Dionysus, meet Jesus!
Jun. 23rd, 2005 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI flew yesterday on Virgin Airlines, London to New York. My window seat gave me a view of a cheeky Union Jack flipped on the wingtip like a victory V or a "fuck off". Virgin wants to displace stuffy old British Airways as the "national carrier", so there's much talk of flags and patriotism on Virgin planes. Virgin are going to win this battle, I think, because they've got Dionysus, comedy and sex on their side. As we queued to take off we pulled up alongside a British Airways plane which had been named (I kid you not) "G Bush". Our own plane, sporting the ironic-retro-sexist flying Virgin goddess copied from World War II bombers, was called "Cosmic Girl".
At dangerous moments (before take off, descent) when the passengers had to be controlled, white indie rock music (New Order, Oasis etc) played over the speakers. The safety instruction video featured an indie geezer who looked like Liam from Oasis, Japanese girlfriend beside him. The V:Port in-flight entertainment system recommended I "chill out" with some music videos, or relax with on-demand comedy shows. I watched one that contained this joke: "What's white and sticky and runs down the toilet wall? George Michael's new release."
It's the 21st birthday of Virgin New York flights, so the stewardesses handed out party hats and birthday cake and little paper trumpets, and soon the entire deck (even the Essex casual next to me, who spent much of the flight describing broken-bottle fights in his "rough" Essex town and telling the stranger next to him how some Pakis were all right, actually) was honking away delightedly like a Down's Syndrome day trip. The stewards were Red Coats: lines like "Please make sure your seatbelts are fastened, because we're going to go really, really fast!" got laughs, and turbulent bumps and surges brought collective whoops from the "audience". Who needs the police when you basically have a flying Butlin's Holiday camp? Who needs overt social control when you have a combination of surveillance, technocratic expertise, comedy, rock music and party hats? And who needs all those radical 60s texts about the society of spectacle and repressive desublimation when reality outstrips (and confirms) the wildest predictions of Debord and Marcuse?
I scribbled down in my notebook: "Dionysus sits in the throne of Apollo." We've sent rationality and responsibility up to the locked captain's cabin (and most of the time he's delegated it to the flight computer). With Apollo in the computer, all that's left for humans is Dionysus, the god of wine. We can revel, we can regress to childhood, we can chuckle at sperm jokes. It's all the more comforting because the world is scary and there are people (less Dionysian, more organised, more self-disciplined than we) who want to blow up the plane or fly it into a building.
Those shadowy figures, the ones who don't blow party kazoos, don't enter competitions, don't party (Jeez, they don't even drink!) are shady presences at the airport, too. The airport has a new name, it's not "Newark" any more but "Liberty International Airport". I suppose that's because it was used by the shadows, the organised ones, to remove the two enormous towers that used to be visible from the runway, marking where New York stood. The Department of Homeland Security greets you at Immigration in the form of a noticeboard saying that America is being "kept open to visitors". It's nice to know.
The US feels less postmodern than Britain, more protestant. There's a TV for people queuing for their immigration interviews, but it's not showing Ricky Gervais making jokes about sperm. It's got CNN on with the sound down and subtitles. They're interviewing Franklin Graham of "the Graham ministries", Billy Graham's son. He's talking about "the ministry of Jesus Christ our lord and saviour." The interviewer says "You're known as a bit of a hell raiser, with strong views. For instance, your views on homosexuality..." Graham replies "I have a mission to give the Bible's view on these things, and the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a sin." I wonder how many gay people there are in the queue, and how reassured they must have been by the gay stewards on the plane, and (possibly) by the gay jokes about toilet sex in the British comedy shows. I wonder if their hearts are sinking at this moment. Graham continues, talking about how, in his view, Islam is an "evil religion". More hearts in the queue sink.
But in today's America there's an equal opportunity: we're all criminals of one kind or another. Potential criminals or sinners. I'm fingerprinted (left index, right index, look into the camera) and waved into New Jersey. From the bus I watch billboards. The first one says "Why Islam?" and gives a free number people can call to learn about the evil religion of organised shadows. The second one has a big banner headline: "YOU LOOK GUILTY!" (It's for a TV show called "The Closer".) The third is for a Broadway musical called "Wicked Is Wonderful". The next, for a bank, proclaims "Land Of The Free... checking". The last shows a new SUV, the Hummer. It's huge, battleship grey, and has tiny windows. It looks like nothing so much as a tank. It strikes me that it's the wintry polar opposite of the AMC Pacer, the 70s American compact car which resembled a futuristic bubble of glass, open to the world around it. "You don't need to see out of me," the 2005 Hummer seems to say, "just crush everything in your path".
