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me a friend had a great idea for a short screenplay a couple of months ago, centering on an anglo-german "pun".

the central concept was "Todd goes to germany".

in fact, the nucleus of it could be summarised with this exchange, in German:

Todd: "hallo, ich bin der Tod(d)."

german: "aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!"

----

the idea is that this guy Todd goes to germany, where his name, pronounced as Tod, means "death". numerous humorous cataclysms ensue...

we were planning to bounce it back between each other, as I did film theory a while back and he's doing a PhD in french literature, with bits of film theory stuffed in, and we're both kind of weird / creative types. at least, creative aspirants...

theory is not necessarily a good start, as theory tends to get in the way of good filmmaking, but we thought we'd see.

now that I've given it away, remember: you saw it here first!

heh. I'm unemployed. no job, no clear ideas, no driving ambitions, no home of my own anymore. no fixed expenses, no debts, no commitments... I don't know what I'm doing. nothing seems set, everything flows.

what can I say.

It rocks.

today, sleeping, drinking coffee, watching vintage films, looking out the window at the fresh rain and wondering whether to do my PhD on the chupacabra.

tomorrow, more sleeping, maybe an exhibition or two... and sweet nothing.

and the day after?

I can't wait.

my last day at work!

I'm leaving my place of gainful employment since February 2000, for the vast and wonderful world outside my open-plan office...

(in fact that's a lie. I'm going to bum around back in Norway for a couple of months, mostly at my parent's house... chilling, good food, no work, no rent, no fixed expenses... yeah!)

so for those of you who want to know, I leave the URL address here:

http://www.whatsonwhen.com

I don't want to leave a direct link, because the techies can track it and then they'd find out how little work I've actually been doing... erm, the last year, really... which would spoil the farewell party a bit...

so, farewell to here. here, where I've been working for a looooong time now, but no longer. (well, it is a long time in the age of digital nomadry. I'm counted as "old blood"...).

world, welcome me. or I'll kick you in the nuts.

drunk and christened with tequila shots, I've been sent off like a crazy ship into the world of unemployment...

and what a send-off it was.

what a glorious send-off. a pub full of workmates... my beautiful, beautiful former workmates. wrestling and dancing and laughing and almost crying at times, playing and playful like happy children...

I can't believe what amazing people my workmates are. bright, honest, open, genuine, hardworking. utterly beautiful, in all senses... not one of them less than amazing... in a bleak, depressing, bankrupt world of unbelievable media whoredom, populated and controlled by the base pollutions of greed, stupidity, lust and contrivedness...

at the end of the night my chief editor shook my hand told me I wouldn't believe how much he'd miss me. the company CEO hugged me on the sidewalk for ten minutes and told me things in private that were so sweet I don't even want to put them down, here or anywhere else, because they touched me like few things ever have.

just for the record and to break the tone a bit, she is 27, and female. most definitely female. and god damn is she good looking... and I'm not talking on the CEO scale here...

I felt like crying then, I feel like crying and laughing with joy now... I don't feel like I'm leaving a job. I feel like I'm breaking up with a woman I still love. I feel like I'm leaving my family, maybe forever, with no certain prospect of seeing them again.

these people, my company, are such a closely-bonded group, and I was so lucky to find them... that the thought I might not see them again, for whatever reason, tugs at my insides.

honestly. screw my stupid dolphins.

bless these incredible people. bless them, and keep them blessed. for the rest of their lives.

if for nothing else, because they took in this strange, straying creature that is me with open arms, and made room for my madness and nonsense. because they let me walk around barefoot and wear shalwar kamises when meeting investors, and let me write about Japanese tapeworm museums or glacial lakes in Uzbekistan if I wanted to...

bless them for letting me keep my desk as the infinite garbageheap of the office, an infinite stack in an infinite library, and letting me very nearly scare all potential investors off with the very real threat of avalanches of coffee cups and ancient yellowing newspapers from my desk...

