'Not Now, Not Ever!'

Julia Gillard's epic anti-sexist Parliamentary speech set to music

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/17/julia-gillards-epic-anti-sex.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

FYI - an occasional alternative to amazon

http://www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk/

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/

Painting from life....

http://hyperallergic.com/99056/the-people-behind-your-images-of-luxury/

Search Harvey, Graeber, Massey

http://selforganizedseminar.wordpress.com/library/

Slapstick and social observation: Beryl Reid 1968

Levels of false consciousness

Regarding a conversation I had with Corey after watching the final instalment of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", about the myth of racial superiority within the population of The Congo which was proliferated by the Belgian colonial masters, ultimately, as a means of divide and rule; specifically, the psychology of the subjects, both perpetrators and victims:

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (more a liberal than a socialist) described cynicism as a third level of false consciousness: first comes deceit (being the perpetrator or the victim of it), then comes ideology (‘they don’t know it, but they’re doing it’ - Slavoj Zizek paraphrasing Marx), and finally there is cynicism. The cynic knows the falseness of what he is doing and yet he does it all the same. This might sound like deceit but there is an important difference. The deceiver deceives for his own immediate gain, i.e. in order to overcome something; he still retains a sense of struggle with the world, even if he is on the side of the victor and not the victim. The deceiver’s Nietzschean instinct, his will to power, is still intact. Whereas the cynic has decisively abandoned all of this. This isn’t to say that he lacks self interest - he has plenty of it. But he has successfully dissolved his self interest in the great sea of the status quo. He draws every sustenance, every vital need from submission to the status quo. What’s missing from the emotional profile of the cynic are things like joy, sadness, courage - and yes, anger.

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/opinion/16546-antidotes-to-cynicism-and-fear-a-reply-to-dan-hodges

New Collaborative Project - Plus, regular soup kitchens.

I have no specific thoughts on this other than I would like to imagine a form developing from our collaboration,the substance of our meetings and our conversations.
I feel that we need to gather momentum and push ourselves into a joint show I want to see rush of creative enlivening the autumn and winter to welcome 2014.
I want a deadline and the stress of a performance to get to and leave behind.  I want the mess on the floor and the trail of evidence that we were out there. I want to raise the stakes and watch the strains develop and see different strengths and self awareness become apparent in the group. In a sense there is a forge that puts a material under intense heat and pressure and in the process transforms it.
I desire criticism - positive and negative.  I am happy for mine and other peoples ideas to be challenged examined, reexamined, agreed with and then re- disagreed with, it is all fine.  It is all healthy and constructive.
We need to regroup and I need to get out my notes and start on my 'This is Week......', this in a sense is a ritual of commencement of a new meet.
The date of the new meet will be the Tuesday 22nd October 2013 for me, this is because it is the next date when I will re-attend for a gathering that is solely a meeting: as opposed to a film and conversation.
I have to decide on whether it will be week 1 and make a division with the early part of the collaboration meetings or should it be continuous?
The soup kitchens should be revisited but when they are on and around meetings the food should be prepared and be cooking while we have a disciplined shorter meeting.
I have given a lot of 'I's, in this small piece but I am simply being honest and opening up my thoughts for others to hopefully muse on too.

Let's make lots of...

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JuHIRrt5lCI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DJuHIRrt5lCI

Frank Kafka 'The Law' and excerpt from 'The Trial' narrated by Orson Welles.

Before the Law

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” The gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try going inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I cannot endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this first one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud; later, as he grows old, he only mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. 

Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things considerably to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know now?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance wasassigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”