The bus pulls into the Port Authority Bus Station. You can feel as soon as you leave the tunnel that it isn't really America any more. It's an anomaly, nervy, creative, dense, nocturnal, glassy-towered. The bus station is full of Asians. The neon graphics are crappy and the magazines look completely alien. But it almost feels like Hong Kong, so I feel comfortable in the nervous hardness, the cheap utilitarian fluorescent light. I'm not strapped in, I can walk. The city doesn't care who I am, I can be anyone. I'm free to escape the flaggy, churchy, rightist "narrative" of America, escape into this city's mesh of complex stories. Even complicate it with a few of my own. It's still New York, isn't it? It's still the city of ambition, weirdness, experimentalism, tolerance. I probably still love it.
At dangerous moments (before take off, descent) when the passengers had to be controlled, white indie rock music (New Order, Oasis etc) played over the speakers. The safety instruction video featured an indie geezer who looked like Liam from Oasis, Japanese girlfriend beside him. The V:Port in-flight entertainment system recommended I "chill out" with some music videos, or relax with on-demand comedy shows. I watched one that contained this joke: "What's white and sticky and runs down the toilet wall? George Michael's new release."It's the 21st birthday of Virgin New York flights, so the stewardesses handed out party hats and birthday cake and little paper trumpets, and soon the entire deck (even the Essex casual next to me, who spent much of the flight describing broken-bottle fights in his "rough" Essex town and telling the stranger next to him how some Pakis were all right, actually) was honking away delightedly like a Down's Syndrome day trip. The stewards were Red Coats: lines like "Please make sure your seatbelts are fastened, because we're going to go really, really fast!" got laughs, and turbulent bumps and surges brought collective whoops from the "audience". Who needs the police when you basically have a flying Butlin's Holiday camp? Who needs overt social control when you have a combination of surveillance, technocratic expertise, comedy, rock music and party hats? And who needs all those radical 60s texts about the society of spectacle and repressive desublimation when reality outstrips (and confirms) the wildest predictions of Debord and Marcuse?
I scribbled down in my notebook: "Dionysus sits in the throne of Apollo." We've sent rationality and responsibility up to the locked captain's cabin (and most of the time he's delegated it to the flight computer). With Apollo in the computer, all that's left for humans is Dionysus, the god of wine. We can revel, we can regress to childhood, we can chuckle at sperm jokes. It's all the more comforting because the world is scary and there are people (less Dionysian, more organised, more self-disciplined than we) who want to blow up the plane or fly it into a building. Those shadowy figures, the ones who don't blow party kazoos, don't enter competitions, don't party (Jeez, they don't even drink!) are shady presences at the airport, too. The airport has a new name, it's not "Newark" any more but "Liberty International Airport". I suppose that's because it was used by the shadows, the organised ones, to remove the two enormous towers that used to be visible from the runway, marking where New York stood. The Department of Homeland Security greets you at Immigration in the form of a noticeboard saying that America is being "kept open to visitors". It's nice to know.
