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a time for fear
 
Saturday, May 31, 2003  
Reports early last year spoke about a Shining Path resurgence, boosted by Colombian narcotics entrepreneurs who found fresh territory for drug production in Peru (less risky than Columbia and Afghanistan, both subject to American intervention). Shining Path guerillas made money by running protection rackets for opium farmers and traffickers on the poppy fields, and this financial bounty lay behind new waves of Shining Path attacks that began in 2001. In August Shining Path killed four policeman in a rural ambush, and later that year Peruvian Intelligence claimed to have uncovered a Shining Path plot to blow up Lima's US Embassy. Is Shining Path retooling itself, shapeshifting back in and out of Peruvian society (Shining Path insurrectionists included not just peasants and intellectuals, but doctors, lawyers, school teachers...), radicalising the Andean highlands again, just like it did in the 70s and 80s? This seems unlikely because Shining Path success was based on a fluid network of very tight and secretive cell-structure operations that remained virtually impenetrable until the police successes of the early 90s which effectively broke the organisation by removing Guzman himself
(to his followers the fourth sword of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin, and Mao). Great irony: that a movement so decentralised that each cell was made of up six fighters max, divorced from all contact with the movement command and structure itself except for the individual cell leader who would answer to superiors in an infinitely complex tier system that eventually led to Guzman alone, fell to pieces once the head had been lopped off. It died from the tip down to the grassroots: not so much rhizomatic as aborescent after all (or a fatal mix of both). In 2003 Shining Path remains diffuse, rootless, a faint spray of vicious and desperate resentment in a country still reeling from years of destruction, conspiracy and chaos.



12:17 AM

 
Peru spirals into violence and bloodshed again, a perpetual cycle ever since the days of the Spanish Empire, despite the disgrace and removal of Alberto Fujimori and his shady, paranoid, brutal military regime and the decapitation of the terrorist movement Shining Path, its head Abimael Guzman apparently still pacing his prison yard cage in striped pyjamas. This is how useless things are: the same President that annulled the verdicts of 400 terrorism trials dating from Fujimori's reign (all decided by anonymous judges), who ordered the retrial of Guzman himself, is forced to declare a 30-day state of emergency and order soldiers to shoot students and teachers, which happened on Thursday in Pumo. The enlightened, neo-liberal, free market reforming Peruvian State, all new, and all old, not as bad as the last lot, but not what anyone hoped for...So: a bad mood rising again in Peru. The workers and the peasants are disenchanted, restless, brooding, and...organising?

12:17 AM

Friday, May 23, 2003  
BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner says brilliant things. Explaining the concrete blocks currently being dumped in Westminster by the Met Police - those really short, sandy concrete blocks - as an attempt to "stop a suicide truck bomb slamming into the Houses of Parliament", he goes on to say:

It is not going to stop a determined attacker with really subtle, carefully worked out plans, but it is certainly going to deter the casual bomber...
news.bbc.co.uk

The what?
The...casual...bomber...?
Ok then. Good. Phew.

4:08 PM

 
metal machine

Westminster Station on the Jubilee Line extension swallows you whole as soon as you descend into its vast caverns and tubes, suddenly, you're nothing but a helpless piece of flesh on an enormous conveyor belt, waiting to be crushed alive, cut into strips and put into a can. But you're only going to catch a train! ...and you feel like Chaplin in Modern Times...The architects involved have a great sense of drama, it seems, and also slight irony and cheek mixed in with macho blockbusting. A big box cut into the ground, something like twice the size of Portcullis House that caps it above - the real drama goes on below, carved inside thick and ancient London clay - gutted and knitted into a network of tunnels, platforms, escalator shafts that wrap around you, lose you, humiliate you. It's pretty sublime, actually, the weight and scale of it, the dead, cold, industrial force, concrete and steel power games, what it does to your body, the way it commands you, and your sense of space, simultaneously oppressive, and as awesome and empty as a cathedral. Light is interrupted, cut across, shafts of light slice between escalators and steel tubes and concrete blocks, and on the insides of the escalators themselves, little pools and eddies and dapples of light. Little spots of microfascistic desire...sinister, isn't it? Have you been there?

10:25 AM

Wednesday, May 21, 2003  
"I've been told I am like this ring - apt to fall"

She twists the ring from her finger, erasing the memory of a short-lived and unwanted marriage, a contract made in the shadow of disappointment and personal insult, and the past is wiped away, and the future falls silent...

(The weird thing about watching a silent film - especially on a big screen, with a live pianist, the only possibility: total submission to a finely woven spell, the nostalgic dream, light & shadow magic - is that you swear to God that you remember things being said. You recite the best lines of the film in your head as though you've heard them.)

Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs - so fine, despite the melodrama, at times precisely because of it (the hospital scene, that moment she inhales Neville's flowers, an ecstasy of warmth and desire spreading like celestial light across her face, bathing her skin, a beatific martyr drowning in throes, pangs, and momentary relief...or her reunion with Neville three days before he marries pretty, predictable Constance, a scene in which the grand drama of unrequited love is consummated with an inflated pathos that fixes Garbo and John Gilbert's figures in a stony, mythical aspect...it'd be impossible to render this kind of neoclassical grand passion on the movie screen now, it wouldn't translate, would look silly, because distance and drama and dream are no longer implied, assumed...even demanded? You'd rather laugh at the idea of love now.) In this adaptation of Michael Arlen's 1924 potboiler The Green Hat, Garbo plays Iris Storm (renamed Diana Merrick), an archetypal twenties flapper and renegade aristocrat or...a woman torn apart by desire, duty, speed, liberty, failure, loss. Arlen's Storm is an impossible figure, a composite of his own delirious desires, impulses and fears, a reaction to the radical social escapee Nancy Cunard, with whom he had a brief affair. By the time you get to Clarence Brown's 1928 film most of this has been diluted, lost, until you're left with a rather stark and harrowing melodrama absolutely dominated by the glacial, enigmatic composure of Garbo's Diana Merrick, a creation of steely nerve, brittle nerves, and flashes of screen passion that burst like a geyser against the ice. So, like the great screen presence that she is, Garbo plays Garbo, and it's a weird concoction: sometimes proud and supple like a finely bred horse, sometimes gaudy like a drag queen; sometimes a silvery, moving mannequin, sometimes The Scarlet Woman you'd die for, or who'd kill you.

A total dream in a low cloche hat and a lady's mac, belt wrapped around waist, collar high around swan neck, eye sockets hollowed out, eyebrows plucked. Garbo is a compelling tension between restraint and rapture, dignity and decadence. This narcissistic conflict wraps the film around itself, has an almost supernatural effect on the studio lighting and Garbo herself: particles of light seem to gravitate around her, and she bathes in the glow of immortality and adoration while keeping it at bay, courting distance, retreating - not into shadows - but silence and invisibility.

A Woman of Affairs is not a great film. It dilutes a fairly bizarre lust-and-pain crazed potboiler into a clumsy, wan melodrama and the only thing that rescues it - the only reason it would ever be shown in the NFT - is Garbo. Sublime Garbo, Garbo hitting heights of movie transcendence in the dying twilight of the silent era, touched with poignancy, dazzled in obscure, alien, Northern European radiance...she is the sunlight hitting frost, and the frost hit by sunlight.

9:49 AM

Monday, May 19, 2003  
Scientists now consider the world to be in the 6th great wave of animal extinctions. The 5th wave finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Just trying to imagine what the 8th wave is gonna do. The 9th wave. The extinction of atoms, before the death of the sun, or after. Or AK: After Keith (Richards).

11:47 PM

 
Numbers of ocean fish, including the largest predators - because it's all linked in one great food-chain of doom - have dropped by 90%, mainly due to pollution and overfishing. The oceans are emptying. Soon the cold and silence of the deep blue and black will be the cold and silence of...death, quite simply. And there's more: bird extinctions now top 50 times the natural rate of loss, 128 species having disappeared in the last 500 years (103 of those since 1800!). A quarter of the world's mammal species are close to extinction. Meanwhile, we're booming: the world population is now over 6.2 billion, having doubled since 1950. Awesome figures that obliterate metaphysics, film theory, the death of rock, the nature of celebrity, your career concerns, good shoes...

Process that!

the decisive actions are now, massively, those of enormous and dense tectonic plates...colossal banks of humanity as powerful as oceans, deserts, or icecaps...
Michel Serres

11:21 PM

 
The Death of the Country and the Birth of the City, coming up: cities will be our most vital ecosystems, thrumming with tiers and cycles of life, from humans to hawks and wolves, roaches, viruses, nanobots...

11:02 PM

 
Keeping Pumas and Pets Apart

Pumas prowl through the suburbs of LA, feasting on trash, household pets and Californian kids. Like bears, coyotes and foxes, pumas (aka Mountain Lions aka Cougars) have found (sub)urban living relatively favourable, and have themselves proven highly adaptable to its demands and degradations. I seem stuck on this great vision of wildlife flocking into the city in one large clandestine migration, a silent swarm... and a dream image of pumas roaming the streets of LA alongside packs of coyotes, picking off pampered cats, brats, actresses, bloods and crips, has this kind of murderous, apocalyptic potency, like a deadly mirage brought on by torrid, dry West Coast heat. Actually, the pumas haven't even left their natural habitat: the city invaded it. The pumas' territories were engulfed by urban sprawl, but rather than retreat, they acclimatised. As Beverly Hills, Studio City, Tarzana, Chatsworth, etc, spread up the Californian foothills, they shifted their habits to accomodate new food sources, new layers and pockets of carrion and prey. And it fits: LA as barbarous, brutal, (un)natural park, Rangers patrolling in vans, cars, and choppers, tooled up to take on the most savage natives with their uzis, AK-47s, Mac-10s...LA as a strip of lethal wilderness striated by freeways and tectonic faultlines...the city in meltdown, a desert war...

