Friday, July 30, 2010

Red Noses

Selma James wrote:


WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK LESS

WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT
WE DEMAND CONTROL OF OUR BODIES
WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO HAVE OR NOT HAVE CHILDREN
WE DEMAND EQUAL PAY FOR ALL
WE DEMAND AN END TO PRICE RISES
WE DEMAND FREE COMMUNITY CONTROLLED NURSERIES AND CHILD CARE



In the Guardian's comment is free blog, Nina Power takes this "clearly" to mean that James was concerned with the "moral value" that capitalist employers of women derived from their "expectations" regarding working women:

what is the moral value in expecting them [women working outside the home] to toil away at the cost of their health and happiness?


This imputation to James of primary concern with the moral state of those whose point of view Power represents (capitalists, propertied professionals) is very far from a legitimate inference from James' and her comrades' statements and activism. Rather it is so gross and unaccountable a misreading of a perfectly straightforward and unambiguous assertion of demands that one is forced to wonder if it is not that Power is semi-literate (though her writing suggests this) but that she is engaged in an effort to mislead to support her previous dismissal of feminism as a "moral discourse" (always unfavourably contrasted - as feminised and therefore degraded - to virile "political" discourses, so James' rather obviously political demands are misconstrued as moralising) accompanying her insinuations about women and immigrants driving down white male wages and negatively impacting the standard of living of the working class as a whole. The result - incoherent, equivocating, insinuating, sense-destroying - is an excellent example of Zizzlocation and Zizzlocution.



Couched in a lot of childish ultra-radical posturing about the need for propertied professionals to achieve personal "fulfillment" by dreaming of "unfathomable" alternative universes, the usual reactionary talking points are paraded by Power as givens and hackneyed patriarchal myths put forward as established facts. Further, Power engages in increasingly popular techniques of debate-infantilisation, assigning idiotic postures to her sock-puppet adversaries as set-ups for her vague, sentimental, applause-cuing outbursts. She presents the absurd binary alternatives of her own childish imagination as if they could serve as a reflection of other people's actual social and political possibilities and their limits. Power asks her readers to choose, for example, between 1. "clinging on to employment at any cost", [a suggestion she attributes to working class militants opposing austerity] and 2. "reconsidering what it means to work at all".

We're all salaried by Universities, after all, and have no responsibilities; we all have nobody depending on us and healthy parents who own a big house outright where we can live and be fed, read and watch television. We're all legal in the country we live in, enjoying healthcare for free, and none of us have criminal records, and everyone we know enjoys the same security and equivalent resources. What better time than when you're out of work to reconsider what it means to work at all? Why try to cling on to employment no matter the cost when you don't even have any to cling on to? What the real radicals who write in the Guardian understand is that unemployment is an opportunity, not a hardship. What's wrong with being unemployed? Okay, okay, but money isn't everything! Why does everyone have to be a "job seeker" with a mortgage, a vibrator, your same sex domestic partner and a solar panel on your roof? That's not emancipation! If you don't have a job you're in an even better position to resist the temptations to consume luxury items, just as if you don't have a vibrator you're going to be less tempted to while your days away "researching" vintage porn and Girls Gone Wild. Closer to subjective destitution, you are closer to your true liberation. Instead of working, you could travel or re-read Kant. The shocking controversial non-conformist possibilities are endless! You could cook your way through Julia Child but with all vegetarian substitutes. There are lots of new tofu-based products. You could start a bondage and domination kibbutz, or go to graduate school for a qualification to think a radically different future with no work for all, not just no work for you. After all it's not all about you, Right to Work Grrrl, it's not all about your job, your debts, your kids, your needs; you could stop being such a selfish bitch.



Of course Power genders the issue of the right to work in the expected fashion; it is not professional men's jobs (sacred, meriting partisans at the barricades when threatened) but working class women's "right to work" that is presented as problematic and indeed damaging to all. Given her allegiance to a macho misogynist backlash that once again advances the image of a monolithic Woman as "a vapid dude-obsessed, pink-clad, consumerist cog" it is not that surprising to see that, having scavenged the reference to James' feminist programme from a criticism of her own propagandistic, irrational and anti-rational anti-feminism in a blog debate and transformed it by misreading for her own reactionary uses, she tacks on at the end a kind of symbolic beating of Selma James by evoking as her heroes and role models those autonomist men who descended on James and her comrades when they marched for women's reproductive rights in Rome in 1975, called them fascists and physically assaulted them. That she begins her piece evoking and simultaneously insulting Selma James, whose analysis she appropriates and Zizzifies Golovinski-style, and ends it with a call to admire hypermasculine ultra-leftists who accomplished little more than to accidentally smother one of their trustifarian number and serve as convenient bogey and cover for P2 and Gladio terrorism and who attacked James' comrades in the street and yanked them around by the hair for their refusal to be subordinated to men, pretty much says it all about Nina Power's self-proclaimed "Marxist-feminism".