The US feels less postmodern than Britain, more protestant. There's a TV for people queuing for their immigration interviews, but it's not showing Ricky Gervais making jokes about sperm. It's got CNN on with the sound down and subtitles. They're interviewing Franklin Graham of "the Graham ministries", Billy Graham's son. He's talking about "the ministry of Jesus Christ our lord and saviour." The interviewer says "You're known as a bit of a hell raiser, with strong views. For instance, your views on homosexuality..." Graham replies "I have a mission to give the Bible's view on these things, and the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a sin." I wonder how many gay people there are in the queue, and how reassured they must have been by the gay stewards on the plane, and (possibly) by the gay jokes about toilet sex in the British comedy shows. I wonder if their hearts are sinking at this moment. Graham continues, talking about how, in his view, Islam is an "evil religion". More hearts in the queue sink.But in today's America there's an equal opportunity: we're all criminals of one kind or another. Potential criminals or sinners. I'm fingerprinted (left index, right index, look into the camera) and waved into New Jersey. From the bus I watch billboards. The first one says "Why Islam?" and gives a free number people can call to learn about the evil religion of organised shadows. The second one has a big banner headline: "YOU LOOK GUILTY!" (It's for a TV show called "The Closer".) The third is for a Broadway musical called "Wicked Is Wonderful". The next, for a bank, proclaims "Land Of The Free... checking". The last shows a new SUV, the Hummer. It's huge, battleship grey, and has tiny windows. It looks like nothing so much as a tank. It strikes me that it's the wintry polar opposite of the AMC Pacer, the 70s American compact car which resembled a futuristic bubble of glass, open to the world around it. "You don't need to see out of me," the 2005 Hummer seems to say, "just crush everything in your path".The bus pulls into the Port Authority Bus Station. You can feel as soon as you leave the tunnel that it isn't really America any more. It's an anomaly, nervy, creative, dense, nocturnal, glassy-towered. The bus station is full of Asians. The neon graphics are crappy and the magazines look completely alien. But it almost feels like Hong Kong, so I feel comfortable in the nervous hardness, the cheap utilitarian fluorescent light. I'm not strapped in, I can walk. The city doesn't care who I am, I can be anyone. I'm free to escape the flaggy, churchy, rightist "narrative" of America, escape into this city's mesh of complex stories. Even complicate it with a few of my own. It's still New York, isn't it? It's still the city of ambition, weirdness, experimentalism, tolerance. I probably still love it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:09 pm (UTC)thought you might be interested in this site: f u, h2 (http://www.fuh2.com/). althought the add you saw was for an h3, the next gen hummer abomination.
hope you're not too disappointed in the "disneyification" of NY, though...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 02:42 pm (UTC)Looking forward to meeting you at your opening. Congrats.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 07:37 pm (UTC)Sorry, I was being a serious intellectuall there for a second. I apologize.
$50 on Dionysos
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:18 pm (UTC)anyway if you call that number for 'why islam' at least if it is the same ads which i have seen, it is in fact a service to help explain the religion and why it isnt evil to those individuals in the US who are ignorant of religions other than their own and like to find convenient scapegoats in those who are different.
and i think the musical is called 'wicked' based on a book of the same name about the wizard of oz.
other than that, its fun to read about my home from your point of view - especially when i cant be there myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-25 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:30 pm (UTC)I look forward to reading about how you react to it this time around.
And your opening should be fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:33 pm (UTC)momasu(at)gmail.com
sound system
Date: 2005-06-23 11:40 pm (UTC)I mean, it wasn't a very good sound system, but it was "free"... there was something "wrong" with it though, the speaker wires picked up FM radio when there was no signal, so your cd would finish & then there would be classical music through a fuzz box (i quite liked it).
***
also, you might like this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1512708,00.html
"...the latest generation often seems to be united by a fondness for inconclusive songs that try to capture life's most elemental aspects, but end up evoking nothing much at all."
I really do prefer Momus lyrics myself...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 03:41 pm (UTC)tonight
Date: 2005-06-23 03:45 pm (UTC)W
Re: tonight
Date: 2005-06-23 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 06:32 pm (UTC)Times Square is rather brilliant. Totally safe, but enough of the 'riff raff' are allowed a presence to give it a fun park feel of possible trouble around the corner.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 07:27 pm (UTC)though the rocky mountains are standing in the way a bit.
ah i can't wait to go back.
George Michael's new release
Date: 2005-06-23 07:50 pm (UTC)I saw him recently, he came into the store I work at, a Tower Records.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 07:57 pm (UTC)I'll ask a proper question, have you listened to 'Tearing Up The Album Charts ' by Lawrence yet?
Welcome back
Date: 2005-06-23 08:13 pm (UTC)I suggest you start an outreach program where you volunteer
with some poor children...perhaps even some rural/midwestern ones...
or some british ones...some gentle songs to get the imagination flowing.
