’[T]here isn’t a single traveller by sea who hasn’t come upon derelict thoughts drifting on the waves like seaweed, and there isn’t a traveller by road who hasn’t come upon wind-piled ridges of desert-sand where thoughts are buried thick as the shards of beetles in the cracks of forgotten sepulchres’.

• John Cowper Powys – The Inmates
  

The ‘curating’ of areas for the socially desired means the de-development of what remains for those whom the curators despise. That gentrification will kill is not only predictable, but urgently, repeatedly, desperately predicted. 

Grief is political. 

EDIT: The countdown now begins for two things.* 

1) Angry denunciations of those ‘politicising’ this Unforeseeable Tragedy™. 

2) Kensington, after a tasteful pause, redeveloping atop these new ruins in an Exciting New Direction™ (with, no doubt, a sombre plaque somewhere in memory of those who died in the fire of 2017).

* EDIT 2: 

Unless, as seems increasingly likely, the political crisis provoked is too vast to be evaded. The leader of the council is currently being heckled on live TV – ‘Do you have blood on your hands?’ 

Yes. 

Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC, reporting on his speech after the London Bridge attacks, tells us that Jeremy Corbyn has ‘tried to counter perceptions that he is soft on security, including his earlier stance on shoot to kill, which he questioned days after the Paris attack at the Bataclan’. We’re familiar with the claim by now, that the loony lefty hippy was flatly opposed to any lethal force by police under any circumstances, including during such ongoing terrorist atrocities. But at last, Kuenssberg would now have us believe, he’s turned his back on such lunacy.

Corbyn, of course, never took any such position from which to turn, U or any other letter. We know that this was not what Corbyn said because the BBC Trust itself – not Momentum, not Angry Twitter – ruled, less than five months ago, that the BBC report implying this was inaccurate, and ‘misrepresented the Labour leader’s position on the use of lethal force in the event of such an attack in the UK’. It achieved this by mendacious editing, stitching questions and answers together into some misshapen thing. In the BBC Trust’s words, the BBC ‘was wrong in this case to present an answer Mr Corbyn had given to a question about “shoot to kill” as though it were his answer to a question he had not in fact been asked’.

For the BBC now, nearly half a year later, just before an election of staggering importance, to continue disseminating the same unreconstructed insinuation about some pre-existing Corbynite allergy to police protecting civilians is deplorable. 

To do so to construct ex nihilo a supposed Labour U-Turn – a sign of weakness – is tawdry.

For the person constructing this schmaltzy narrative of Corbyn’s painful growth, to be the same Laura Kuenssberg who purveyed the original smear? For her to herald Corbyn’s consistent position as, now, a ‘change of mind’ on the grounds that it is different from the position her own superiors denounced her for inventing in her own head for him? That is neck of the finest and heaviest brass. 

John Berger has died. The world is smaller.

The machine strains to domesticate dissent, to national-treasurise a rebel.

It would be too overt, too unsubtle, to censor the fact of his radical politics. The theoretical disembowelling must be subtler. Thus, 30 seconds into its short video obituary (second video), the BBC shows a clip from 1972′s Ways of Seeing.

‘Reproductions distort’, Berger says. The camera pulls him into view before a da Vinci. ‘Only a few facsimiles don’t. Take this original painting in the National Gallery. Only, what you are seeing is still not the original.’ He speaks more quietly. He turns from us to gaze at the painting. He sounds now as if he is at worship. ‘I’m in front of it. I can see it.’

That clip ends. ‘The programme’, Will Gompertz interrupts, ‘was to become iconic and highly influential.’ True enough. But it is surely not irrelevant that what we were allowed to see in that truncated clip was not the awed reverie at the power of art that it was made to appear: it was the set-up for its radical puncturing.

‘This painting by Leonardo is unlike any other in the world’, Berger continues in the original programme, as the camera lingers on the brush-strokes. His voice is hushed. ‘It isn’t a fake. It’s authentic. If I go to the National Gallery and look at this painting, somehow I should be able to feel this authenticity. The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. It is beautiful for that alone.’

And then, after a pause, the camera lurches to a close-up of Berger turning back to stare into it, his face now almost angry. He speaks assertively, making a mockery of his previous churchy tones, in a brilliant switch, one of the greatest ever moments of television. He speaks now with quizzical disdain. ‘Nearly everything that we learn or read about art encourages an attitude and expectation rather like that.’

