Oh yeh, incidently, we're at war again. What? How did that happen? No wonder I'm having some kind of pathetic emotional breakdown! Hopefully the military action begun today in Libya will conclude pretty sharpish one way or other. Perhaps a temporary partition between the government of Libya and a UN-administered mandate until public participation can began in either or both bits of Libya. There's been some worrying talk among politicians today about no longer tolerating a rogue state just south of Europe. Well I'm sorry but that's not our business. Perhaps some Libyans do support the current regime but we know some don't and in a localised area they're supposedly under UN protection whatever that means. I'd still rather have seen the Idi Amin solution, whereby the neighbours intervene to restore stability to their borders but given both Tunisia and Egypt are both undergoing dramatic political changes themselves, it wasn't very likely.
It must feel pretty nice for PM Cammers (soon to be Cammo?) to be attacking a regime so publicly courted by the previous government, Blair's especially. Will this international coalition go on to support the democratic rights of all the oppressed in the middle east? The unrepresented majority in the Kingdoms of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc and the Republics of Yemen and Syria? How about the Palestinians? Hamas in Gaza responded to an Israeli assassination bombing with an attack of dozens of rockets today. Which side does our coalition believe is the aggressor in this case?
Wattoo-Wattoo never used violence to solve problems. Hence the picture. See.
I hope at the end of all this we at least find out whether Al Megrahi really did carry out the Lockerbie bombing as the evidence against him did look pretty weak. That silly trade-off where we pretended we felt sorry for a dying man really didn't clear anything up. I'm all for releasing terminally ill people from prison but it would have been nice to have had to have gone through the evidence again in a court before releasing what may have been a mass murderer.
Anyway I promised to talk about The Monoform. I think it's best left to be described by radical film-maker Peter Watkins, where I'm getting all this shit from:
http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PfaY9B27s
The second one, from 2001, is his introduction to La Commune which is an extraordinary film. A probably incomplete version in about 20-30 parts was available on YouTube till fairly recently and it really was an engaging peice of work. The enthusiasm of the participants (it seems wrong to call them actors) was so evident that at times it really felt as if you were watching live, current events. Something it shares with another classic Peter Watkins film 'Culloden' from the mid sixties and its contemporary, the masterpeice 'Battle of Algiers' which is actually a fictional film but filmed in a very similar style.
Anyway one of things I was very impressed with in this film introduction was how Watkins is aware of the paradoxes of his own position whilst being utterly certain that he's right. Most people on a the screen telling what you should think try to intimidate you with dogmatic authority but his own informal almost improvised style invites you to participate and ponder ourselves whether we're having our consciousness fragmented to keep us feeding (with junk food and junk information) or whether the media trend he's flagged up, and let's not for a moment deny he's onto something, is actually a symptom of our late-industrial highly captalised interconnected civilisation. Is the monoform just a highly-sucessful meme co-evolving with the mass-information-culture?
Personally I think that the Monoform has got a bit boring. It's totally ruined BBC2 for one thing and I'd love to see a diversity of informational culture. I'd like to think that new forms of participation are evolving in the rich primordial sea of the internet. It's all dependent on our own sense of responsibility for our own lives and the life around us. We have to face up to what we are including recognising our complicity in the suffering of others whether it be from the weapons being used in our name or the raw materials clawed out of the ground by slaves for our talky-magic boxes. Possibly including the one you're reading this on.
More likely you're reading this on the screen I'm looking at right now. Hello! Don't go nuts, you.
It's late. Better stop.
*********
It was too late and I'd long stopped making any sense. It's now Sunday night going into Monday morning at the end of this odd weekend. I don't feel I really got to grips with the enormity of this 'Monoform' stuff. Once you start looking for it it becomes ubiquitously apparent. Perhaps that's just because of the looking? What is communication? What happens when it fails? I think we're seeing it all the time.
One thing I certainly liked about the introduction film, though which the film-maker critisised himself for was the simplicity and honesty of the talking-head monologue. The best playwrights have always made use of this, of re-personalising communication. Today information exchange is often devoid of emotional context and is vulnerable to catastrophic misunderstanding. I suppose it's better for those who are classified as having autistic spectrum disorders and I've encounterd many on the internet who thrive communicating in a way that is less ambigious. I wonder if labelling them as disordered is really that useful. They certainly present divergent cognitive models and it may be in some conceptial environments those models may work better.
Anyway I'm rambling again. So much to say. To nobody. Who cares? I'm reading this back and smiling at my shortcomings. Maybe I'll try the monologue myself. After all I can't fail to participate with this captive audience. I think he thinks I'm mental. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. Maybe both. Who cares? Everyone else just dismisses it or medicalises it. Fucking idiots.
I never got round to saying how much I've missed the Biography of Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore since the library got it back. Some fucker requested it! I've got him back though by requesting it myself again. Now he'll face dissappointment when he comes to renew it. There's no way he (or she)will finish it all, not if he's got a job anyway. There's too much information. Here's a little nugget I never knew: Palestine only has the name because Emperor Hadrian renamed it that after the Jewish revolts of the first century in a failed attempt to eradicate the people and the faith. The name refers to the Philistines (Goliath & co) who, centuries before, had been the major competitors to the tribes that were to become Judeans and Israelis. Also our old pal Arthur Koestler was wrong about the modern jews being the Khazars. DNA doesn't lie (Unless it's being used by the cops). The modern jews are the ancient jews and we've got to bear that in mind when we impose a settlement on those troublesome cuties.
Oh well back to the dog-shit again tomorrow. Great! I probably think I deserve it on some level. Last week I snapped and wrote PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG in algae-remover on the paving slabs near a really bad bit. Sadly the algae was thicker in some places than others so i expect the only legible bits will say CLEAN YO DOG which might not convey exactly the right message. Next time I'll go for PLEASE FLING YOUR DOG'S BROWN EGGS DIRECTLY INTO THE GARDENER'S EYES AS HE'S A PREPOSTEROUS JERK AND WOULD RATHER GO BLIND THAN SEE ANY MORE OF YOUR UGLY PROLETARIAN FACES AND YOUR IDENTIKIT BULL TERRIER DOGS ALL WITH SOME KIND OF DISGUSTING BOWELL CONDITION APPARENTLY. If there's enough algae killer.
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