It may be a tiny bit surprising that Leninino greets this buffoonery with delight, happy to be assigned a "worthy, classical" "model of work" to go along with a purportedly "rather British" attitude favouring slave labour as character building - that work ethic, also Slovenian of course - and the conviction that "it is enough [for women] to have a job, regardless of what it is". The height of effrontery is Leninino calling this risible performance, with all its Zizekian hanging concessions, prevaricating convolutions, garden path feints and semantic mirages, "the scalpel of socialist feminist critique", when it is rather the iron(ic) mace of post-post-modern digi-interactive-age propaganda. But the pleasure in all this breathtaking nonsense would be less perplexing if you were to suppose the aim was for the Marxist left to make its public image as ridiculous and repugnant - as sexist, racist, ignorant, infantile, and foolish - as possible, appropriate followers of the world's most influential Marxist.

54 comments:

  1. As usual, very enjoyable. We do apologize in advance for not being able to 'always take your side' on everything, as one knows that's what you require. That's wonderful about Bell Hooks knowing that feminists can't be racist, since you and Anodyne are White Lesb'an Supremacists (although you're just a Closet Wannabe Lesb'an and can't quite figure out how to do it, since it would make you such a powerful figure in the Soviet superstructure, you could give up your real furs and wear fake furs with animal-rights pins on them like my frumpy downstairs neighbour; Anodyne accuses other wimmerns of being lesb'an because she is only 49% Lesb'an and believe it is important to be pedantic about terms like 'bisexual', 'lesb'an', 'monosexual' (a condemnatory and infantilizing term for 'heterosexual males' and 'homosexual males' because Lesb'ans are all 'forced bisexuals' because of the International Male White Supremacist Movement led by Badiou, who proved it by not asking your permission to talk to Finklekraut and not protesting the gum-chewing (Anodyne's term) beautiful objective black woman's face behind him, and if he'd really care, he would have!) and this is racist by it's nature. If you weren't such a lovable crazy-house person, I was going to write at Dejan for the first time since February, as he was hilarious today. I ONLY didn't because he (and Anodyne too, I believe I remember) both love this Kylie Minogue, and Dejan confesses to watching this Zizekian Pepsi-Lite 'n' Diet Coke video some 100 times, I don't know how she had even one brain-cell left. Well, I don't won't little homely gleeful girls and male feministas to put Voodoo Needles in this Barbie, but this an AWFUL piece of shit--she has no personality beyond Britney and Paris and is, I guess, about the same level as Lady Gaga. All this mechanical rhythm is just to make many Gay 'n' Lesb'an activists even more stoned than they already were. And the inept pyramids of young models is very Zizekian, it's all very clumsy. You'd never know it was in Downtown L.A. if they didn't tell you, and that was just for the glamour. She doesn't even have a perfect Barbie figure, although does look maybe 1/8 Hispanic, that helps a little.

    Like that pic of Al Jolson.

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  2. "It's not far from M*A*S*H to The Verdict and David Mamet stacking the deck so when Newman floors Rampling with a blow she deserves it and the audience is titilated and "morally" satisfied. "

    I think Joan Rivers deserved it when I floored her on the ballet board for combining money-making from talking about Liz Tay-lah, Dolly Parton, lying about having an "onstage Lesb'an part opposite Barbra Streisand in their salad days, and that Babs was a 'good kisser'" and then getting cosmetic surgery into the thousand-session echelon that ended up giving her misshapen lips. The Fierce Feminist legal assistant at the ballet board said 'Blaming women in show business for cosmetic surgery is, in this particular society, to blame the victim, and that is certainly not to my taste'. I told her it was the same as Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery and that men who think they're 'not hot enough' get surgeries that don't work all the time, and that I just didn't consider any of these victims of 'this particular society', especially when any idiot knows that hundreds of facelifts and chemical peels may not leave you with that easy 'California-casual and faux-natural look' such as Sally Kellerman indeed does have (looks stupendous in 'Welcome to L.A.', although plays a sex-starved real estate agent, Lauren Hutton is more successful as nympho, and Geraldine Chaplin has a Garbo Complex and is always screaming 'Nanine! Nanine!' in the mirror, she's even more beautiful than Garbo.

    But what happened to Joan Rivers's mouth (as she began to sink into low-level cabarets in the 20s and 30s area just below the Garment District...anti-Semitic slur? I wouldn't know, I think Widow Fortune should have the Soakeses pull out everybody's tongues) is because she was a 'jellis girl' (I love that) and had been taking advantage of Liz Tay-lah's weight gain at the hands of her marriage to Warner, and then also Dolly's big tits, and Streisand's great talent.)

    Now, whether you are fit to be seen in sassiety I dasn't knows. But Barbara Walters has had like, maybe, two or three cosmetic procedures, and at 77 in 2007, looked fabulous in person. PLUS...she is a KIND person, because she will go out in sassiety with Joan Rivers, who is a 'jellis girl', and Barbara knows that Joan wants to put Barbara needles in her. Say, that reminds me of those gals in the perf. space of yo' youth, poking each other with needles. Which one was jellis? Did they swab down with al-kee-hawl from time to time, or were they into getting infections as well.

    Enquiring minds waunt to know.

    I just read that Porfirio Rubirosa "was linked romantically to Dolores del Río, Eartha Kitt, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Soraya Esfandiary, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, Judy Garland, and Eva Peron. He dallied with his ex-wife Flor de Oro Trujillo Ledesma during his marriage to Doris Duke, and with Zsa Zsa Gabor during his marriage to Barbara Hutton. He was named a co-respondent in at least two divorces, the wives charging adultery in each case."