10:56 PM

Saturday, May 17, 2003  
and...and...and

This will end up as an affirmation, you'll see...

6:38 PM

Friday, May 16, 2003  
And a dolphin seen in the Thames this year. How lovely is that? Next: a porpoise, seals, a small pilot whale, manta rays, blue sharks.


4:09 PM

Thursday, May 15, 2003  
One of the things that amazes me is that the Himalayas - which people think of as the paradigm of the stable - are still moving up to one millimeter a year because India is still clashing with Central Asia. They're a ripple in the surface of the Earth. We cannot conceive of a clash that would last millions of years - our time frame is too limited. Imagine an observer with a time-scale so large that he could see this clash. He wouldn't even see us. Species to him would seem like vast amounts of bio-mass in constant change. He would see evolution. Everything that matters to evolution happens across Millennia. That observer would see species mutating and flowing. He would probably worship flows - unlike us, who, because of our very, very tiny time-scale of observation, tend to worship rocks.
(Manuel DeLanda talking to Erik Davis)

10:08 AM

 
Turning Back Against the Town

Wildlife is finding whole new habitats in unlikely areas: urban centres and industrial sites are adaptable landscapes, packed with new advantages, quickly shedding their terrifying novelty and turning up rich pickings in the trash, waste and squalour of our worst environments (and the birds are getting so fearless: I've seen a raven scouring for food in the middle of a main road, dodging traffic). Birds, mammals and insects make the most of urban living in ways so imaginative and unexpected that it's like a silent environmental revolution. London's eeriest Nature Reserve: Abney Cemetery in Stoke Newington, home of blackbirds, mistle thrush, warblers, tawny owls, kestrels (all those rodents!) among the wrecked Victorian grave stones and a gutted church. A Grey heron fishing in a roadside pond near Stamford Hill. Birds of prey hovering above the marshes, along rail tracks and roads, elegant angels of death. Urban foxes, a renegade, motley breed compared to their country brethren, scraping through inner city surburbs, raiding bins, dodging dogs. Swans in regal clusters on the Lee Valley Canal. St James's Park and its mad menagerie of exotic ducks and ghost-faced pelicans and special gulls who can swoop in from 300 metres away to catch bread mid-air. All those green parrots in places like Eltham Park, adding a dash of surreal exotica to gentle foliage and fauna, flitting like sprites between Elm and Oak. Plus I swear there's some sort of killer eel alive in Hampstead Pond, the size of a small seal, blowing intimidating air bubbles for the kids, its oily thick skin occasionaly breaking the surface as it devours another unsuspecting tufted duck. Etc. More than that, there's new stuff moving in, like the Gulls nesting on their High Rise islands (I love that: a maze of four-faced cliffs; animals totally re-orientate your way of seeing the city); even Otters, whose numbers in England have grown five times since the Seventies, are moving closer and closer into urban waterways. Our cities are evolving into new natural territories, unexpected habitats, zones of conservation (like Walthamstow Marsh, where cattle is being reintroduced to facilitate the growth of some rare weed or moss or something): slowly and continually, wildlife is moving in, de- and reterritorialising urban space. Total concrete jungle (and if you include all the crazy people, all of us skimming our own territories, mining our routes and parading the streets...)...

The country is a city without houses, the city
merely a kissed country...

Frank O'Hara

8:02 AM

 
The Birds

Vicious gulls are swarming into UK cities according to a report written by Peter Rock in this month's Environmental Health Journal. In it, he says:
They regard buildings as islands with cliffs all the way round. They have found urban living in Britain highly advantageous. There is very little disturbance on rooftops, no predators and large quantities of food close at hand. Ample street lighting enables them to pick up discarded takeaways before street cleaners have a chance to clear up, and if it is edible they will eat it. (Quoted in the Guardian 12.05.03)
Easy living. Thug Gulls. They've progressed to stealing food right of our hands, purposely aiming crap at our heads, and attacking old ladies and dogs with their huge yellow beaks (this is all in the official report! Can you imagine? They're aiming at our heads). Herring Gulls are the nastiest, most vicious, sordid bastards out. Cardiff has the worst gulls in the UK: mutant gulls with appetites and cries like desert vultures. And they're huge, way bigger than gulls I've ever seen anywhere else, although apparently they're like that in San Francisco too, so maybe there's some sort of West Coast thing going on. I once saw a Herring Gull dragging the whole carcass of a large rabbit along the ground just off Penarth Road; I've also seen an old Grangetown lady make the mistake of throwing slops on the pavement outside her house and being rushed by a posse of ravenous gulls - she bolted back indoors fast, face as white as death, some sadistic git next door hanging out of his window and laughing (wasn't me). The Gulls are moving inland and colonising us.

1:46 AM

Tuesday, May 13, 2003  
Don't mess up this good thing.

10:11 PM

 
Things go...cold, grow old.

9:51 PM

 
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