bless them, because with all the cokefuelled madness and global capital of the London media scene they have retained their fundamental innocence, this childike sense of honesty at play that sets them in a league of their own.

bless them for their habits, for their madness and their success. bless them for having three people leave at once, one to go bonkers in holland, one to farm reindeer in the north and one to shave her head off as a buddhist nun in thailand.

bless them.

it is late, and this drunken sentimental fool is going to bed. forgive my uncharacteristic outburst. cynical alienated service will resume as normal in the morning.

but this remains, that I, voyeur of authenticity for once have found my hunger sated. for once, the dreadful and indifferently glazed veneer of irony and curbed enthusiasm lifted, and in the space of a few hours revealed a world that was genuine, effortlessly to be enjoyed and loved and relished.

a sacred world, even, a multitude of holy hidden in the smiles of people I've been seeing every fucking weekday since this time last year... and a few trays of tequila shots...

whatever this will seem like in the morning, tonight I moved in a world suffused with real joy, tinged with paining love and joyous sadness; a world that for once seemed real, and certainly not be derided, but enjoyed.

heya. not dead, just taking a break from here because every time I'm about to write something, I get turned off by the pop-ups... superficial, I know, but these things matter in a relationship. I don't understand why the OD people don't introduce an optional expanded subscription service ( say, opening more coding possibilities etc., say, letting only subscribers use "weird" HTML tags and stuff...) instead of lumbering everyone with ads. at least they could try it, and see how much response they got?

anyway. I am alive and I've digested what I can digest of the attacks two weeks ago, though still mildly shell-shocked I've got most of it out of my system. started living in the shadow of anthrax attacks on London, because they are all-too eminently possible, more than ever now that the invisible boundaries and definition of terrorism have been reconceived on global television anyone might get even funnier ideas and carry them through...

I and 8 million londoners could die any day and no one would be able to predict it or do anything about it. weird fuckedup shit. good thing I'm going to norway soon, though all my friends would still die even if I wasn't here. dark dark dark...

I'm remote-writing a lot of crap on my weblog, easily reached at cannibalbaby.com [since defunct -ed.] if anyone does want to keep up. hope you're all as well as could be under the circumstances and under the new damoclean sword of large-scale annihilation, whether by terrorists or governments...

[later] - ok, disclaimer time kids. these are [almost certainly] not real pictures. if they are, it's [almost certainly] an accident. the face in the pictures is [almost certainly] not the face of the devil or any other supernatural entity.

I was still spooked though. the images are eerie, even if they're strictly speaking not to be considered "proof" of anything. like everything else in this catastrophe, they seem to come from the hyperreal world of visual fiction. they belong in a manga cartoon, more than in reality. just like the skyscraper incident belongsn in the world of airplane disaster cum "Die Hard" cum "Skyscraper" movies...

the "spooky" refers as much to the possible impact the picture might have on certain parts of the target demographic, who will be prone to interpret this in as superstitious a manner as possible...

I'm worried about this idea of retaliation, and the way it'll be articulated. I don't like the talk of attacking countries, because countries are full of civilians. even Afghanistan is full of Afghani children, old people, men and women who have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism...

on that subject, here's a slightly edited comment I left on deadeye's blog:

"...certainly the criminals deserve extreme retaliation, but the key question now is at what cost? America is morally justified now, but indiscriminate retaliation will destroy that.

as Bush is pointing out, this is "a new war". it needs to be very, very carefully handled; its purpose, targets and methods need to be just, equitable and considered. extreme measures must be deployed with a constant eye to justice.

Careless retaliation against civilian populations (Afghani, a handful of kids in Palestine who were stupid enough to be celebrating, Arabs, starving civilians in Iraq) would put America on the moral level of the terrorists, not to mention perpetuate and maybe even increase the frequency and intensity of the suicide attacks.

