Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Is hip hop driving the Arab Spring?

Let's stop assuming the police are on our side

'The Beach Beneath the Streets': A Pleasant Meander Through the Situationist Labyrinth

In the Romantic mythologies of the market niche formerly known as the counterculture, the Situationist International (SI) occupies a special place. Founded officially in Alba, Italy, in 1957 and dissolved in 1972, the SI sought alternatives to the strictures of the capitalist ruling order by exploring techniques for opening up experience to the fulfillment of authentic desire. Among those techniques were derive, the drift, unplanned excursions typically into the urban environment to uncover its objective and subjective conditions; detournement, diversion or derailment, the appropriation and alteration of images and other expressions of the market system that would expose their contradictions; and the potlatch, grand expenditures of time and resources in defiance of capitalist rationality and utility.
The SI is said to have played a leading role in the general strikes in France in May 1968, inspired the fashion, music, and lifestyles of ‘70s punk subculture, and set the agenda for postmodern media interventions such as culture jamming, sampling, and other forms of hacktivism. McKenzie Wark‘s new book The Beach Beneath the Streets: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, takes its title from one of most the famous SI phrases from May 1968: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (“Under the pavement, the beach!)
Given his profile as a prominent contemporary media theorist, it should come as no surprise that Wark has been heavily influenced by Situationism. Indeed, his celebrated book A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard, 2004) took obvious cues from SI frontman Guy Debord‘s magnum opus, The Society of Spectacle, both in terms of its sublimely aphoristic form and its cryptic theoretical content. His next book Gamer Theory (Harvard, 2007) was in essence a requiem for the unrestrained spirit of play animating the notion of derive, now corralled within the multilevel structures of computer video games, set by the boundaries of what Wark terms their ruling “allegorithms” (a mashup of the words allegory + algorithm, meant to convey the way in which imaginative possibility has been short-circuited by the digital code embedded in predetermined game narratives).
Most recently, Wark lectured on the Situationists at Columbia University, the documentation of which has been issued by Princeton Architectural Press under the title 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. The Beach Beneath the Streets expands on that last text, including whole sections that have been incorporated nearly verbatim...

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Vince Carducci @'PopMatters'

Citizen Rupert

What Rupert Murdoch means for you personally

Murdoch Veterans Portray an Engaged Boss

HA!

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freak

'Please listen to the plight of Fukushima people left behind by their own government'

Residents stonewalled by government officials

Hold On. It'll be OK

YES!!!

Is Australia too obsessed with sport?

Pearl Jam Twenty Trailer

Pearl Jam Twenty chronicles the years leading up to the band's formation, the chaos that ensued soon-after their rise to megastardom, their step back from center stage, and the creation of a trusted circle that would surround them—giving way to a work culture that would sustain them. Told in big themes and bold colors with blistering sound, the film is carved from over 1,200 hours of rarely-seen and never-before seen footage spanning the band's career. Pearl Jam Twenty is the definitive portrait of Pearl Jam: part concert film, part intimate insider-hang, part testimonial to the power of music and uncompromising artists.