Some things seem so odd, so completely insolite, that in coming across them one can only assume that they are completely without historical precedent, that they exist outside of all tradition. Consider this, for example:

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The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

via Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

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The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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Fast Tube by Casper">From \’Newswipe\’

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The non paternalist elite hobnobbing at the ICA

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, “elitist”, whereas treating them as if they are stupid is “democratic”. It should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.

Parkes touches here on the right way to think about paternalism – not (just) as something prescriptive, but in terms of the gift and the surprise. The best gifts are those we wouldn’t have choosen for ourselves – not because we would have overlooked or rejected them, but because we simply wouldn’t have thought of them. Neoliberal “choice” traps you in yourself, allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different “you”, a you that does not yet exist. (All of which resonates with J J Charlesworth’s illuminating piece on the management of the ICA in Mute, with its attack on the assumption that “what the audience wants is merely what the institution should do.”)

Neoliberalism may have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk economics of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have played their part in propagating, but the kind of “entrepreneurs” that dominate our culture – whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne – have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money. Good for them, no doubt, but hardly something that the rest of us should be grateful for. (The genius of Cowell was to have plugged a very old cultural form into new machineries of interpassivity.) And for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism’s culture is – there has never been a culture more homogenous and standardized, more repetitive and fear-driven.

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By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

via Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.

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Zizek - looking quite trim and moody here

Fast Tube by Casper">Zizek 2

Fast Tube by Casper">Zizek 3

Fast Tube by Casper">Zizek on reviving the left

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On the face of it, the struggle over the Christmas number one this year sums up capitalist realism’s stranglehold over culture. From one perspective, what we have here is a simulation of disputation, one Sony BMG act versus another, where capital wins every way up – abetted by a grassroots Facebook campaign that has fed the marketing machine while ostensibly raging against it (retailers and Sony BMG must be delighted that members of the public have off their own back come up with a way of re marketing ye olde commodified rebel rock). Yet it’s worth also attending to the utopian dimension at work in both the campaign for the Rage Against The Machine to be number one and (submerged) in the X Factor phenomenon itself.

The problem is that no response to the X Factor phenonemon is adequate: whether it be the standard bourgeois “I don’t watch it, I don’t have a TV, although I occasionally watch serious documentaries on the IPlayer”, the PoMo “I watch it to exult in how awful it is”, or some version of apparently ingenuous engagement – any response seems useless. The X Factor has seemed as impregnable as capitalism. In one of the best pieces he has written for some time, Paul Morley captured very well the quandary that the X Factor presents. “What’s the point of watching the show,” Morley asked, “and feeling that I must be losing my mind, because I seem to be seeing and hearing bad, unsavoury, deeply uncomfortable things, while everyone else is enjoying a cheery, light-hearted party, fun for all the family, a Saturday night television show that is merely an ingeniously produced newfangled way of keeping alive certain old-fashioned light entertainment values?” Complaint seems both churlish and impotent; or else irrelevant – why be concerned about the X Factor at all? Aren’t there more important things than this high-gloss trivia?

more via k-punk.

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The enemies of reason: Hmm… remember this?.

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Zizek’s new website

I’m not sure exactly who is running it – not the man himself I suspect – but it’s the hub for Zizek related matters, with a US emphasis, I assume.

Slavoj Žižek —.

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Rupert Murdoch as he actually looks

The Conservatives have vile little deal sorted out with Murdoch, and when they come to power (alas! – it’s looking pretty certain), they will start to knacker the BBC for him. One way to help Murdoch is to hobble the regulatory framework that protects public service broadcasting and restrains him (I’ve blogged on that before) – the other begins to emerge in the Guardian story  below. In return for The Sun‘s support – and that of the rest of his squalid empire – the Tories will ensure that the BBC is cut down to size. Naturally they will deny the link, but it is there, and it will be toxic for yet another part of the UK’s public realm. And that’s a firm prediction.

You didn’t  think the Sun’s backing came free of charge, did you?

