkish state, to face the question.

First, the only valid use of the word genocide, though the UN has blurred the definition somewhat, is to designate a systematic programme of extermination planned and ordered by the heart of a state’s government. Anything less is a war crime, group murder, or sheer incompetence or neglect that results in death through hunger, disease or exhaustion.

Such a programme has never been shown to have existed. On the contrary, what do exist are a number of proven forgeries intended to convince the gullible that it did happen.

Below is a famous example, The Mehmed Talat Pasha Telegrams, a book which dissect an Armenian forgery of documents purporting to relate to a genocide programme. Here is one forged telegram from this interior minister:

This is the translation:

This is not to say the Ottoman government did not enact draconian laws, for example:

The Tehcir law, “Regulation for the settlement of Armenians relocated to other places because of war conditions and emergency political requirements”, was passed by the parliament on May 27, 1915 and came into force on June 1, 1915, with publication in Takvim-i Vekayi, the official gazette of the Ottoman State. The temporary law expired on February 8, 1916.

It laid down (1) the military measures against those opposing government orders, country’s defense, and the protection of peace; and against those organizing armed attacks and resistance, and killing rebels during aggression and uprising in wartime, (2) the transfer and resettlement on a single basis or en masse, the people living in villages and towns who are found to be engaged in espionage or treason, (3) the temporary law’s effect and expiration, and (4) the definition of the responsible parties (application).

Remember, in 1915 the Allies had encouraged, financed and armed Armenian nationalists to fight a guerrilla war and seize districts and cities with semi-regular forces, while the Russian army was fighting the Ottoman army on what is now the Caucasus border; in this war on two fronts, fought fiercely and at times with savagery on both sides, there was imminent danger the whole of eastern Turkey would be lost.

Hence these measure in the Tehcir law can be thought to amount approximately to the steps taken at the turn of the 20th century by the British in South Africa when fighting a guerrilla war against Boer commandos. In order to cut the flying columns of farmer-soldiers off from their hinterland and support, the Boer population, women, children and all, were evicted from their homes and herded into “concentration camps” (yes, the British invented them) where thousands died of hunger, disease and exhaustion.

Naturally, anyone outside the camps caught or suspected of aiding the enemy would be shot no doubt without trial or delay. Quite possibly there were reprisals or massacres after particularly galling defeats for the British army. I don’t know the precise history, but you get the picture.

Of course, the upshot years later was the Afrikaans state and apartheid. But nobody now talks about Queen Victoria’s criminal responsibility. On the other hand, neither do I risk prosecution in my home country for saying Queen Elizabeth has blood on her hands, or at least her forebear does.

Hence, to return to Turkey, there were scenes like this this execution:

But for many who died, it was more a question of this, mass deportations and enforced treks to resettlement in Syria or Iraq, where exhaustion, hunger and disease brought about by the disorganisation and shortages of wartime played a larger part than any mass murder:

The Guardian, Friday June 20 2008

Publisher convicted of insulting Turkey

b) even liberal free-minded journalists unthinking recycle the assertion, by no means a fact, that there is such a thing as “the Armenian genocide”.

If I may declare an interest, I work at the Guardian, and the article as it is above was changed by me after it was first put in the paper, with due consultation and permission, from something stronger.

The first paragraph had read: The publisher of a book by a British author acknowledging the 1915 Armenians genocide has been convicted …

The wording of the third paragraph was also changed slightly, the word “deliberate” being removed, since “deliberate genocide” is a tautology or oxymoron, and the phrase “though not the fact that many died” was added.

The term “Armenian genocide” remained in the headline; but what I now more regret — though at a newspaper at night there’s not a lot of time to spend changing things when there are, seriously, more major changes that have to be made.

“…the slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces” may well be the book in question’s view, but it again appears as by implication actually what happened. With hindsight I would have certainly removed the word “slaughter” since, as I have argued, it implies killing on orders what in many case is known to have been unintended deaths due to a multitude of causes; and of course the numbers are disputed even if you use the phrase “up to”.

Well, that’s enough on that subject.

Except to say that if you really are interested, I highly recommend another book for a much more nuanced and I believe accurate account of the true state of affairs in that region at that time.