Why? Because these people justify themselves not just by naming God, but by referring to the injustices that Israel commits against the Palestinians, to the US-backed sanctions against Iraq, and to a number of other situations in the Middle East where US foreign policy has at times had extremely detrimental effects, and stood on very shaky moral ground.

the attack was political, in short, and motivated by political and economic reasons. not just an attack on the American dream...

The average American has so far been completely sheltered from the consequences of its government's policies and interventions abroad. For some of us who live abroad, this is very difficult to keep in mind.

This is why the moral outrage that america and the world feels now must be channeled, not only at the physical presence of the terrorists, their camps and their bases, but at the root causes of terrorism, causes which are grounded in political and economic conditions, not just in "religion".

It serves no purpose to make the terrorists into religious monsters (Islam condemns the taking of innocent lives; these people are to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is, or was, to the American dream...), because this label obscures the very real political and economic causes that lead to the attacks.

they may have acted monstrously, but we need to understand why they acted in such a way, how they justified it, so that the root of the problem, in the widest sense, can be attacked.

we need not just to physically attack the terrorists, but to confront the poverty, misery and political injustices that lead people to commit such monstrous acts.

of course their "religion" (I think of it as an ideology, more than a religion; it's so far from the tenets of Islam as it is practised by the vast majority of Muslims all over the world...) plays a part, as an explanatory framework for action, but if there was not such widespread misery and resentment in the area already, the twisted ideology of these people would have no recruits...

the average Afghan or Iraqi is no more responsible for the attacks of terrorists, than the average American is responsible for coups in Central America or the training of terrorists like bin Laden in the Middle East.

both populations are innocents,victims, caught up in historical processes they have little understanding of and no power to affect.

The political tensions that produce suicide bombers in the first place, and engender the atmosphere of fear and resentment from which these attacks came, will be alleviated if America handles this in a just and reflected manner, by singling out and destroying the terrorists themselves, not the innocents who happen to live in the same country as the terrorists...

something good can still come out of this, unlikely as it seems..."

America has the chance to rise to the occasion and make the world a better place, in a much broader and more lasting sense than just by loosing their cannons on a bunch of terrorists who'd be replaced ASAP anyway. I'm crossing my fingers that they do.

heh.

looking for something else to busy my mind with, I checked on the poll I put up last week... the results made me chuckle (darkly).

htmlGEAR.com Poll

I would rather brutally kill and eat...  a fluffy kitten 9 (39%) a catholic kiddie 10 (43%) an afghan refugee 2 (8%) myself 2 (8%) 23 Total votes

I suppose one could draw some relief from the fact that in the middle of this, voters are as likely to want to kill&eat themselves as they are to want to kill&eat an afghan refugee...

I'm a bit worried on behalf of catholic kids everywhere, who are a more popular choice than kittens...

*sigh*... I'm going home now.

crazy shit. goes to show how much will change from now.

Eerie Image Pulled From CD

what is going to happen to the anti-American rhetoric of domestic groups like this, in the short term and in the long term?

it's been easy to attack America because of its apparent "invulnerability". images like these were fiction, symbolic expressions of anger that were assumed never to crystallise in reality...

will this change? is america now no longer the invulnerable behemoth that everyone can hate?

maybe this is a good thing, in the much longer term...

the horror of it all is sinking in on me, overwhelming, as it is articulated and made real in its minute, horrifying details through the testimony of victims and families...

it's all so sickening. unexpectedly perhaps there are glimmers of hope (maybe I'm naive, maybe not). the fact that the Bush administration is seeking evidence, and an international cooperation / consensus / coalition, before it strikes out is one of them... the fact that many important voices are being raised in reason, not blind anger, is another one. there are reasons for hope.