This attitude of sentimentalism he immediately deguts as a mediated excrescence of capitalism. A work becomes ‘mysterious again’, might acquire ‘a kind of new impressiveness, but not because of what it shows, not because of the meaning of its image’, but ‘because of its market value’.

It’s been pointed out by many, including Berger himself, that it is impossible to imagine the BBC making Ways of Seeing now. That’s bad enough: it seems a particularly purulent symptom that in the BBC’s own obituary for the person responsible for one of the greatest works it ever broadcast, it in passing inverts the spirit and meaning of that work. Deploys it to reinforce the very attitude Berger was working so urgently to break.

Call me childish, but I love all the nonsense - the snow, the trees, the tinsel, the turkey. I love presents. I love carols and cheesy songs. I just love Christmas™.

Keep reading

From Choice to Polarity

On Social Sadism.

0:00 - 0:04

Blackness. Slow, laboured breathing extends into a death rattle.

V/O, female: ‘We lost the world.’

 -

0:05 - 0:09

Series of fixed-camera shots of cities destroyed and deserted. The images intersperse with close-ups of wounds and dead flesh.

V/O: 'To the dead.’

-

0:10 - 0:13

An overgrown yard crowded with shambling, rotting corpses.

At the farthest corner of the lot, something hidden in the undergrowth snatches a zombie out of sight.

-

0:14 - 0:16

Young man (Y) runs through the charred remains of an art gallery. A mob of bloody dead run after him.

-

0:17

Blackness. Sound of wet explosion.

- 

 0:18

Y has turned, is staring at a swamp of decaying blood, all that is left of his pursuers.

V/O: 'We’re all prey to something.’

-

Keep reading

• 2002 - Palestine.

Construction of ‘separation fence’ aka 'West Bank Barrier’ aka Apartheid Wall begins. 

……….

• 2007 - I Am Legend.

Wall provides blessed safety for refugees from snarling mayhem.

……….

• Today - Palestine

Running at the wall.

……….

• Today - World War Z

Running at the wall.

1. The demolition is sponsored by Burger King. Everyone is used, now, to rotvertising, the spelling of company names & reproduction of hip product logos in the mottle & decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition - Apple paying for the breakdown of apples, the bitten-fruit sigil becoming visible on mouldy cores. Explosion marketing is new. Stuff the right nanos into squibs & missiles so the blasts of war machines inscribe BAE & Raytheon’s names in fire on the sky above the cities those companies ignite. Today we’re talking about nothing so bleak. It’s an old warehouse, too unsafe to let stand. The usual crowd gathers at the prescribed distance. The mayor hands the plunger to the kid who, courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, will at least get to do this. She beams at the cameras & presses, & up goes the bang, & down slides the old ruin to the crowd’s cheer, & above them all the dust clouds billow out Have It Your Way in soft scudding font. 
2. It’s a fuck of a fine art, getting that pill into you so the ridiculous tachyon-buggered MDMA kicks at just the right instant & takes you out of time. This is extreme squatting. The boisterous, love-filled crew jog through their overlapping stillness together & bundle towards the building. Three make it inside before they slip back into chronology. Theirs are big doses & they have hours - subjectively - to explore the innards of the edifice as it hangs, slumping, its floors now pitched & interrupted mid-eradication, its corridors clogged with the dust of the hesitating explosion. The three explorers have bought climbing gear, & they haul themselves up the new random slopes inside the soon-to-be-rubble, racing to outrace their own metabolisms, to reach the top floor of the shrugging building before they come down & back into time. They make it. Two of them even make it down again & out again. They console themselves over the loss of their companion by insisting to each other that it was deliberate, her last stumble, that she had been slowing on purpose, so the ecstasy would come out through her pores allowing the explosion to rise up like applause & swallow her. It would hardly be an unprecedented choice for urban melancholics such as these.
3. You can’t say, you can’t tell yourself that it’s the intruder’s spirit doing any of this, that there’s a lesson here. It’s not her nor any of the other people who’ve died in its rooms, in any of the 126 years of the big hall’s existence. It’s not even the memories, wistful or otherwise, of the building. The city’s pretty used to those by now. The gusts, the thick choking wafts that fill the streets of the estate that’s built in the space the warehouse once occupied, are the ghost of the explosion itself. It is clearly wanting something. It’s clearly sad - you can tell in its angles & the slow coiling & unfolding of its self, that manifests & evanesces faster even than its material predecessor smoke did. A vicar is called: book, candle, bell. The explosion, at last, lies down. As if, though, the two drug enthusiasts who got in & out of its last moment insist, out of pity, rather than because it must.