    Now this was not a White Supremacist Male except in the sense that Obama is. Would this not cause a Legal Assistant to defend Joan Rivers, both of whom would be 'jellis' because Porfirio was more interested in Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa, and didn't rilly want them to be killed with needles by Joan Rivers? (although I doubt he cared that much either, to be honest.)

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  3. sorry I ust appreciate this at the tomb:

    The right to work is not coextensive with the obligation to work. On the contrary, asserting the right to work is essential for the purpose of reducing the amount of work that people have to do, and increasing the share of the social product they receive for their labour. It is also synonymous with defending the welfare state, so that unwaged work is paid in some sense. It does not entail "working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more" - quite the reverse.

    the reverse? really? quite the reverse? you mean, the labour movement and the radical left is not trying to make people work harder so those at the top can keep more? no, are you sure?

    that's the conversation Lenin wants to have - to be obliged to explain the obvious, repeatedly. But it's too late now - he has issued now the official denial of what technically nobody ever accused the right to work campaign of advocating. So why is he denying this, out of the blue, if there's not some truth to it? What's he hiding?

    He's already lost. The campaign, she said, is not of course about working harder for less, or pink elephants, or "half-ape blacks whose grandparents jumped in trees like apes in africa". NOT about about that she said! NOT. Let's be clear, she's saying the right to work campaign does not advocate a race to the bottom. There's no connection between the blog's repeated evocation of this new slavery and the repeated reference to the right to work campaign. just coincidence they appear in the same paragraphs. like the vibrators the booze and the feminists.

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  4. patrick, women certainly who are filmed for a living have to have more facework and earlier.

    men eventually do it, and can benefit - i mentioned pacino, it really rejuvenated him. but men who don't get it can work and have worked into old age.

    now there is botox, everyone using it means everyone has to use it - like doping cyclists. now a normal face looks odd. even very young beautiful actresses whose faces are perfect look now very strangely mobile in their faces next to the big stars between thirty seven and forty five. on screen a normal face with normal muscle movement begins to look bizarre no matter how youthful and taut. this may happen with men but it hasn't happened yet.

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  5. "the reverse? really? quite the reverse? you mean, the labour movement and the radical left is not trying to make people work harder so those at the top can keep more? no, are you sure?"

    Searing and witty, unless you've happened to notice that the ruling class is cutting welfare for unemployed and disabled people while justifying it in terms of the edifying qualities of work, and that the Right to Work campaign necessarily distinguishes itself from that position. But hey, why have a go at the bosses when there's so much else to keep you busy.

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  6. is the right to work campaign run by the bosses?

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  7. and bill, the ruling class don't justify anything to anyone. that is what they retain the comment is free commentariat to do, but even they mostly promote tv shows now.

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  8. patrick, women certainly who are filmed for a living have to have more facework and earlier.

    We are not talking about WOMEN, we were talking about JOANNIE FUCKING RIVERS, well-known cosmetic surgery addict for decades now. As a clown, she had no reason to try to make herself glamorous except because she wanted to, and because, as she said, 'I always feel like it will help me get a man'. We are not talking about NORMAL show bizznezz women. Of course, Barbara Walters needed some and Barbra Streisand has had TONS, just so long as she keeps the trademark Nefertiti nose. But JOAN RIVERS--Jesus god--and those guys just made a docu on her that people are going to see called 'Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work', and she only did it because she wasn't doing anything more glamorous at the time, and I'm sure got paid well. But what am I explaining something so obvious to you for. You just wanted to see me type. I don't imagine Joannie or Michael went more than 3 or 4 weeks EVER without some knew cosmetic surgery, OF COURSE that's going to make them unemployable because it always looks LOONEY! And all I wondered was if she knew what horrible photos were coming out of her mouth. Michael never seemed to know he had this total nose-job-look nose, and also claimed he never had plastic surgery. Well, I guess Joan is proof that wimmernz are smarter than minz--at least she admits she can remember her cosmetic surgery sessions.

    But what's her fucking 'bought glamour' for anyway, if she's gonna get out there and say 'who wants to smell like a middle-aged Jewish woman?' Well, 'why pay more', as they say, if you already determined that you were going to look like shit (and you do that much of it and does look totally macabre.)

    Yeah, Al Pacino has a face that can just be touched a bit, like Walters's. The trouble probably comes in when they try to change the whole structure of the face, Walters has a strong face (and a great body, btw, very tall and statuesque in person) and so does Pacino. I think Rivers just wants to be somebody else. No wonder she had Leona on her early 90s show, and cried with her about how she had to go to jail (but Joan didn't have to.)

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  9. " and that the Right to Work campaign necessarily distinguishes itself from that position."

    As the Guardian comment is free explains today, the Right to Work Campaign does not distinguish itself from that position but in fact "plays into this attitude that work is the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too" while the media and culture industry proprietor-professional class and their patrons the capitalist class perform the important work of "thinking about alternatives to the current system, however unfathomable."

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  10. " we were talking about JOANNIE FUCKING RIVERS, well-known cosmetic surgery addict for decades now. "

    Okay. You're right.

    We had the same lawyer, you know, Joan and I. And for our lawyers' daughters' wedding, i bought them these wonderful bathrobes. And when Melissa got married, he asked me, where did you get those robes? They are so wonderful, the perfect wedding gift. And that's what he gave those riverses.