Is New York in summer as smelly as I remember it?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 10:37 pm (UTC)I look forward to seeing (and meeting?) you and Mai at Saturday's reception.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 10:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 01:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 02:14 am (UTC)That's because it was a tank -- or, at least, a military vehicle. The original hummer somehow got popular stateside (I can sort of see why people think it's cool to drive a tank-like thing); but the new hummers are just fascimiles, hummer-shaped cars that have all the gas-milage disadvantages of a regular hummer without being able to survive a missile blast.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 07:52 am (UTC)>The last shows a new SUV, the Hummer. It's huge,
>battleship grey, and has tiny windows. It looks like
>nothing so much as a tank. It strikes me that it's the
>wintry polar opposite of the AMC Pacer, the 70s American
> compact car which resembled a futuristic bubble of glass,
> open to the world around it. "You don't need to see out
> of me," the 2005 Hummer seems to say, "just crush
>everything in your path".
My current research at Tokyo U of Art has me spending a lot of time reading about various modes of transportation, especially in relation to war. So something that I read recently came to mind...it might be of interest to note something that Paul Virilio wrote back in 1977 in his book "Speed and Politics" on the type of military vehicles that pre-dated the hummer. I'll quote at lenght from the chapter "Essay on Dromology":
Speed is the hope of the West; it is speed that supports the armies' morale. What "makes war convenient" is transportation, and the armored car, able to go over every kind of terrain, erases the obstacles. With it, earth no longer exists. Rather than calling it an "all-terrain" vehicle, they should call it "sans-terrain"--it climbs embankments, runs over trees, paddles through the mud, rips out shrubs and pieces of wall on its way, breaks down doors. It escapes the old linear trajectory of the road or the railway. It offers a whole new geometry to speed, to violence. It is already no longer simple an auto-mobile, but also a projectile and a launcher, while waiting to become a radio transmitter as well; it hurls both projectiles and itself. With it, once more, Death kills Death, since it victoriously opposes the fearsome German machine gun. Captain de Poix has a prophetic vision of a battlefield literally covered by the mass of these automotive forces. After leaving the street, the military proletariat loses contact with the road. From now on, anything can become a probably trajectory of its Assult. The battlefield has become like the naval glacis, without obstacles, entirely run by the rapid engines, the "battleships of the earth."
And it might be useful to borrow his phrase "the military proletariat" and, with a twist, update it to cover the need to have such a vehicle as one's personal mode of transportation: The "consumptively militarized American proletariat"
A CO reader commented on Nick's post:
>but the new hummers are just fascimiles, hummer-shaped cars that have all
>the gas-milage disadvantages of a regular hummer without being able to
>survive a missile blast.
In an act of nationwide psychological denial, the citizens of America who might purchace such a vehicle, living in a country that has recenty secured its "position" as a "possessor" of Iraqi oil in an effort to be in a pole position at the onset of the coming energy/oil crisis, have decided to splurge...to forget. If America as the prodigal son returns to his senses, can the fatted calf of this kind of consumerism be slain?
And echoes of this can be found in the most unlikely places. In the upscale Setagaya ward, Tokyo Japan, there is, in total, what amounts to a small fleet of these vehicles being driven on roads almost too narrow for two normal cars to comfortably pass each other, by nouveau riche Japanese, in an embarrassing effort to flaunt their ability to spend their disposable income on the raw excess of spatial redundancy, an indulgance which is, regrettably, its very own raison d'etre. The only way that this socio-economic class can find to express itself in the backdrop of a country in which space is at a premium is to rebel against the tendancy of hyper-miniaturization, and consciously select hyper-maximization.
Hummer. As the webpage states, it is "Like nothing else"...at least we can thank Allah for that singularity!
Hey
Date: 2005-06-24 05:39 am (UTC)http://masamania.com.nyud.net:8090/archives/2005/06/decorer_process.html
Re: Hey
Date: 2005-06-24 09:52 am (UTC)Stick around here and perhaps we won't have to discuss this year's styles in the year 2012.
Re: Hey
Date: 2005-06-25 07:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 07:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 12:25 pm (UTC)May I...
Date: 2005-06-24 02:00 pm (UTC)unnecessary metaphor
Date: 2005-06-26 11:35 pm (UTC)for shame, nick.
Re: unnecessary metaphor
Date: 2005-06-27 11:47 pm (UTC)Re: unnecessary metaphor
Date: 2009-09-10 01:21 pm (UTC)Essex Pest Control (http://www.able-pest.co.uk/essex.html)