I just hope that the inevitable operations will be conducted in a spirit of justice, not blind violence. I hope the disenfranchised will be treated equitably.

specifically, I hope the US allows the Palestinians some justice, as well as the Israeli... so much tension in the area would be deflated if the US were seen to act fairly and equitably there, not just unconditionally supporting the state of Israel whatever it does...

but it's all so sickening.

my soul is drained, mute and tired; I've swallowed a red-hot cannonball, impossible to digest or disgorge.

one thing that puzzles me is the question of who did this, and the question of guilt.

I'm not saying that bin Laden did not organise this. but what if he didn't? what if these were autonomous, self-supplied terrorist cells, acting by their own plans without external support???

the perpetrators themselves are dead, and if they were clever enough to be trained pilots, they might well have been clever enough to organise this by themselves... there might not be any "planner" left behind! the grunts were not grunts, but the actual masterminds??...

after all, one of the most terrifying thing about this is that they held the planes up with knives, box-cutters and their brains... that individuals armed with little but kitchen equipment, handbooks on flying available from commercial bookstores and their own crazed intelligence were able to command such stupefying forces of destruction as we saw in the attack on Tuesday...

I wonder whether the hunt for the responsible persons might be obscuring the real and incredibly disturbing nature of the threat, ie. its viral, individual, invisible, amorphous and most importantly kamikaze nature...

the fact that the principal perpetrators destroy themselves in the act could lead to a scenario where it's impossible to punish the "criminals", because nobody who was directly involved with the crime survived it... the definition of criminal will then have to be extended to proxies, with all the ramifications this will have...

that is a sobering thought. how do you deal with kamikaze crime on a mass scale???

fuck.

fuck fuck fuck.

one guy I work with just pointed out how the implementation of a global "war on terrorism" might impact on the claims of local ethnic minorities like the Kurds, the Basque, East Timor, not to mention the Palestinians...

what happens if Turkey joins the offensive against terrorism only to legitimate their continuing campaign against the Kurds?

just to raise the question of what exactly terrorism is, and who defines it... Iraq Under Siege: Ten Years On

strictly speaking this is a bit full-on, perhaps even tactless. but it does contribute to an understanding of the complex canopy of causes that led up to the act.

I believe this understanding is necessary to prevent excessive demonisation, rampant violence, anarchy, hate and hysteria: the further deepening of the schism between factions of innocents who are all equally affected by the tragedy, rather than a focus on the actual perpetrators...

demonise the perpetrators, if you must. pursue them, arrest them, convict them if possible, execute them. ideally with fairness and justice, rather than hate...

some of them are dead, but there are networks of them left in place. these can be attacked.

just please don't generalise. don't attack immigrants, or muslims, or the palestinians, just because they are who they are...

I can just see that wave of racism building on the horison, and it really terrifies me

"the analytical moment... has been indefinitely postponed" writes a journalist in The Guardian today.

I let that stand at the moment. I really haven't been able to think about anything else since the attack happened; for the time being I have exhausted both myself and the analytical possibilities of the situation. it is beginning to turn into a solid mental brick wall in the pit of my stomach, if you'll excuse my mixed metaphors.

life does go on, though it does so more easily here than it does in America.time to try and get some work done, and wait for the news to develop.

I'm crossing my fingers, and quietly wondering whether I should get the fuck out of London before the war begins...

this is damn interesting:

The Great Superterrorism Scare

a brave new age we enter, indeed. *brrrr*...

this may not have been "chemical or biological" superterrorism, but it supercedes conventional notions of terrorism by a far margin, which is why politicians are calling it "an act of war", rather than an act of terror...

it defies belief. and once it has been established that things such as what we saw on tv yesterday are possible... the sky is the limit. endless possibilities for mass annihilation are now imaginable. why hasn't it been done before? a few dozen vials of stolen anthrax and hundreds of thousands would die.

why hasn't this happened before? I can only guess that there were no precedents, it was "unthinkable", beyond even the moral framework of terrorists... but now? this has happened. our concept of what terrorism is and can do has been reorganised, violently and bloodily, on our tv screens...

the political landscape of the world shifted yesterday, and we will be feeling the aftershocks for years to come... I shudder to think what will happen next. this will not be the last act of mass destruction on this scale we see...

seeing pictures of the afghani leader online, accompanied by shouting and clamoring for his death, I can't help but be struck by the similarity to the scenes you see in documentaries from the middle east, where puppets of western leaders are paraded and burned... mass hysteria, screaming, self-righteousness, militarism.