It is about another Christian versus Moslem conflict within the chaos of the end of the Ottoman empire, the story of the war and ethnic cleansing that began at Missalonghi in 1824 and ended in the treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Though it could be said to have begun in 1071 when the Byzantine empire lost the battle of Manzikert and hence a lot of what is now Turkey to the Seljuk Turks, and reached its peak in 1453 when the last Greek emperor died in the breach as Mehmet the Conquerer’s Janisseries fought their way into Constantinople.

The “Great Idea” was the hope and determination of the recreated modern Greek state to recapture Istanbul and drive the Turks out of Asia Minor to make it once again part of the Orthodox Christian nation.

With the help of British, French and Italian forces, the Greek army all but captured the whole of the western Turkish mainland, after Turkey had progressively given up the whole of an empire that had stretched throughout the Middle East, southern Europe and the Caucasus.

The Greek invasion led to horrific killings on both sides, millions of refugees herded into an exchange of populations, and the birth of the modern Turkish nation and state under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk.

That of course why all Turks are ambivalent to say the least about their history — it was in many respects them who faced annihilation at the end of world war one.

So read this book and realise that in history there are few altogether good guys, or bad ones for that matter.

To move on, one last thought on Orientalism.

I bought this book at the Tate as well as my catalogue and postcards.

As well as setting up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said, as they say, wrote the book about Orientalism.

Just recently there has been a fierce correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement after the neo-Orientalist Robert Irwin wrote a retrospective on Said’s book, damning it with faint praise while acknowledging its centrality to modern thinking on the subject.

In particular Irwin cast doubt on Said’s command of the Arabic language.

Said’s wife was forced to come to her late husband’s defence with personal testimony.

What can one say?

When West meets East … or not, as the case may be.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4114045.ece http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_letters/article4067321.ece http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4021027.ece http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3978324.ece http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3885948.ece

Audio accompaniment from the Airplane

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The true lesson to be learnt from May 68, by Slavoj Zizek 

LE MONDE | 02.06.08 

One of the most famous graffitos appearing on the walls of Paris in May 68 said: “Structures do not march in the street!” — in other words: one could not explain the great demonstrations of students and workers of 1968 according to the terms of structuralism, as phenomena determined by the structural changes in society. 

However the response of Jacques Lacan was to affirm that this was precisely what was happening in 1968: the structures well and truly took to the streets. The explosive events on show were at the end of the day the result of a structural disequilibrium — the passage of one form of domination to another, which Lacan defined as the passage of the speech of the master [of thought] to that of the university. 

Such a sceptical view is not without foundation. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello underlined in their book Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (Gallimard, 1999), a new form of capitalism emerged little by little from the years of the 1970s: it developed a form of organization in networks based on the initiative of employees and their independence from the workplace. By doing this, capitalism diverted the anticapitalist self-management rhetoric of the extreme left to make a capitalist slogan out of it: socialism itself is lived as rejected as conservative, hierarchical and administrative [???? — le socialisme se vit rejeté comme conservateur, hiérarchique et administratif]. The true revolution was that of digital capitalism… 

What survived of the sexual release of the years 1960 is that tolerant hedonism, which today is so well integrated into our hegemonic ideology: today, sexual pleasure is not only authorized, it is almost obligatory — those who does not enjoy themselves feel guilty. This search for radical forms of pleasure rose up at a precise political moment: that where “the spirit of 68″ exhausted its political potential/potency. At this critical moment (the middle of the 1970s), the only option which remained was a brutal and direct push towards the [psychoanalytic] real, which appeared in three principal forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual pleasure; the turn towards inner experience (oriental mysticism); and finally leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany and Red Brigades in Italy, etc).

The consequences of this withdrawal are still felt today. What was striking in the riots in the French suburbs of autumn 2005, where one saw thousands of cars burn in a vast eruption of violence, is the total absence of any positive utopian perspective among the rioters. If the threadbare stereotype, according to which we live in post-ideological times, has a meaning, it is located there. It speaks volumes to us about our actual situation: in what kind of world are we living, where the only possible alternative to the powerful democratic consensus is the explosion of violence which is (auto-) destructive? 

