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Il Duce: 'pull the other one Julia'

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:26:39 PDT

What fun you can have playing around with widgety things!

I have shared the good oil about ComicLife as an easy DIY for making comics.

I then got an easy to use Mac app -- PhotoSketcher -- to turn photographs into comic like and inked (or water coloured) drawings.

I thought that was the whole shebang for the likes of me, but I then came upon FotoFlexor which is not Photoshop -- "a ha! what delights," he says -- but which is an online tool box with enough quirky effects utensils for me to pretend that I can draw.

So I took this image of Gillard (at right), processed it through FotoFlexor and concocted the 'comic' above via ComicLife.

A brand new world awaits wherein I can caricature and tweak; merge snippets from the web and indulge my penchant for the comic grotesque.

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Comic Book Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:17:53 PDT

A Dave Riley original

Finally getting the proverbial faeces together.

This image above is a very gaudy and very garish experiment in texturalizing an image. I've been trying for years to add text to photographs but couldn't find an easy DIY way of it until I came upon Comic Life combined with PhotoSketcher.

This is how I think folks: welcome to my world. It's in capitals , with thought and speak balloons floating about and with a few captions thrown in.

I am a keen aficionado of montage and collage but digitization has ruined the precious selectivity of collecting bits of paper and merging them into the one image.

Photoshop has ruined reality for us all.

I used to think tram tickets could have meaning -- something special and unique which reflect the urban environment. While they won't in themselves tell much of a story: but glue them to a page with a street map and a few coins ... and the artefacts speak for themselves.

In a few years such a montage becomes a display in a museum. And you get tangible meaning.

So I now seek to

CARTOONIZE LIFE

...and all my Christmases have come at once.

Who needs to draw or color in when the apps do it for you? All you need is to pose a few photos and with a plot in your head start storyboarded. What better way to tell your life's story and the vagaries of political existence than with meaningful aggregations of comic artistry such as this.

But that's the knack: story telling. Comics tells stories in the same way that novels do. Drama and pace are manipulated; reality skewed; POVs contrasted; contradictions explored; 'characters' developed.... Text and image are edited so that they comfortably merge.

I am reminded of Irwin Piscator whose theatre productions were montages of diverse elements: film, text, sound and movement. Bertolt Brecht's playwrighting was always governed by the Piscatorial techniques of 'Epic Theatre' using especially text such as banners strung across the stage. Like chapter headings they were.

It was all about laying on the information. Making a point while the action -- like on a comic page -- proceeds.

I continued with this by so often deploying text in the little videos I've shot.

And when you start exploring what's already out there...it is indeed surprizing what gets cartoonized. Classical literature, Shakespeare, biography and autobiography can all be found in comic book mode.

In fact anything is possible. Seek and you will surely find.

There is even a Manga on the life of Che Guevera as well as other graphic comics on his life.

So today you may not have to ink in your own images but with a few simple tweaks on the mouse you can make your own super hero, your own Marvelperson...your own cartoonized point of view.

I never really thought that much about this option until I became addicted to the political cartoons of Mr Fish who uses a lot of techniques besides drawing lines -- and I thought....

I thought, "There with the grace of skill could go I. But draw? Not so good at that."

But nowI say : "I could be Mr Fish's fry. A Fish fingerling in the political sea."

I suddenly have the tools to hand. All I need is the attitude, perseverance and chutzpah to cartoonize the all around.

Anything lends itself to comicafication.

So Dave, practice and skill up.

A contemporary political comic from Canada
created by Inuit artist, Gord Hill.

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Comic Life: a message from god (and I'd like to thank her)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:17:53 PDT

Here I am wallowing in my relentless day in - day out existence.

And as I wallow I feel a yearning upon me.

I yearn to change the world.

...long for, pine for, crave, desire, want, wish for, hanker for, covet, lust after/for, pant for, hunger for, burn for, thirst for, ache for, eat one's heart out for, have one's heart set on; informal have a yen for, itch for.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a Curriculum Vitae in world altering.

But of late as I yearn I also frustrate...

...exasperate, infuriate, annoy, anger, vex, irritate, irk, try someone's patience; disappoint, discontent, dissatisfy, discourage, dishearten, dispirit; informal aggravate, bug, miff.