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  11. "Yeah, Al Pacino has a face that can just be touched a bit, like Walters's."

    No he really changed It was a lot done. He was not going to work, he was elderly looking, and then he was young again. But it was great work, he really looks just like his younger self. Not everyone can.

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  12. And Bill, i'm American. Where I am from "right to work" means "union-busting", so don't think you're letting loose exciting secrets or discovering thrilling little complexities in language. We know we know we know, reservation noted, moving on.

    And I don't want to shock you but many Americans - WASPs and African-Americans and Italian Americans and Lebanese Americans and Latin@s - and Jamaicans and Mexicans and Colombians and Haitians also see work as ennobling or dignified. And Koreans and Indians. It's not just you wondrous AngloSaxons. And, perhaps you need to sit down for this, but I have heard an English aristocrat laughing at Rich Yanks for not understand that work is degrading, for wanting their children to work "in mines if possible". Said aristo exempted American Jews from this censure. That was why I was being told this story.

    So don't believe anything about these special British qualities just because you read it in the Guardian.

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  13. Just looked up Pacino in IMDb to see if I could find a recent pic. Will find one elsewhere, that has maybe 300. But he's been doing Shylock at the Delacorte all through the heat wave. I wish I had had time to go. Main thing is, I looked over there and he did it in a 2004 movie with Jeremy Irons as Antonio. Never heard of it. I wonder if a lot of people saw it. I always have been a big Pacino fan. Now remember he still looked young in 'Heat' from mid90s, long and lean and it was right after that he started aging, an Danny Bracco, or whatever that movie with the little one, what's his name, Johnny Depp, I never can pay that much attention to him. Probably around that time he and D'angelo started the screaming on phones, etc. It's basically a good face, and even though you can get a lot of work done, you're mainly trying to get your 'old' young face back. I can't say I really want to watch a 'Merchant' with Pacino and Irons that much, though. I saw a modernized Jules Irving/Ellis Rabb version long ago w/Rosemary Harris. She's probably the only thing I liked about it, I rarely like updatings of classics. She was a great Blanche Dubois just before that, knows how to do that line 'Oh yes, that kind is good for the BED, but theah's AHT 'n' MYOOZIK, some progress hay-as been MAYDE!' much better than Vivien Leigh. She did 'Royal Family' again this year, did daughter 30 years ago, mother this time. they gave Tony to Catherine Zeta-Jones, as they always seem to give her any award, no matter how bad she is in whatever--this time for singing 'Send in the Clowns', etc.

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  14. "It's not just you wondrous AngloSaxons."

    Well as a fenian mick bastard, I can take such insults on the chin, just as I managed to cope with transatlanticist accusations of being a cute little leprechaun.

    "So don't believe anything about these special British qualities just because you read it in the Guardian"

    Except that I was obviously commenting on your reference to the post on LT. But that's OK, if you want to have an argument with me about something I didn't say...

    "many Americans - WASPs and African-Americans and Italian Americans and Lebanese Americans and Latin@s - and Jamaicans and Mexicans and Colombians and Haitians also see work as ennobling or dignified"

    You may have left a couple off your list, but we can overlook that for now, and as soon as they all gang together to start driving disabled people into work, we can take up the question of the appropriate slogan with them then.

    "the ruling class don't justify anything to anyone"

    Well, if you say so.

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  15. "Except that I was obviously commenting on your reference to the post on LT. "

    the reference is to the post on LT which quotes a comment is free Guardian column

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  16. by the way, i think it's good that Lenin is not really campaigning with theright to work campaign to strip benefits from disabled people.Itwould have surprised me more than I can say to discover him advocating something so cruel.

    However I am not sure that the commenter in the Guardian accusing the right to work campaign of existing to justify such barbarism, to which he is replying with this clarification which you now are underscoring, really believes that's what they're doing. Anyway she doesn't say, any more than you do, who is taken in by this "justification" for cutting the benefits to the disabled that this slogan constitutes, or what such a justification is worth to the ruling class if nobody is persuaded by it or even notices it until it's pointed out by those retained to think the unfathomable.

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  17. I think she just gives that impression to the Guardian readers knowing that it is misleading. Though she may be just wrong, or I could be wrong and Lenin and large UK trade unions could really be campaigning to harm those for whom working is especially onerous or impossible.

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  18. "many Americans - WASPs and African-Americans and Italian Americans and Lebanese Americans and Latin@s - and Jamaicans and Mexicans and Colombians and Haitians also see work as ennobling or dignified"

    You may have left a couple off your list,


    Well unless I covered every ethnicity, I obviously did. One could almost suspect it had to do with something other than "national character". And what the Guardian comment is free commenter explains is not not that the workers in Britain aren't Irish, Polish, Sudanese and Australian but that the work ethic is "rather British". You've heard of this before, I'm sure - this "rather British" work ethic was used for generations by the British ruling class to justify imperialism, something that time out of mind the ruling class' clerks have pointed to in order to distinguish the British from the colonised and imperialised. In the Guardian comment is free piece it is evoked to distinguish what is "rather British" from the International Wages for Housework Campaign, workerism and autonomism.