Let us remember the challenge addressed by Lacan to the anti-authoritarian students: “As for being revolutionaries, you are hysterics who ask for a new master. You will get one.” And we have one, indeed — in the shape of the postmodern “permissive” master whose domination is all the more stronger as it is less apparent. So if many positive changes have accompanied this transition, one must however raise the basic question: has not all this intoxication of freedom been merely the means of substituting a new form of domination for the old? If we consider our actual situation with regard to the year 1968, we must not forget the true heritage of this time: the heart of May 68 was the rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, and something not addressed (a Lacanian letter, perhaps?) to the system as a whole, not a critique of it as an ensemble [ le coeur de Mai 68 était le rejet du système libéral-capitaliste, un non adressé au système dans son ensemble]. 

{Digression: Why does a letter always arrive at its destination? 
Why indeed? Why could it not — sometimes, at least — also fail it reach it?
Slavoj Zizek, in another context — http://www.lacan.com/frameII1.htm}

It is easy to make fun of the concept of the End of History developed by Fukuyama, but, today, the majority of people are fukuyamists: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the at-last discovered formula for the best possible form of society, and all that we can do is to make even more just, more tolerant, etc. 

This is why, once again, the only true question today is: must we act within this generalised acceptance of the system, or is it true that the actuality of global capitalism produces in itself contradictions sufficiently powerful to prevent its perpetual reproduction? 

These contradictions number at least four: the menace of an ecological catastrophe; the maladjustment of the notion of private property applied to the so-called “intellectual property” ; the socio-ethical implications of the new technical-scientific developments (particularly in biogenetics); finally, and this is not the least important, the appearance of new forms of apartheid, of new walls and shantytowns. September 11 rang out the death knell of the Clintonesque happy years and symbolises the epoch which is opening itself, in which new walls emerge everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, or at the frontier between Mexico and the United States. 

The first three of these contradictions relate to the areas that Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call the “communs”, the shared substance of our social being whose privatisation is an violent act which one must resist, if necessary, by violent means.

{Digression 2: The Inclosure Acts were a series of UK laws enacted between 1750 and 1860 which enclosed open fields and common lands — the rights people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied.}

Among them, one picks out the “communs” of the environment [nature extérieure], threatened by pollution and exploitation; the “communs” of inner being [nature intérieure]; and the “communs” of culture, the immediately socialised forms of “knowledge” capital, in the first rank of which is language, our principal tool of communication and education, but also shared infrastructures of public transport, electricity, the postal service, etc.

If one allows Bill Gates to gain for himself a position of monopoly, we would find ourselves in the absurd situation where one individual would literally own the software texture of our principal communication network. Little by little we become aware of these potential destroyers, capable of going to the point of the auto-destruction of humanity itself, who would be unleashed if one let the logic of capitalism seize these “communs”.

Does not this need to establish an organisation [a way to organise] and a global-politics engagement capable of neutralising and channeling the mechanisms of the market bring us back to adopting a communist perspective? The reference to “communs” consequently justifies the resurrection of the concept of Communism: it permits us to consider the progressive privatisation of the “communs” as a process of proletarianisation of those who are thus excluded from their own substance. 

But only the contradiction between included and excluded is truly capable of justifying use of the term of communism. Across various kinds of shantytowns, we observe throughout the world the rapid growth of populations escaping all state control, living under conditions of semi-illegality, and who lack in a way that cries out the minimal forms of self-organisation. 

Although it is true this population is made up of marginalised workers, redundant state employees and former peasants, they do not  thereby constitute a useless surplus [reserve army of labour?]: they are in many respects integrated into the global economy, since many of them work like salaried staff in the black economy or as individual entrepreneurs, deprived of any kind of adequate medical or social cover. 

It is not a question of an unhappy accident, but an inevitable result of the inherent logic of global capitalism. An inhabitant of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or a shantytown in Shanghai is no different to an individual who lives in a Paris banlieue or a ghetto of Chicago. 

The essential task of the 21st century will be to politicise – by organising them and by disciplining them — the “masses déstructurées” of shantytowns. If we ignore this problem of the excluded, all other contradictions will lose their subversive relevance. Ecology will limit itself to a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property to an issue of complex legislation, and biogenetics to a question of ethics. 

In short, without the contradiction between included and excluded, we could very well find ourselves in a world where Bill Gates would profit from an image of being a great humanitarian worker fighting against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch from that of being a champion of the environment able to mobilise hundreds of millions of individuals thanks to his media empire. 