Jeremy Hunt warns of tough times ahead for all ‑ including BBC

Hunt, who would take charge of broadcasting policy as culture secretary, says the BBC should respond by “cutting its cloth”, pointing out that 47 BBC executives earn the same as, or more than, the prime minister’s £197,689 salary.

If the BBC fails to act on a voluntary basis, Hunt makes clear he would use his role overseeing the renewal of the BBC licence fee in 2012 to push for salaries to be cut. “That will be a chance to look at the whole direction of the BBC ‑ and executive compensation is obviously one of things that you discuss as part of that.”

Hunt shares the concerns of Sir Christopher Bland, the former BBC chairman, who warned the corporation to be careful about throwing its weight around now that the BBC’s income outstrips all its commercial rivals put together by £1bn. “There is a real risk that if this carries on, the BBC could be the only show in town. That would be incredibly unhealthy for consumers who really appreciate the choice that they get.”

Stressing that the BBC’s independence is sacrosanct, Hunt is careful about dictating where it must cut. He rejects the call from the Sunday Times for the BBC news website to be scaled back because it is undermining newspaper websites.

But the BBC should be careful about expanding its website. “You might think at first glance that if the BBC does have a website about angling, that can be brilliant for the angling community. But if the unintended consequence of that was that it drove out of business every single angling magazine in the country, you might take a different view.”

More below, if you can stomach it:

Jeremy Hunt warns of tough times ahead for all ‑ including BBC | Politics | The Guardian.

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Adam Curtis Films here:

Adam Curtis, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self and others….

(You might need to scroll down a little to find them)

All on Rewtube.

you can see his new film It felt like a kiss on his blog, here.

Adam Curtis

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MARX AND MONTAGE

It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. [1]Capital, whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period. [2]Ulysses during much the same time and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capital project as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more like Eisenstein’s notes. Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s 1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyce’s

Many important intellectuals have—as it were, posthumously—endorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and of Deleuze’s unrealized Grandeur de Marx, along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world crisis (‘we are all socialists now’, etc.). Is Kluge’s new film a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one? And what would ‘being a Marxist’ mean today? The Anglo-American reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of Capital reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter: ‘The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousness’. [3] That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones, in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a reconstruction of ‘feelings’ (a key or technical term for him): this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as his Geschichte und Eigensinn—History and Obstinacy—written in collaboration with Oskar Negt.

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New Left Review – Fredric Jameson: Marx and Montage.

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Fast Tube by Casper">Spike Jonze ad.

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I’m posting this in full because it is so important. Toynbee is no radical, but she has got it dead right here.

New depths have been plumbed by Rupert Murdoch‘s newspapers. If the Guardian’s revelations only concerned lurid journalism it would be disgraceful but not sinister. However, the way the police, the public prosecutor and judiciary appear to have prevented exposure of this industrial-scale bugging is a reminder of just how cleverly Murdoch companies manipulate officialdom.

Something else happened this week, something that again raises all too familiar questions about Murdoch’s extraordinary power. The evidence is circumstantial, but you may find it quite compelling.

On 26 June Ofcom published a report into the pay-TV market. After long investigation, it concluded that Sky had a monopolistic control: its 80% of Premier League football and 100% of movies from the big Hollywood studios prevent others from entering the market, and Sky sells these rights to others at too high a price. As a competition regulator, Ofcom’s job is to keep the market open. Its new ruling requires Sky to sell on its rights to all comers at some 30% less than it currently charges. BT reckons this will drop the average cost of watching top-flight football by £10 a month.

Ofcom’s boldness drew an amazed intake of breath from industry players and observers. This is the first time a regulator has seriously challenged Murdoch’s market power. Those who stood to gain – BT Vision, Virgin Media, Top Up TV and others — were delighted their protests were so bravely answered.