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  19. The "right to work means"

    the right of access to the means of producton.

    this is construed as a "right" in a basically natural law reasoning, with the right stemming from the working class' needs and the working class' powers.

    again, this is Marxism 101. If you think it's valuable to have a public pedagogy such as appeared in the Guardian going under the banner of radical left marxism or libertarian marxism, designed to promote the most grotesque historical ignorance and every other kind of ignorance and irrationality, to insinuate and imply without stating anything to evade rebuttal, evidence and sense, to renew obsolete reactionary ideological topoi and refurbish greatly weakened and nearly obliterated sexist and racist vocabulary including clichés about the "British" national character, I would urge you to reconsider after taking into account the effects of such shenanigans rather than seeing it as a case of individual self-expression and career advancement so that the only criterion to be applied in the judgement of such ventures is the supposed good intention score of the author.

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  20. "I can't say I really want to watch a 'Merchant' with Pacino and Irons that much,"

    he's great in it. It's very neoliberal, ideologically, the Portia is horrible, the whole sequence with her and her suitors is dreadful clunky, cheap and cheesy, but Pacino is terrific and moving.

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  21. If you weren't such a lovable crazy-house person,

    Funny you should mention that, in her auntie's corsette she looks like a CRAZY HORSE production gone out of control.


    I was going to write at Dejan for the first time since February, as he was hilarious today. I ONLY didn't because he (and Anodyne too, I believe I remember) both love this Kylie Minogue, and Dejan confesses to watching this Zizekian Pepsi-Lite 'n' Diet Coke video some 100 times, I don't know how she had even one brain-cell left.

    Like, did anyone actually READ what I wrote about Kylie? I was explainin' how this conjuring up of Aphrodite, Wilhem Reich, the Tower of Babel etc designates the affluent West as a successful Sodom, based on all these great United Nations ideals like the love of all gay men under the sun, and the dove of peace, but it's just a mirror-image of socialist realist design during Stalinism, the only difference being superior production values.

    Dear Colonel, you should point your gaze towards New Subversive Serbian cinema, which shows you that the Serbian spirit of subversion ain't dead yet; you will also find it interesting as an extension of the ''black wave'' Communist cinema during the 1968s, about which they recently had a great conference at Van Eyck, attended even by Comrade Agnetha Hatherley.

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  22. Joan Rivers's auto-biography is one of the most hilarious books I read in my life, the scene that imprinted itself forever was when she was still a struggling comedienne, walking in downtown Manhattan, and then Babs appeared in a fantastic limo (Babs and Joan went to the same amateur theater). Joan looked in Babs's direction, and Babs waved her poodle's paw at Joan.

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  23. Like, did anyone actually READ what I wrote about Kylie?

    Like, is she cud-ding?

    Love,

    Catherine Zeta-Jones, before getting fired from T-Mobile ads for 'just not famous enough', said the reps...

    Nobody cares what yours or anybody else's stupid analysis of that shit is when it sounds that fucking vacuous. And it is truly THE SOUND OF ZIZEK, and believe me, I bet she'd fuck him and Lady Gaga would too, they'd think it was so 'intellectual' thingk to do, just like their own bimbo asses. She's ORDINARY, just run-of-the-mill. You are stuck between a rock andt a hardt place, you Serbian cretin! It doesn't get you off the hook when you 'understand how it's like shit Socialist Realism', when you then confess to 'swooning over it' when it is such total shit as this, and she has NO talent to speak of, just run-of-the-mill Barbie shit, just ready for the 'jellis girls' to poke with their crochet needles.

    Even Miss Power's msm media debut is more titillating than Kylie's Sterilized Lesb'an b.s.

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  24. Arpege, your page is getting hard to load again, does that have to do with the number of clips and YouTubes you post on one page? I don't know. Maybe you will need to remove the old ones, even Mr. Finkielkraut (gawd, what a name, it took time to get used to it, I kept wanting to get rid of the 'e', until I realized it must be 4 syllables.

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  25. If the propaganda wasn't GOOD it would not be successful, and this is mega-successful *not just THIS, but the whole genre which you address *, or it wouldn't have been produced by Stephen Bray. The clip has a way with ''orgone energy'', as it were, it is seductive and addictive. The vacuity is another issue; most popular stuff has to be vacuous, or do you envisage L.A. queens dancing to Shostakovich or something??? Shostakovich goddamn disco!

    You cunt if I didn't realize you were as handsome as you are, like some Bretagne sailor version of the younger Newman, I would deplore your insolent refusal to play with my smooth lacy lingerie.
    I doubt that the Taiwanese testicles knew how to take advantage of this discovery, but photographed you more as an object d'art in her little online diary of girlie memories.

    It's quite possible if not inevitable that the Vole Dyke used to be Analyte's online customer and this is the only reason he didn't know how to defend his hairy ass under the onslaught of werminery.

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  26. Well, I thought it an interesting technique he employed. He told her the obvious truth, but then apologized for it, because he knows how 'en colere' she gets, even though she says that's just that 'men can't stand even for a few seconds to listen to an aggressive Lesb'an', or something like that. Then starts talking about the world's rape victims and says 'the menz don't wants to hear about it'. Now she's talking about whether menz will quit getting 'energized' or something by internet porno and some other thing. But I do give you credit about how he should have known not to 'talk to the wermin'. I nearly passed out with all those new versions, it was the best thing you've written since the Interview with Mrs. Doyle in her Garden. And then he went into all that crazy hair, and oughtn't to try to carry off a kraut-style buzzcut.