What threatens us, is to see ourselves reduced to abstracted and empty Cartesian subjects, deprived of all substantive content, dispossessed of our [psychoanalytic] symbolic substance, constrained to undergo the manipulation of our genetic base and to vegetate in a barren and uninhabitable environment. This triple threat with regard of our entire being makes of us all, in a sort of way, potential proletarians, and the only way for us to oppose it is to act in a preventive way. 

The true Utopia is to believe that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly realistic is to imagine that which, with regard to the system’s parameters, cannot appear other than impossible.

Traduit de l’anglais par Gilles Berton.

Slavoj Zizek est philosophe.

Translated from French by John Flower.

Long Hot Summer Party : A Night of 1968 Inspiration

Philosophy Football proudly presents The Long Hot Summer Party – A Night of 1968 Inspiration. Organised in association with Red Pepper magazine and supported by the Fire Brigades Union. 1968, a year of protest and revolt. Join us for a night to celebrate and inspire.FRIDAY 13 JUNE. Featuring Clash sidekick, Mescaleros member and 1968 Squatters movement activist Tymon Dogg,’ Rocking the Barricades DJ set from Scratchy, 1968 Poetry veteran Adrian Mitchell joined by the best of today’s performance poetry scene, Polar Bear. Red Pepper editor Hilary Wainwright, writers Lynne Segal and Sheila Rowbotham, critic Mike Marqusee and Guardian journalist John Harris, art from San Francisco’s Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company. The party is at Offside Bar, 271 City Road, London EC1, starts 7pm.

20-revolution1

2-03-we-can-be-together

This is all I can manage for now: a couple of rock songs (blue text for download mp4 files), and artwork from the event.

I have two hours of audio, but I spent literally hours last night vainly trying to upload it as a single file.

So I’ll try and rerecord it as smaller files: and here’s a bit of audience banter, 20080618-143045 reminiscences by Sheila Rowbotham 18_06_2008-16_41 a comment by Hilary Wainwright 20080618-165412 a rousing speech by Lynne Segal 20080619-012548 verse from shadow poet laureate Adrian Mitchell 20080619-093253 and a bit of situationism and comment on Revolution and the Society of the Spectacle in the light of Coldplay’s latest album (below) 20080619-104002 from John Harris.

With music from your Melancholy Muse. And, yes, I am going to see him next month.

Long live the Front de libération du Québec! 

04-the-partisan

Yesterday’s Liberation newspaper had an article by an activist, Alex Foti, who apparently organised something called Euromayday, and who was aged two in 1968 and presumably still in his pram.

Tuer 1968 au sens freudian, is the headline. And I suppose we ’68s can be grateful that it is only an Oedipal wish.

“We reject ‘leftwing caviar’ and the tendency to intellectual ’saturnism’,” he says. “We’re more ‘hereticals’ than them in relation to western modernity, more ‘punks’, more pirates, more ‘queer’, more radical in a practical way since we control the means of production thanks to computers and the internet.”

Radical?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Microsoft and Apple (not to mention eBay, Amazon, YouTube and MySpace, and of course, I suppose, WordPress) control the means of production!

Although it is true, as Alex says, the 1968 generation thought it had killed God once and for all, and now, post 7/11 and all that, religion and cultural identity have once again become central, is it not the case that having had one god, well actually two, that failed, he is erecting a third god-like figure?

At least he has sufficient sense of irony to make his slip into a freudian joke.

Whereas in the Observer magazine of June 1, in what was a piece, This Much I Know, of few words indeed, Naomi Klein manages twice — not once but twice — to have a swipe: “I think there’s nothing more unpleasant than a disaffected lefty … The thing I can’t stand the most is the ex-lefties.”

I suppose we know who she means, since her grandad was a red blacklisted from Hollywood, but isn’t there is something uncomfortable about such a Khmer Rouge view of other people?

And I must say I would try not to be so fatuous as is the acclaimed author of No Logo, now giving interviews to promote her latest blockbuster, by saying: “I do occasionally buy Starbucks but only in really desperate situations — for example, if I’m getting off an overnight flight and it’s the only coffee at the airport.”

06-the-old-revolution

Clerkenwell at Tuesday lunchtime