Universal flow
Jul. 29th, 2005 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Yesterday Hisae and I went to the Ring Centre at Frankfurter Allee, a big shopping centre. Hisae bought a sack of litter for Baker the rabbit to drop his pellets into, and I bought a cheap DVD player and some contact lenses. I got the DVD machine specifically to watch the Rem Koolhaas Lagos DVD I bought the other day, which refuses to play on computers. It was worth it: the DVD is excellent and, for me personally, endlessly thought-provoking. The criticisms I raised the other day were pretty much dispelled. There is some confusion between Koolhaas' attraction to Lagos as a place of refuge from shopping and his subsequent discovery that Lagos is all about shopping too, and between his initial exhilaration at the lack of planning and a growing conviction that planning is necessary. But these are productive confusions, the inevitable result of looking and learning with rare application and candour. The impression that Koolhaas is flying over Lagos in the president's helicopter, studying ants scuttling on clover leaves, is also offset when you watch the film (it's a whole other film, really) with the "close angle" view selected, and get a much more human, verstehen perspective soundtracked by first-person narratives from Lagos people themselves; the bus driver, the policeman, the marketeer unloading electronics bought from Dubai's free trade zone from the back of a truck.
One of the ways the film changed my perception was its constant attention to logistics — the way goods are moved around the world, and moved around Lagos; the sense of flow. It's tempting to see this as a rather 90s globalist theme because people like Andreas Gursky and Koolhaas himself have focused our attention to it so relentlessly in the last ten years. The Lagos DVD contains a beautifully poetic image of flow: Koolhaas describes being taken to a Lagos restaurant at night during a power cut. The area feels dirty and dangerous; one could easily get lost here and find oneself "prematurely recycled", as Koolhaas puts it. It's so dark in the restaurant that he can't even see the food he's eating. Suddenly a pristine bright white refrigerated truck arrives to restock the kitchen with fresh, cool food. In that place of utter darkness there's a bright white light, a temperature-controlled cube, a sort of rescue spacecraft, a vehicle from the world of flow.After I watched the film, I looked at my own life in terms of the flow of goods. The DVD player I'd bought, a cheap but sleek and efficient Chinese model stacked high in the huge electronics store where I bought it. The smell of the factory when I tore open the plastic. The rapacious pleasure of throwing away the packaging. The usual problem of finding a free electrical outlet for yet another new appliance, and a free place amongst all the electronic accessories that cluster around the TV. At some level, all this is happiness, a very universal sort of happiness. Just because 90s globalism focused so insistently on flow, it doesn't mean it isn't universal. After all, even animals seem to share the exitement and understand the importance of flow.
Baker has taken to carrying one of Hisae's slippers around the flat with a loping gait, the heavy weight hanging from his teeth making his hind legs kick out like a frisky horse's. There's no practical purpose to the exercise: I suppose it's a kind of practice for carrying rabbit cubs around in times of emergency. But it's certainly a form of flow, of rabbit logistics. Baker is very interested in human movements around the flat, especially movements which are to do with food, waste, and moving things around. Even bowel movements excite him. He follows me into the bathroom and runs around my feet grunting with excitement when I'm sitting to piss or shit. The smells tell him what's happening. He's also very interested in sexual congress. That's flow too, fluid flow, a process to produce, potentially, new goods, new life. Baker sniffs everything, scampers around, investigates crumbs on the floor, eats grass and vegetables, and gets very growly and angry when I sweep up his droppings with a brush, attacking the bristles. What to me is simply waste is to him nutrition (rabbits eat their own scentless pellets, needing two passes to digest everything) and communication (the pellets are also used for territorial marking).The reason we think of Koolhaas' helicopter shots as "reducing" Lagos to a huge antheap is that we think of ants as inferior creatures, creatures for whom we have little sympathy. But there's a reverse logic implied in the metaphor, a much more sympathetic one which might redeem it: that what we humans do to survive is also what animals do, and insects do. We think we're unique because we have things like language and economics, but logistics—the transportation of goods from place to place, flow—is universal, a result of the basic material contract we have with the world, a contract we must meet with resourcefulness or die. For animals and humans alike, food must grow and goods must flow. We must forage, and stock, and transport, and consume, and discard our waste, and, sometimes, recycle too, like the drum-beaters who work under Lagos flyovers beating the dents out of blue chemical drums, reselling them for 1000 naira apiece. Like the black man I discovered outside the door of my New York gallery at 4.30am, stripped to the waist, sifting through the trash, collecting the plastic containers and putting them into clear plastic bags to recycle them for cash. We all participate in flows of this kind, and even animals have a sort of "economics" based on the way they organize their lives to fulfill the basic material requirements of life in the world.
This sort of idea might seem cold, or distant, or ideological, a kind of projection on a vast scale of the Darwinian free market. But I began to wonder how this might be rendered as a universal understanding, a point of contact. I began to think of ways this materialist conception, this emphasis on connection through flow and goods and logistics, might be tied in with the idea of a universal tenderness. I fitted it with the outline taking shape in my mind of my next album, "The Friendly Album" (working title), which is supposed to be a tender and positive record about feelings of empathy, connectedness and indebtedness. Instead of trying to portray friendship as "higher" or more noble and disinterested than mere material investment, why not see material interest as a real source of connectedness and even virtue? The missing link between humans and dung beetles!