    I spotted Carl's post the night before and couldn't BELIEVE he didn't know that that was not the time to talk to the wermin, and he was acting just like Dominic, offering to let her de-ball him, and I thought she would, but in her Lesb'an mode, she was more gentlemanly and let him off with a warning...but then couldn't believe you'd seen it and had it up on the Baedeker by next morning. Best part was he was saying how the woming was basically right, but that therefore the dissolution of masculinity could be taken in a slow wasting-away-disease tempo. I'm sure she saw that as an immediate concession on his part (and it certainly was.)

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  27. because he knows how 'en colere' she gets

    sweet Lord like the Elisabeth Taylor character in ''The Taming of the Shrew'' but then played by Anjelica Huston in Goth drag. Elite's much more RADICAL than that ''Fragments'' broad, who fell into complete blawg obscurity.

    The problem with bears is that they can be wilfully dumb; it's easier for the Dyke to imagine that there's something ''wrong'' with his heterosexual conscience and then undergo online strap-on rituals in the gutters of Manhattan's Unconscious; than to simply admit Analyte gives him a fat hardon. There must be a term for this radical pathology, something like ''willful penis obstruction'' or ''consensual penorectomy with ball torture'', and you're right, it does remind one of Dominique's madness.

    I think the parallel between Kylie and Nymphomania is spot-on.

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  28. Arpege, your page is getting hard to load again, does that have to do with the number of clips and YouTubes you post on one page?

    If you count that together with the number of Corinthian curves on her aunty's corset, I think yes even Windows 7 can't deal with it anymore.

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  29. I think the parallel between Kylie and Nymphomania is spot-on.

    Except that Kylie is a commercial whore, and the Nymphette, as they'd say in Dutch, EEN GRATIS HOER (whore for free).

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  30. Or as Missus put it well:

    I think of Robert Altman's M*A*S*H the film, and the humiliation of "hot lips" Houlihan played by Sally Kellerman. The men hate her because they want her.

    Quite, Arpege, and they SHOULDN'T WANT HER EITHER, she's better off painting Kim Catrall's labia in Morocco; don't worry about us men, we'll manage with our penises, just GO SHOP or something.

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  31. What I also find amusing is that Arpege herself won't admit that she can't do Lesb'an in a very literal way--but, in usual fashion, makes you figure it out and won't help you with it if you can't. She can do endless anti-racism at every turn, isn't afraid of leninino, but since she's not really interested in Lesb'an behaviour as a good Communist should be, she has to read all their books and defend the honour of the most objectionable wimmernz like Sarah Palin and Joan Rivers, because EVEN THEY must not be insulted for beingk wimmerns. Therefore, in defending all wimmerns at all times, Arpege has succeeded in developing a unique Lesb'anism which does not include having to dive right in--she has developed a Universal Black Feminism which allows the luxury of keeping Explicit Lesb'anism at arm's length. I find this rather endearing, although I don't doubt Anodyne's frightening powers if she ever, as Tina Turner used to sing, has to 'just keep yo' min' on da money'. That Anodyne is an EMOTIONAL wyrmyrn!

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  32. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/nyregion/27peabody.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

    Worth looking at the pic, because this is a real Southern Belle Manhattan Socialite. I hadn't been as aware of her as the rest of those listed--Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, Nan Kempner--and had never seen a picture, but I instantly knew she was a Southerner. Although I did know a North Carolinian Old New York dowager who didn't have that look. She was more typically Southern-lazy, said 'my mothah tol' me, you don' have to learn how to cook. I nevah had to do it and you'll nevah have to eithah'. Well, that's why her cook made Trinidadian Chicken every time I went over too. She never got me to do anything but take my shirt off at the dining table, but she did have a young homo who was willing to bridge the 30 to 75 age difference and do a certain amount of putting out. He was an idiot, and wrote an 'opera' about Thoreau, with the title song 'Here's a man that you should know, Henry David Thoooooo-reau'. And he sing this one time. She took me to the Colony Club, which is socially all the way up, but dull WASP food, and said "Well, you know, this is the best Ladies' Club in the United States, and maybe eb'n in EUROPE", which made no sense, but I loved the reasoning, having wanted to indulge it often.Louis Auchincloss writes about these types all the time, he just died a few months back, I love his stuff.

    Mrs. Peabody types are always involved in the Charity Ball Circuit of the East Side, but I thought it was interesting about the Lenny Bruce connection. Wouldn't have thought it.

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  33. she has developed a Universal Black Feminism which allows the luxury of keeping Explicit Lesb'anism at arm's length.

    She's as straight as a goddamn kalashnikov although I don't doubt if the Party Programme required it she wouldn't let Analyte unzip her aunty's corset a little and then they would pose for the Socialist Worker, the ''Wimmin's Leisure'' series. Analyte claims to be a New Age polysexual and a queer Goth princess but it's so easy to say that when you have such a classically well-endowed boyfriend to hang on to, and rely on, and I don't mean JUST FOR GODDAMN EMOTIONAL SUPPORT!!!