Sky’s chief executive replied immediately that it would challenge Ofcom using “all available legal avenues”. This time, however, Ofcom is not expected to allow Sky to use the tactic of delaying regulators in the courts for years – it must comply and can appeal afterwards. The battle is on, since historically Murdoch’s empire has stooped to manipulating regulators and avoiding taxes. How has he done that? By leaning hard on politicians, who – knowing only too well his dominant voice in newspapers – are frightened for their lives.

Sure enough, the next day his newspapers sharpened their knives. Here is the Sun’s Fergus Shanahan: “This is the world gone mad. Ofcom, the official telly regulator, says a successful and popular firm – Sky – must be penalised for doing well … This nonsense – rewarding losers by punishing winners – is Ofcom’s way of ‘improving competition’. Ofcom busybodies also have the nerve to threaten to dictate what prices shareholder-owned firms like Sky can charge. That’s despotic, not democratic, and it’s what they do in Russia.” No, what they do in Russia these days is to grant monopolies to oligarchs and that’s why Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading exist — to prevent it happening here.

Just 10 days later, last Monday, David Cameron made a surprise speech about quangos. His team asked the rightwing thinktank Reform to set up the event at just a few days’ notice. It looked like the standard speech made by all oppositions promising cuts in “the quango state”. But one astonishing new commitment stuck out, even though it was barely noticed in most reports: “Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist. Its remit will be restricted to narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy.” It would be knocked back to “regulating lightly”. Had there been a great popular outcry calling for the demolition of Ofcom? Hardly, since this is obscure, techie stuff. So what was this all about?

Within hours of Cameron’s speech, leading market analysts UBS Investment Research assessed the potential impact: “This bodes well for Sky … We believe that a lighter-touch approach would result in a far better and fairer outcome for Sky, the consumer and the pay market. This could result in a valuation of over 750p versus circa 650p under Ofcom’s current proposals.” In plain English, if the Conservatives come to power and abolish Ofcom, expect a £1 share price rise for Sky – worth some £1.7bn.

The timing and content of Cameron’s speech may, of course, be purely coincidental. Former Murdoch man Andy Coulson may have nothing to do with it. I have no shred of evidence to the contrary. The Tories have every reason to dislike Ofcom chief Ed Richards, a former Blair adviser paid £400,000 a year. But behind the scenes the players in this drama, other companies, analysts and observers were stunned. Few dare speak for publication, fearing the wrath of the incoming Conservatives. Ofcom will not be drawn. The one bold voice was Peter Luff, Conservative chair of the business and enterprise select committee. “Ofcom is a bloody great regulator,” he told me. “I believe in free markets and I’m very pro-competition. It needs powerful people.”

Cameron’s office says there was “no contact with News International” about Ofcom but history should not be ignored. The Murdoch press has a long record of winning pay-back from the political leaders it backs – and it has recently swung behind Cameron. In fact, it is so ordinary that too few political commentators bother to keep remarking on the malign influence this man has had on our politics for the past 30 years.

Europe has been Murdoch’s one unwavering political obsession. The reason is commercial: the EU is the one regulatory power stronger than his ability to twist the arms of national politicians. EU law nearly stopped him launching Sky until Margaret Thatcher demanded a special exemption to let him start up with almost entirely US content. The one Cameron policy that sits oddly with his bid for centre-ground moderation has been his anti-EU extremism, greater than Mrs Thatcher’s, marching his troops out of the influential EPP group in Brussels. Murdoch has shaped our foreign policy by using his press and his political power to inflame Europhobia.

In his memoirs, John Major counts his downfall from the day Murdoch gave him the imperial thumbs-down. Blair fawned and obeyed, right from his shocking acquiescence to the Tory 1996 Broadcasting Act, which gave Murdoch total control of the digital future (later saved by Greg Dyke bringing in Freeview). The night before the crucial Iraq war vote, virtually the entire cabinet attended Sun editor David Yelland’s farewell party. Brown loses his moral compass down the back of the sofa as he courts Murdoch. All Tory and Labour leaders canoodle with the Murdoch apparat with a social desperation that demeans them and their office. This political corruption is rather more alarming than duck islands.

Murdoch’s malign influence demeans British politics | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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