"if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into thee".

this seems to confirm, to me, the growing and terrifying diametrical parallelism between the US and the middle east in the ways their different ideologies are articulated and legitimated.

public hysteria on this order of magnitude is the last component we need for a new, unbearable polar world order to crystallise, a new "cold war" fought between the economic ideology of US free market imperialism on the one hand, and the religious autocracies of Islam on the other...

it's turning solid as we write: a dual cosm where the battle is between two enemies who both denounce the enemy's barbarism, all the while concealing the all-too-real economic and political structure of their maneuvering with a layer of rousing rhetoric.

I'm not a relativist. I think murder, terrorism and abuse is incredibly abhorrent. but given the history of the US, this was to be expected. what we can only hope that this lends force to the arguments for conciliation, not for more carnage.

on the subject of the Taliban...

yes, yes. they're the scum of the earth and they should be wiped out. yes yes.

but hang on.

wasn't the Taliban, then a bunch of relatively harmless tribespeople, armed and trained in the early 80s by Reagan's government to serve as troops against Communism?

let me check...

http://www.rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk/warhist/wars/afghanistan.htm

ooops.

does this mean that the US actually indirectly created the Taliban, to fight in its own dirty little ideological war?

ooops.

same thing with ol' Saddam. trained, armed and resourced by the US government.

fuck. is this karma or what...

visuals from the attack are permeated with hiroshima imagery, like a manga cartoon... a curious echo, that sets the mind thinking...

according to the FBI,

"Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

"unlawful" is obviously the key concept here, and unlawful defined under the Lex Americana...

otherwise, what would Hiroshima be? 150,000 civilians dead??

"an act of war". Prrrtsj. the war was being won anyway, and the bomb was a ploy by Truman to "get a hammer on those boys" in Russia.

terrorism. as was bombing baghdad; as were assassinations against political leaders, coups, shipments of weapons, bombings, invasions, attacks, interventions...

tastes horrible, doesn't it, your own medicine...

"We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, on Iraq, on Libya. In Central America, we have been active parts of coups," he said. "It was only a matter of time."

                    ---- from the Washington Post 

yup.

sorry, but it's true.

"ending terrorism"...

this is what I don't understand. how can we "end" terrorism? how are we going to deter people who want to die anyway from doing it?

the problem is that this is not the work of a centralised entity, like a country. it's to a large degree a small-scale protest with extreme consequences, viral and individual.

declaring war on the countries the terrorists come from will do little. comparably to the idea of attacking Germany because there are neo-Nazis there or England because there are football hooligans is an empty gesture of bravado. 

even where the terrorists are funded by national governments, which there is no evidence so far that they are, the protest is fuelled by the grassroots resentment of largely untraceable, invisible individuals.

most of these terrorists have no criminal records. they're recruited from the masses, eminently replacable and willing to die.

some of them, like McVeigh, are just that, individuals. if there is just one suicide bomber, fine. that's the end of it. but if there are so many, what can be done? can the US declare war on the innocents of the "muslim world", countries and people who have nothing to do with terrorists?

the perpetrators die in the act: how can you punish someone who is already dead? how do you deter someone who is already intent on dying anyway? these people obviously have nothing to lose... how can one stop them?

it's like the hydra. you cut off one head another comes to take its place...

as long as the desperate masses continue to create suicide bombers, there is no way to stop the phenomenon except to consider what steps could be taken to hear these people and alleviate their desperation.

a happy, well-fed people produces few suicide bombers. compare israel and palestine...

