Endangered Species

Having just read a long and arduous feature on the future of universities in the LRB, I realise I am an endangered species. I'm going to be systematically hunted down, my habitat steadily eroded, because  I represent 100% teaching and learning (often my own). I really couldn't give a fuck about anything else. New 'private universities' whether profit making or charity based, will spend up to 40% of their income on advertising and promotion, and when you whittle away the rest, it might end at just 10% of expenditure in actually teaching people. We shall have to set up charities for academics who can't cope with the bureaucracies that have grown up around them, and that will eventually destroy them. Students will be consumers automatically subject to fire sales and refunds  (depending on financial clout) and no body will have the patience required to actually learn anything, or crucially gain perspective on events.
A world insanity hence comes home to roost, and even the finest of critics don't seem to be able to stop the waves, the waves that say everything has to turn in to money, that everything has to turn a profit, even when they are dealing with something as inherently tricky to qualify in monetary value as education. When you have to dream up terms like 'positional profit' for somebody who might turn out to be a bigger spinning cog in the money machine to justify education you know you are on the wrong side of something bad.
If I were to take this essay seriously (and I do) I would have to note that this ideological position is entirely the reverse of that offered by J K Galbraith in his Affluent Society of 1956, when advertising was seen as a threat and that some sectors, notably universities, would be strengthened at vast public cost against it's worst influence.

Terrific Picture

By Luis Falero: Faustian vision of course. Walpurgis Night. Bit Frank Frazetta but..well it is nearly Halloween, and I'm doing the Gothic next week, and I have been listening to too much Black Sabbath. 

Sign of The Times

Like some ancient omen, an eagle flying over one's head clutching a snake or something like that, on the day Royal Mail shares begin open trading on the stock market, when people cash in for their windfall £350 for doing nothing except having £500 to spare, we get no mail.

Shumon Basar

I'm re-blogging Shumon Basar's excellent diptic above which he's posted on Facebook. He simply added that the picture on the left was taken in Zurich and the one on the right in Dubai. Those who have read my Maoist critique of striptease (previous post) will immediately understand what I was trying to get at. Meanwhile this looks a lovely piece; the sort of art stuff I really like.

Dr Feelgood (or maybe not)

Very pleased to add this record to my collection today. Motley Crue may never have produced the greatest rock record of all time (whilst they inadvertently managed to provide us with the all time best book: The Dirt and came close with the single Girls Girls Girls) but this is fairly hilarious anyway. By the time they made this our cherished muppet gods of rock had cleaned up and were under the scrupulous direction of Bob Rock: pretty much the Moses of heavy metal. Dr Feelgood itself is reason to buy this, another would be the fabulous ACDC cover they conjure into Kickstart My Heart. However it is still the idea that the Crue, no longer taking real drugs, were 'depressed' and driven to quaffing Prozac as they sipped Evian in Vancouver (Vancouver!!) that drives me to smile all the way through. It drives me to remember that rock 'n' roll is such an everyday effort despite the illusions and pretences of celebrity, because decent rock bands can disprove the myth almost as soon as they make it (The Darkness did this too). Nobody has done this more than Motely Crue. Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee will always be a lovable idiots, no matter how hard they try. Meanwhile, last I heard, Vince Neil was running a rock and roll airline out of Las Vegas. Micky Mars? Well it's just a great name. You couldn't dream it up. It's odd to think of Motely Crue as 'honest' but they seem never to have been anything else, even when they were tossers. The ridiculous 'Time for Change' ends this record, and it could have been penned by the Beatles on a bad day and made for Eurovision. 

Humour! I'm laughing.

Contribution to a Maoist Critique of Striptease

Pondering the post below, I realise 'insouciant worldliness' is an insufficient term that demands development. Is it possible that Jessica (above and below) and her ilk represent nothing less that pure revolutionary practise? There is an idea here, an almost unthinkable idea- that the only unmistakable and unqualified victory of feminism is the Strip Club. This form of permanent revolution (sic) of course places all men (but not exclusively men) in the role, for once, of slightly sheepish spectators, while Jessica acts, and in her conflation of the means of production in to the commodity itself- a commodity she herself owns, she pretty much  defines revolution - she escapes that devious bit of economic capitalist circuitry which Marx so well described, and of course acquires derision from all the bourgeois classes (Guardian as well as Mail readers) as a consequence. All derision of her activity is after all a consequence of others enslavement. Meanwhile, all she needs to do this is a stick, a pole, and THAT is positively Maoist in orientation. OK she needs music and beer too, which ruins the purity of her provision, but essentially, she is herself, her own constructed self. Hats off.

In a context where it is possible to see capitalist development only in terms of making people dumber and dumber, it's populace in to mindless and uncritical morons, and where that is the only future presupposed, Jessica's talent is a real Up Yours!

Photo: Thanks and Copyright Nick Stanbra

'They're Wearing Us'

There are two quotes I particularly enjoy on the subject of striptease artistes, the first (above title) from digital knowledge prophet Marshall McLuhan, and the second, recently discovered in Dave Hickey's newly published book 'Pirates and Farmers' where his friend Heidi (who works, or worked, in Crazy Horse Too Las Vegas) insists that 'there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved by a room full of naked women'. 

I am thinking of presenting Jessica (above- and who works at The White Horse, Shoreditch) following a stream of Joel Sternfeld pics of Dubai to my undergrads with the remark 'This is what you get, eventually, when you decide you can represent God'. For Jessica exudes a kind of insouciant worldliness (far from uncommon in her profession) Dubai will never have. Commodification; the very point! As McLuhan suggests, that perfect act of display, far from divesting Jessica or Bambi or Samantha of identity, actually substantiates it, and he was right, and somehow these days Jessica and her clan can represent more of it. To co-opt one of those cliched, crappy, but revealing phrases, just look how carefully she is put together! Of course the audience are possessed, poor souls us, but only for the length of (in Jessica's case) one edgy piece of heavy metal, and it is a fatal misapprehension to think the reverse, that WE possess HER. Of course I could, like Hickey, rank her with Titian's Venus, in which case, there should be a copy stashed in the basement of the Vatican for periodic inquisition- but I'm content that she is actually here to remind me, periodically, as I drop through the grey doors of the White Horse every now and then of an afternoon, of the truth of our world masked somehow by the petty mores of our hum drum. 

Photo: thanks and copyright Nick Stanbra.