Sunday 25 April 2004 at 4:24 pm
feeling spectacularly unproductive a couple of days ago, I went and got myself an okcupid profile under my old OD nick sangreal. even put an old picture up there. the resulting profile I thought a bit mixed, but keeping in mind that our self-delusions are necessarily invisible to ourselves, and the fact that nearly all the 907 questions I answered were clicked through in the space of one latenight screening of sadomasochist romcom 'preaching to the perverted' a couple of days ago, there is no room to complain. my profile is there for those who want simple synoptic comparison.
the last time I did something like that was back in 1999, when I actually went through a 500-question personality screening at the local branch of the scientology church near russel square, in london, only to find out through my appointed 'clarity counsellor' that on a scale from positive 100 to negative 100 I scored -97 on happiness, -80something on clarity and +70something on anger. very unhappy bunny indeed - so unhappy I didn't even realize I was unhappy! ideal candidate material... halfway through the subsequent recruitment interview I bolted. still scarred from the experience.
Saturday 24 April 2004 at 03:58 am
trying to formulate my ethnographic angle on the state at the moment. what interests me lies in the intersection between the material instantiation of the state in day to day practice - legislation, bureaucracy etc. - and the kind of ongoing naturalised reification we all participate in when we speak of the state 'acting' and 'doing' things, when in fact we're talking about the actions of specific individuals operating as the state. etc. etc. a straightforward methodological disaggregation of the state, but is anything ever straightforward that takes place in my mental world? hell no.
as is usually my problem, I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, but the work of formulating this in correct and coherent jargon, and positioning it within and/or in relation to the existing canon of my particular sub-field seems more sweat and blood than it's really worth. it also involves pretending I'm so at home with theories of the state that I could find the living-room lightswitch in the Republic even in pitch blackness and hegemonized, with a rabid little Ideological State Apparatus snapping at my ankles.
I end up watching lots of tv instead and pretending to have the whole thing simmering away on a back burner somewhere in the dark psychick backstage, and carrying lots of heavy books in my pockets. sometimes I really wonder how I got to where I am.
realize I'm not in the habit of writing about work here, but as I'm trying to write up my pre-field report before the middle of may [ha ha] it's kind of on my mind at the moment. also I found out yesterday I'll be having an unexpected viva on it at the end of june [ha ha hahahahaaaa] - in lay terms, this means an oral examination of unknown but probably limited severity. not too threatening but still, nothing like the threat of assesment to inject a measure of productive anxiety.
Wednesday 21 April 2004 at 3:44 pm
jonathan friedland in today's guardian hits the nail on the head concerning the alarming cognitive dissociation experienced in public by blair&bush. the worse things get on the ground, the more the rhetoric soars skywards... and the reverend leader, infamously not blessed with a reverse gear, makes do with driving forward through 180 degrees.
sheer madness.
Tuesday 13 April 2004 at 11:31 pm
Sunday 11 April 2004 at 12:48 pm
skimming through reviews of the new dawn of the dead remake and I'm slightly annoyed at the number of people who extol the supposedly deep sociological commentary of the original in order to dismiss the remake. I suspect a large number of these authenticity buffs simply use this pretext in order to distance themselves intellectually from their material. I wonder how many of them actually enjoyed the original in its own right before the remake came along and the original suddenly became an opportunity to dismiss modern film-making - I think not many.
fair enough and I'm as guilty of the last as anyone alive on earth, but I do pride myself on being able to recognize genuine quality when it does come along. to elevate the original to some higher level of social commentary rather than admitting it was also a farcical, violent zombie movie with a limited budget and serious pacing issues... well, it's just a way of doing violence to the whole genre. personally I don't think the original was ever as high-minded, sociological, satirical or intellectual as it is referenced in reviews.
come on folks. that was just a zombie movie too.
Tuesday 06 April 2004 at 03:29 am
have been porting over manually a lot of entries from my old xanga weblog -about a 100 now, as you'll see from the suddenly expanded archives. skipping some of the worst rants because they tend to be repetitive and a bit annoying, but otherwise more or less complete, and uncensored.
the weird thing is how on re-reading through, the main pleasure lies in the small weave, the little details that bring back things I'd forgotten. not the rants, the arguments or the abstract discussions.
the main regret I have now is that I never got around to editing and uploading the text-file I downloaded from my first and now long since deleted journal on opendiary, the maelstrom hypothesis [feb 2000-sep 2001], which covered most of the period I spent living in london.