    That woman looks like a cross between Helen Mirren, Tippi Hedren and Klaus Kinski. I enjoyed your account of the South'n largesse although you need more than merely your good looks to be allowed as a rent boy in those circles; if I attempted any sort of a career under the rich and the famous, I'd most likely end up doing blow jobs on mediocre penises for 50 euro, which is why I stick to the drudgery of legal corporate jobs, you LUCKY BITCH OF A PROSTITUTE.

    Browsing through my statistics yesterday I realized that the post on Arpege's return to form garnered the highest number of hits since the beginning of 2010. Straight after that is the Dr. Sinthome series, the episode in which I put my finger up the cat's velvety Texan butt, while the SLOVENLY ALIEN still gets a lot of clicks even thought it isn't online anymore!

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  34. I don't doubt if the Party Programme required it she wouldn't let Analyte unzip her aunty's corset a little and then they would pose for the Socialist Worker, the ''Wimmin's Leisure'' series.

    It would be like that famous photo of Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert being just WAY a little too close and cuddly--and DEFINITELY we know the casting in this one! Arpege didn't know that's why she had moved to Paris! But Marlene was supposed to be so butch at times that on set of 'Rancho Notorious' she busted Fritz Lang's balls on regular basis, the writer couldn't even describe it beyond 'he'd finally found someone who was as German as he was'. What I wouldn't give to see those offstage scenes with Marlene in all her fury.

    Have you seen that photo? Marlene also tried to get into Mae West's panties, but was rebuffed, and then she did fuck Frank Sinatra. You never you what Marlene was going to get hot for.

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  35. “Anyway she doesn't say, any more than you do, who is taken in by this "justification"”

    I guess there might be an interesting point here, especially if, as your framing seems to assume, the argument is one whose consequence resides merely in how it pans out on ‘The Left’. But it might also be otherwise. And in any case, (forgive me repeating myself)I was replying to your comment on a post that explicitly disagrees (perhaps in an excessively comradely way) with the Guardian article.

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  36. the argument is one whose consequence resides merely in how it pans out on ‘The Left’.

    The importance of a slogan is publicity and organising. The question was - would this campaign get some help from sympathetic media? The Guardian piece is the answer - no. The media one would have had some hope woumld be sympathetic is very hostile, portraying the effort of the organised working class to resist the austerity plans as reactionary, using an outmoded "model" of labour, secretly plotting with capital the enslavement of its members, Gradgrindian, and preying on the weakest.

    Does this fuck the slogan? Maybe. We'll see. Does it fuck the efforts? no. But it's a pity because the efforts could use the sympathy or at least some honest reporting from the more progressive regions of the msm. That instead there is a fairly malicious, if goofball, attack is an indication of the intensity of the loyalty of the professional classes in culture industry to ruling class interests right now.

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  37. a malicious, but silly, attack like the cherry on the sundae

    because its in context

    the Power piece is a part of the propaganda effort to coopt critique of UK trade unions and the SWP (it would be helpful to the victims of austerity now to see clearly what their leadership does and how they betray their interests) and imbecilise it.

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  38. What the Guardian readers know: People either cling to work no matter how exploitative, submitting completely to the master employer, hardworking salt of the earth, know their place, or are nomadic sprites skipping off for rites in the urban woods to an 80s new wave soundtrack.

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  39. Bill, seriously, look at this comment is free piece and the others which are its context

    it stands out for being far too vague and incoherent to really be engaged as an argument or opinion. it is a kind of spectacle, a little show.

    and know the audience - they are not a single blank althusserian position. they are various, though not as various as the entire species.

    most will not find Power appealing personally but accept her as the representative of the group she claims to represent. "you see, what did I tell you, these radical leftists and socialists are just sheltered, ignorant, privileged kids who don't want to do an honest days work."

    that's the principle effect, as you can verify somewhat from the comments (not scientific of course).

    then there will be a minority who find the persona of the author appealing, and these will be invited to "remember" that class struggle is old hat, that unions are corrupt comprador management, that it's not the 70s anymore! but women are still women, that it's a noo noo world, with all kinds of indescribable "changes" in "the nature of work" which means everything is different and we return to square one every half hour, that we are bewildered and don't understand anything and capitalist relations of property and production are just too complex for human comprehension, it's like God and the meaning of Life, eternal mysteries, and Italians are so much earthier and freer than we rather British, don't you wish you could be there now? yes! Forget all this labour work benefits stuff, it's just not sexy and it's compromised and boring.

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  40. no i haven't seen that photo but here I found a great clip of Arpege, ...

    http://www.break.com/index/cat-versus-snake-in-amazing-battle.html#211

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  41. boyz i hadn't been to that blog but liked Hatherley's grief over the carpark and imagine Zizz: de ushwal leeeberal rizponsh eess oh no you waste so much don't throw away de goot carpark, we have so many, dis wan is steeel goot, we guilty white leeberal multiculturalists alweissss have a nyooo car and for it we need nyoo carpack, so like de little girl in Adams Femmilly Valyooos, I luff dis movie, I say okay give the carpark to those without a carpark then, if you don't want to waste it. Peck it up and sent de carpack to Africa to starving children with no carpark or yes yes to kandahar or iraq someplace where de people don't have a carpark, they can use our old carpark, de how you say hand me down modernist carpark, for all the beeeg cars, de beeeg white four by force the charity leeberals of the ngos can park and the monkeys can jump and do pilates exercise on de de rails and de de how do you say ramps.