Goods are "good" (the French word, biens, also contains the double meaning). They smell good! Animals, children and even insects seem to understand it when we move goods and foods and waste about. Of course they do! They do it too. It makes them excited, it's passionate and fascinating. They love us when we come home from the supermarket laden with purchases, and they love us when we open the can containing their food. Logistics and love are all tangled up. Animals and children love us because we feed and protect them. They seem to understand that love, like money, is just flow abstracted.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 08:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:17 am (UTC)Nor does a rabbit carrying a slipper around need to be an instinctual action which regards one more 'natural'. These kinds of action can make up animal language, or they may be 'just' play, which seems to be as vital and productive to (some?) animals as it is to us.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 08:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:52 am (UTC)earth.google.com
WORTH CLICKING ABOVE !
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 08:15 am (UTC)TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 10:00 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 10:01 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 10:18 am (UTC)Well, I think of religion as "creative accountancy". Basically it uses unproven and invisible "margins" (God and the afterlife) to change the basic equations of material life as we know it.
There's a lovely moment in the Lagos DVD where a rich evangelist is talking about how his system makes every believer a winner (in his version of Christianity, Christ is a sort of business guru). When the interviewer asks "So what happens to the losers, then?" the evangelist laughs and says "There don't have to be any losers in this scheme. Christ can make everyone a winner."
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 10:19 am (UTC)I'm heartened that in being the Carrie Bradshaw of postmodern sophistry, Momus attracts the imbeciles he deserves.
Ben Platt, London.
Re:Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 10:24 am (UTC)Re: Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 10:48 am (UTC)Ooh, that's even better than "a shy and sneaking lustmole" or "furtive, crepuscular art-rudeboy"! I shall put it on my card. I suppose the fact that I've never seen "Sex and the City" and you clearly have makes you even more postmodern than I am, though.
Re: Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 11:06 am (UTC)empty boxes make good bongoes by the way.
bang the gong.
Re: Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 11:12 am (UTC)Re: Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 12:40 pm (UTC)Re: Jeez
Date: 2005-07-29 09:24 pm (UTC)I've struggled with this one all day. what?
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 10:48 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:09 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:17 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:21 am (UTC)Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:27 am (UTC)The recursive absurdity of writing posts on Momus' blog about the idiots who post on Momus' blog. If you've watched this blog for a while you'll know that I disagree with Momus as often as not (and am usually ignored, for my trouble); but the pompous nature of many of the attacks is rendered even more ridiculous by the fact that the (usually anonymous) detractor sees fit to mire themselves in the muck just to make their point.
What's your point? That Momus is silly?
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:33 am (UTC)My point? Er...
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:36 am (UTC)For my part, I do apologize for insinuating that you were an imbecile. Carry on!
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 11:43 am (UTC)Stanley, please! I'm not an imbecile, honestly I'm not!
Re: TheStranger
Date: 2005-07-29 01:26 pm (UTC)It seems like a cruel trick: this carrot that is dangled in front of us for all of our lives, but it is truly the life force that runs through all animals on this planet (it is very much a "natural" eco-system when you think about it).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 10:43 am (UTC)http://www.equus.org/
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 11:56 am (UTC)http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names/africannames.htm
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 12:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 01:52 pm (UTC)I've been corresponding with the producers today about fixing the glitch which makes it hard to play on laptops.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 02:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 01:32 am (UTC)A lot of the Chinese- and Korean-made players will convert PAL for display on an NTSC television. Some can be configured for any or all regions by pressing codes on the remote control (because those players are made for general use and then set to the target region after). Unfortunately, some of those can do the PAL-NTSC conversion or 16:9 anamorphic stretch, but not both.
After messing around with several such players, I invested in a professionally-hacked, Japanese, major-brand player. It was well worth it to gain access to play all DVDs worldwide with the same picture quality and features as a good Region 1 player. Not all brands convert PAL to NTSC. Japan uses NTSC.
If you have more than a passing interest in content from other parts of the world, don't hesitate to make that jump.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 09:13 pm (UTC)So what flow am I involved in reading this post then?
And, any chance of a highlife guitar break a la Bowie's 'Miracle Goodnight' on your 'friendly album'?
rob.x
FROM VICE
Date: 2005-07-29 10:03 pm (UTC)http://viceland.com/viceDiary/photos/Jesse/IMG_5502.JPG
GITS
Date: 2005-07-29 10:35 pm (UTC)This theme permeates several of Oshii's anime features, particularly Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell. The GITS scene in which the Major drifts around an Asian megalopolis as an outsider, trying to grok humanity itself, has always strongly evoked thoughts of termites for me.
It's like Kelly's quote about emergent behaviour: "There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive."
That GITS scene makes you feel, with the Major, that you're looking at humanity's beehive.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 05:23 am (UTC)My people do not understand this "sit to pee" concept. We have never done it. What is this?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 08:41 am (UTC)it's also quite neen. (for a guy)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 08:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 09:52 am (UTC)