damn shame. the file was wiped out when my harddisk burned a couple of years ago, and the online page where I'd kept a backup has been cancelled. about 200,000 words the damn thing was, all gone now. flats, you're probably the only one who ever read it [even if you were practically a toddler back then :-)]
Sunday 04 April 2004 at 3:54 pm
site is getting quite bulky, isn't it... as I was upgrading the system I run this site with [well-deserved plug: the remarkable and still free open-source pivot project] I took the opportunity to redesign some aspects. modifications include search engine, referrers, new archive pages, and a new sub-page for films, accessible through the category link at the bottom of each films entry and the header for the films column on the left side of the main page. comments welcome: there is a stylesheet glitch in the film sub-archives, but I can't be bothered to fix it right now.
great fun. sometimes I wish I had decided to become a codemonkey rather than an anthropologist.
Sunday 04 April 2004 at 12:53 pm
Saturday 03 April 2004 at 7:25 pm
prompted by re-reading hakim bey's essay on the temporary autonomous zone.
when I was a kid I was a voracious reader of occult nonsense. as such I absorbed and revelled in and lay awake at night wondering about the popular myth of the disappeared colonists of roanoke, the terrestrial mary celeste of the new world. an entire settler colony that disappeared, leaving only a single enigmatic word - "croatan" - carved into a tree trunk. there were loose speculations of slaughter by indians - no bodies were ever found, but this only made the story more alluring...
what I did not realise at the tender age of 10 was that the 'mystery' I was being handed down was the product of the kind of systematic racism that prefers comfortable misinterpretation to uncomfortable fact, natives who slaughter rather than colonists who go native.
The Lumbee don't entirely understand why people persist in calling the Roanoke colony the "Lost Colony," since they left an explicit note telling where they were going (Croatan, the lands of some friendly Cheraw Indians) and since the descendents of the Croatan Cheraw were found some 50 years later speaking English, practicing Christianity, and sporting about 75% of the last names the colonists had brought with them. By all accounts, though, those descendents--who called themselves "Lumbee" Indians, after the river running through their traditional lands--were mixed-race, so mixed-race they were not sent to Oklahoma with the other Native Americans of North Carolina in the 1820's and 30's.
|source|
put history through the ideological meatmincer and what do you get? mysterious ideological sausages at the other end.
Saturday 03 April 2004 at 7:05 pm
a couple of clicks, some snappy .css editing and wow, new website. yup, that is klee's angelus novus slapped in a benjaminian fashion in the right-hand corner. the metaphor of history as the never-ending car crash has a certain appeal to me and my ilk. was thinking of sticking a monkey head on it, but my lazy fingers just couldn't be bothered.
the okcupid meme sucked in me and half my friendslist on LJ about a month ago. apparently we're a 35% match, which is about as low as it seems to get with anyone. generally their algorithms seem quite good, so perhaps we haven't realised we can't actually stand each other and should never converse again.
came pretty close to doing the scientology thing, as there was a branch on tottenham court road (presumably the same one) that i used to walk past every day to get to university. was very amused at the people advertising free personality tests as though that was something special, rather than internet ubiquity, and thought it'd be interesting to see how an organisation like that sucks people in. never did, though.
flats - 25 04 04 - 19:10
eh, you didn't miss anything, scientologywise that is.
my online personality compatibilities seldom map particularly well onto real-life sympathies, anyway. when my last ex did the spark test we came out at about 53%, after 3 years or whatever. whats yer userid?
smarmy loverboy monkey - 25 04 04 - 19:26
point of clarification - "smarmy loverboy" refers to my smug, loathsome personality profile on okcupid, rather than... well, anything else.
yech.
yech monkey - 26 04 04 - 14:33
i did one of those scientology tests in manchester, about ten years ago. when they suggested i spend a tenner on a book that would solve all the problems i apparently had, i demurred like the fool i am, and life has been downhill ever since.
yosha () - 27 04 04 - 15:16
ooh, am in cambridge again this saturday evening and sunday. might some face to face talking about crap make if not a pleasant then at least mildly diverting change from talking about crap here? i already have three other separate sets of people i want to spend time with (for anyone else that'd be showing off that they're a social slutterfly - me, that's going "oh god, people...") but they're all nat.scis and mathmos, so a counterbalance would be appreciated. we've got each other's numbers i believe.
flats - 27 04 04 - 21:24
yo. internetivity somewhat down these days - give us a call. will be busy due to other people's deadlines, but i can certainly hook up for a coffee or summing.
monkeeeeee... - 01 05 04 - 02:36
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Monica - 22 01 06 - 01:58
Very interesting and professional site! Good luck!
Suse () (URL) - 14 03 06 - 18:37