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  42. Hatherley went to the conference on Yugoslav 1968 film at Van Eyeck institute in Maastricht, where Zelimir Zilnik showed his films, Zilnik is one of the most important still-active Communist cultural figures next to Makavejev and Kusturica. Some years ago he had written an article about Yugoslav self-management in that period, explaining how Tito's totalitarian apparatus caused regional tensions not just between the republics but also inside the socialist movement, repressing those voices that demanded genuine Communism instead of Tito's soft Stalinism.

    Then Agnetha went to Ljubljana (she always misses Belgrade on her sojourns, I don't know HOW, Belgrade is a fairly big city)... only to write something completely horrible about how you know it was all about unfortunate ''regional tensions'' in Yugoslavia ruining the otherwise pure and beautiful idea of Titoism as an ideal system for the fair distribution of federal funds amongst the wurkers.

    I asked her howcome she never thought of asking ZILNIK about this, who I am sure could tell her a thing or two about the status of Serbia in Tito's book. She waved her hands like Kylie in ''All the Lovers'', and told me that ''Zilnik was very FORTHCOMING about this...'' *this being the NATO-compliant and depleted uranium-friendly official standpoint of her Trotskyist sponsors, NOT AT ALL EXCLUDING YOUR BUTT BOY LENININI.

    Enfin, I pretty much gave up all hope for these comrades and am now looking up to my countrymen's new movies (''The Life And Death of the Porno Gang'' and ''A Serbian Film'') to speak the truth about Yugoslavia to Western audience, if for no other reason, than to try and stop the upcoming wave of separatisms in Europe spurred on by the successful annexation of Kosovo.

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  43. http://www.divasthesite.com/images/Norma_Shearer/With_Others/Marlene_Dietrich_Claudette_Colbert.jpg

    I've decided it was too controlling to 'be' the Casting Director. Maybe Arpege needs some experience as the Marlene Butch, in case she get tired hand-me-down carpark. You know, actors will do anything when they're 'hurtin' foh money'. However, I just can't quite see Anodyne being able to tolerate the Colbert for very long...although even Marneffe probably spent a long time rolling her hair in the mirror so that wicked barons could decide that such was the 'only plaisir'. And I'm sure at least it was feminine, what I don't want to see curling her hair is Joan Crawford. She was never sexy because 'all business'. I can see Nina Power morphing into Joan Crawford and wearing shoulder pads.

    Dejan, don't get your hopes up about me writing at your j'int again. I am fully aware of your conspiracies with lafayetc, and Arpege is a more trustworthy lot, you know. As well, not even Eloise is trustworthy, I just write there sometimes because 'NB' is basically an attractive sort of mind, but he and Eloise also conspired against me (meaning Eloise knows who 'NB' is and 'NB' knows who I am, so when I write there it's all 'noblesse oblige', because they both know they know something I don't--and YOU'RE the same!) Anodyne has been a good friend too, and is still young enough to be allowed severe emotional instability, which she suffers because of a combination of sexual desire and having her head fucked daily by 'scientific method', which she believes in like a goddam religion, just like Virilio said to...

    I love 'at, boss!

    Arpege, you might also want to practice the word 'boyz' in Bette Davis accent for your older Gothic, unless you want to do Blanche in the wheelchair. Bette would pronounce it more like 'boyce' or 'boy-sss'

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  44. I've really no idea why you feel that I have any sort of an obligation to delve into Analyte's characterology when all she ever wanted was to hurt me.

    Since I must, I can only speculate that she's working on splicing herself with Chabert to become a MAN-WYRMIN.

    As for your decision, it doesn't surprise; you were always the kind of a closet bottom who would even disregard his own assets for the sake of his fag hags, as if with your good looks it was necessary for Chabert to organize your orgies.

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  48. I am sure that ''Colonel Chabert'' would still like to persuade you and others that I ended our romance because of some misogyny or anti-Communism or psychosis, instead of my intuition that we're dealing with an odious American Polyanna who perpetrates exactly the same patronizing moralization that she accuses her alleged enemies (the World Bank, NATO and capitalism) of perpetratin', while in reality she's all style and no subtance and painfully selfish. But I have never been truly bothered by any of her intellectual tastes, and for a while admired a lot her dedication to what we could loosely term 'The Serbian cause'. It is primarily her ideological debauchery that turned this opera into a brothel. To change this impression, Mis'z will have to invest in a first-class ticket from Adam to Paris, and a four star hotel with as many boy whores as I desire; then I might be prepared to talk.

    I really don't know what I can do to persuade you that you're lost in Marieband and Lafayette isn't the fantasy avatar you created out of him. In fact I don't feel comfortable discussing this because I don't know much about his personal life, as he never volunteered this information. But still I am very much in awe of all the paranoid entanglements that have been spun out of the chance encounters, purely as a WRITER, and the perverse hybrid gay film noir that you created out of it as well, possibly in preparation for your new book. It showed me that the blawgosphere opens portals, as Eloise would have said.

    I agree that the photo fits well into the overall style of your libidinal rhapsodies, ...

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  49. Okay, maybe I've been too brash and aggressive,

    That's also what Marlene always used to say in the morning, after the party.

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  54. now you've discovered that little trash can, patrick, it's become your favourite toy!

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