"the United States sees no distinction between those who commit acts of terrorism of the kind witnessed in the past few hours and those who harbour them."

fucking pathetic. and terrifying, in terms of the global situation... 

so if the terrorists were based in norway, america would start nuking scandinavia? I don't think so.

bush can get away with saying this because there is the implicit assumption that only a country or a nation state in the middle east will have had the resources and will to carry through the operation. and they are america's enemies, anyway.

there is more at stake here than america's wounded pride. or thirst for revenge.

orchestration.

incredible cunning, isn't it. one plane, two planes, BANG!!! the entire world shifts its cameras to the World Trade Center... you wait an hour, let the president speak, let the international community start mourning confusedly, then bang, BANG!!!

two more planes, and the twin towers of trade crumble in the face of an international community that has aimed every single camera or recording device in New York towards the object you intend to destroy.

power.

the two towers crumble, inevitably, inexorably and completely beyond the power of any official body or government to stop. "look what we can do. you're fucked and powerless and useless" is the message.

genius. absolute genius. sick and twisted, but genius...

I can't believe it.

the twin trade center towers in new york destroyed on global television, in the eyes of a shellshocked public. the implications of this act are nearly incomprehensible...

first of all the hyperreality of it. in retrospective it seems as though the space for this event was paved in our imaginations by decades of american filmmaking about obscure terrorist organisations... who could imagine that something like this would happen, not on a cinema screen but in reality? the conflation of the real and the imaginary shocks the senses... was it real? how do you react when you watch, hundreds of times again and again, something happen that only happens in high-budget films??? it is like a disaster movie, except its real...

I for one felt numbed, and I could scarcely reconcile the event in my head... the human tragedy was cerebral, a question of statistics, eclipsed almost by the astonishing, visionary nature of the act itself... the fact that people were jumping from the 80th story buildings seemed almost insignificant, almost insiginificant in comparison to the breathtaking <i>audacity</i> of the act.

who would have dreamt of this? whoever did this, whatever his or her moral qualities are, was an utter genius.

a symbolic attack against America? yes. but not the america of "civility, democracy and freedom" represented by the white house, the statue of liberty, nearly any other imposing physical public structure in america they could have chosen. the politicians are getting it wrong. the semiotics of the event, the symbolism is so evident it is almost like not seeing the woods for the trees...

an attack on the american people? no. this was an attack against the america of economic ideologies, of financial imperialism; the america the enslaves third world countries with crippling debt and "free-market ideologies" that lead to bankruptcy. the america whose demagogues destroyed russia with their economic advice. the america of the IMF, of the world bank, of the dark side of globalisation...

why the fuck isn't anyone talking about this? why doesnt anyone point out the symbolism, not of the act of terrorism, but of its target!?!? it is so obvious!

the terrorists aligned themselves acutely, with stunning intelligence, with the paradoxically global anti-globalisation reistance movement. savage and brutal and simply unbelievable, yet perfectly aimed and designed with firm intention to awaken both sympathy and horror. sympathy for the cause of attacking transnational financial institutions that are keeping the vast majority of the world in crippling debt, killing hundreds of thousands of silent victims every year, month, week, day... horror at the miniature employees jumping out of windows hundreds of feet above the ground to certain death...

surely they could have taken out the white house, for symbolism, or the statue of liberty... why didn't they? because they are declaring war on a particular aspect of america.

maybe, also, because they still need enemies. just as america is not taking out its scapegoats in the middle east (don't tell me they couldn't have taken out saddam hussein or that guy in afghanistan with their resources, imperialist foreign policy  and lack of ethical restraints! blatantly they need their enemies in place, so they can keep defence budgets up...), so maybe the jyhad people need to preserve their enemy's symbols. if they took out the white house, what next?

though it is a shame, and I stand by that, that they didn't manage to get Bush. I'm sorry, but that is true.

a shock so thorough you wonder what the fuck can happen now. unprecedented and unbelievable, and were it