*Aesthetics* *Cinema* *Humour* *Literature* *Music* *Theatre* *TV*

Dad's upstairs watching a DVD of an American psychological thriller, with his headphones on because he likes to hear the volume loud and the walls are thin; next door his wife is lying on the bed flicking through an interior design magazine whilst listening to a CD of Eminem, also with headphones on, because of the neighbours; in one of the bedrooms, their youngest son is playing the latest Harry Potter computer game; downstairs their daughter is dancing in the living room imitating the dance she's watching on MTV; in the car outside round the corner her older brother is sitting with his mate smoking dope with the volume on his stereo blaring out loud, the base turned up at full volume so it rocks the street, indifferent, and maybe even hostile, to the neighbours - they're reading a slightly erotic but sombre adult comic book together whilst they hardly exchange a word, etc.etc. Why has culture arrived at such a depressing clichéd point? What is the history behind these sad banalities? Where do these separations and passivity come from?

Trying to analyse culture is like a fish trying to understand water: it's the polluted sea we swim in.

Whilst an oppositon to war and to politics seems to be a popular thing, to oppose culture sets you apart as a wierdo. But still, culture is the commodity that sells the whole of the commodity economy - war and politics included. It's sufficient to see the connection between Saatchi as a leading promoter of the visual arts, Saatchi as advertising firm and Saatchi as promoter of the Thatcherite counter-revolution to begin to develop a hatred for the progress of art as a commodity. After the arms industry and the drugs industry, culture and its off-shoots are probably the third largest world business - yet culture is apparently benign, far harder to contest than a nuclear power plant, for example*. It is the religion of the people, a drug. In a crazy world, we're not opposed to using drugs - the point however is to oppose the stupid social relations that require religion and drugs and culture, the cynical social relations that make religion and drugs and culture lucrative businesses.

We need to grasp what is human and subversive in the content that's been expressed in the alienated vicarious forms of culture in order to live and risk this content in reality - against this commodified world. What does this mean? It means this is no purist and ascetic rejection of what has been life-loving in culture, but rather a rejection of the transformation of this spirit into a commodity and into the development of commodity relations, and the re-appropriation of what is merely represented by developing practical risks in everyday life.

Within this perspective we have here lots of different texts, covering various aspects of different cultural forms. We should emphasise that many of these pages are very incomplete and often sketchy, but over the next year or five we shall be elaborating on some of these things.

Aesthetics etc.(General Critiques) :

The Closed Window Onto Another Life

Reflections on culture and its artistic reproduction

[April 2005]

A fairly general look at some aspects of the history of culture, some of its aesthetic manifestations in the form of museum culture and other difficult-to-define aspects of the aestheticisation of everyday life.

Culture In Danger - If Only (English and French version)

[October 2003/May 2004]

A look at the movement of casualised cultural workers in France, from 2003 - 2004, as well as reiterating some more general critiques of culture, including a very brief look at the history of the blues and of Rai in Algeria.

Art & Other Social Diseases by Rex King

[1992]

A wittily written rant against art students and artists."Students of the arts ... are the only masturbators to act as carriers of social disease".

The Occupation of Art & Gentrification

[1989]

A look at the use of art as state-manipulated gentrifier in the Lower Manhattan area, and as a fresh base for accumulation in areas ravaged by the decline of industry.

The Aestheticisation of Everyday Life by Chris Shutes (taken from Shutes' text "The Poverty of Berkeley Life")

[1983]

Culture is still the location of the search for lost unity, but in this search, culture as a separate sphere has been obliged, in part, to negate itself. Each person contemplates not only objects and images, but also the aesthetic totality that he has made out of his daily life. Personality is the new artistic medium

Cinema:

Escape From Alcatraz [April 2005] (introductory notes on the cinema)

Moore is Less[July 2004] Critique of Michael Moore and his movie 'Fahrenheit 9/11'.

Jean-Luc Hitchcock

[early 80s]

Film review, followed by recruitment ad for film extras.

Humour:

The Entertainers [late 80s]
Modernist Cartoon.

Literature:
The Novel ("The Mystery Of Struggles Defeated"[early 80s]

Now Is The Winter Of Our Poetry [mid-70s]

Music:
Some Musical Notes[2004/2005]

"The journey from tribal drumming and chanting to the work songs synchronising the labours of the pyramid builders, galley slaves and field hands, childrens play songs, the songs of many religions, military marching bands and clan bagpipes, through BBC Radios Workers Playtime...to todays Walkman-wearing commuter illustrates some of the changes in the social function of music as a means of both unifying and dominating people."

Reservoir of Poses[late 80s]
"Founded on the essential deceptiveness of pop musics function within advanced capital, todays pop revolt can only lie to itself as to its radicality... Stripped of the ideological baggage found in a song lyric, an interview, or in the slogans inscribed on record and cassette covers, our music rebels proliferate at every step of their activity the alienating forms of the society they claim to rebel against."

Om Sweet Om[1989]
"The free festivals on rural squatted land in the 1970's were largely an extension of the London mass squatting movement of that time. The initial participants being mainly rural hippies and London squatters, these events were an extension of a lifestyle organised around resistance to work and living outside the confines of the isolated family structure."

The End Of Music As We Know It [mid-1980s]

Death of a Walrus[Early 1981]
"On the morning of December 9th 1980 I was particularly struck by the rapture in the eyes of newspaper readers, by their concentrated frowns, their inquisitive peeking. They were all reading about the same thing. About Lennon's death. Everyone was riveted. Me, I felt nothing, nothing at all. Whatever it was that these people were sharing I was not sharing it with them."

Disco and the Gay Scene[1979]
"Unlike the cultural reflections (jazz, blues, even soul) of earlier black milieus - culture that was at least in part grounded in an indigenous sub-society whose semi-autonomous existence outside the social mainstream left broad room for individual creativity and originality - the evolution of disco was unambiguously grounded in culture-as-commodity from the word go."

Theatre:

1969: Revolution as Theatre and as Personal [ March 2001/additional material Nov.2004]

Not exclusively about theatre, but more about the development of the beginnings of a radical opposition to this world by one of us when he was 19. When it speaks of theatre it focuses mainly on street theatre, though with some reflections on Brecht, Weiss's Marat/Sade, Handke's "Insulting the Audience" and others. "This was a good example of using a theatrical form as simply a pretext, a tool, for creating a situation quite untheatrical: i.e. exposing very concretely a hierarchical role and contradiction. Such a use of theatre is only possible where people go in uninvited and where such people are not attached to the precise artistic means of conveying a critique, but are more into shaking themselves and the situation up, singing its own tune"

"Shakespeare Was A Fake!" Horror Shock![1984]Shakespeare heavily plagiarised his brother to create his plays.

TV:

Soaps Get In Your Eyes [2001]

[July 2001/updated Jan.2005]

"Soaps are the vicarious community of the isolated individual, the risk-free fake family consumed by highly stressed real families everywhere....If were attracted to soaps its because they tease us with an exaggerated version of our desire for a constant flow of contact and excitement increasingly absent in reality....The more slow-plodding our real lives are, the more fast-paced the unfolding of the plot lines in soaps become: things that would normally take a year to develop in real life, take a week or less in the soaps (the exception being pregnancies these seem to last 15 months)" .