...because I am not the man I used to be. I may have refused to grow up but my body protestith so when I ask it to rebel against its surroundings.

In my desire to express this conundrum ...

...communicate, convey, indicate, show, demonstrate, reveal, make manifest, put across/over, get across/over; articulate, put into words, utter, voice, give voice to; state, assert, proclaim, profess, air, make public, give vent to; formal evince.

and solve it I am so glad I have come upon Comic Life which seems engineered for the likes of me: an ageing radical, a sixties hipster if you will, handicapped by life's foibles and follies.

And boy you shoulda seen my underground comics collection!

Why bust a gut putting in the hard yards at the activist coal face, something that I can't do so well (read 'tis so hard for me to do') anymore, when I can cartoonize the world instead?

Live the dream: join with the panels.

But here in this decrepit bod there is a brain, skills and a will to match all going to waste.

The only person I'm entertaining is myself.

I've done theatre, stand up, monologues, street theatre, puppetry, musicals, reviews, cabaret, organized festivals, I've written satire and newspaper columns; made puppets and masks ... I've been the creative type on and off for yonks.

Can't help myself. It's a yearning.

But as soon as I saw some comics created in ComicLife I said I gotta get myself into dat.

Custom made for me.

Why?

Because that's how I think: I think in comics. Bubbles of words and thought..and preferably in caricature and grotesque. I luv da grotesque.

I love Gilray...

But ironically comic format also lends itself to the most personal: look at Persepolis and American Splendor and Ghostworld

My handicap is a self evident obstacle: I can't draw! Leastways not well enough to tell a story.

So in the past I sculpted and shaped my own puppets and masks and animated those.

Clay. Paper and clay and felt. Papiermache.

My maskmaking was a professional activity: The Mask Studio. I was a 'expert' on masks from commedia dell arte to the quirky or indigenous.

On tour Professor Ratbaggy's Red Cordial Show fostered riots among the under tens.

No pencil work required but I did always get a helluva response when Mr Punchcame to change 'baby', the infant urinated out into the audience!

(Psst! A syringe filled with water goes avery long way...)

Now that was ART and I knows what I like.

Best gag in the whole show.

But to be able to utilize my passion for collage and montage -- to me that means grabbing odd remnants from the web or wherever -- and reassembling them WITH WORDS of my creation in a comic format ...

That's making Whoopee!

So with ComicLife I too have a dream:

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Don't let Gandhi drink alone

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:20:26 PDT

It's only after the fact that it occurs to me to add " At least I think I do." or "Don't let Gandhi drink alone."

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Easter Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:19:46 PDT

De man.

I've got nothing special against Jesus per se. As a Christian he is one of the best. But it occurred to me that if he had been hung, drawn and quartered rather than crucified -- say at the hands of the very Christian medieval French or English -- it would have been a darn sight more difficult to come back reincarnated-- and looking spiffy. I'm sure for a son of a god, it's do-able. But I'm saying that it ain't an easy fix to recycle a Messiah that way. But it sure woulda made a more plausible case for divinity.Imagine the response:

"I sore your innards, Lord. a' laying and a'squishing in the dirt; and your limbs and head every which way -- but now look at you! Way to go, Jesus! Where can I get me some of dat?"

Being exploded by a bomb is another reincarnation challenge I would have liked to have seen, or being plopped on by napalm... Maybe reincarnation is death type specific and can only be arranged post crucifixion?

'We shoot digital in the context of being part of the action'

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:13:45 PDT

Soviet Cinema under montage rules ( which are formatted by a take on dialectical materialism in way of contradiction) revolutionized film making and in effect paved the way for the modern feature film. If no October then no Star Wars. In terms of intimacy and vox popery consider Vertov's extraordinary Man with a Movie camera (1929) which is my favorite. But the (silent) voices are of individuals engaged in a mammoth project.

Similar vox popery is standardly deployed by radical film makers like Peter Watkins.

Sampler: Culloden

He also did a massive film in similar mode on the Paris Commune.

Sampler: La Commune

I'm not so keen on Godard...

But since I've done a bit of both video and audio editing in socialist garb I think the main task is to edit rather than not. Thats' YouTubes burden isn't it -- video unedited and published raw? Spare us the extra bits...and terrible sound.

The problem - or the advantage -- with digital media is that you can choose to tell your story so many different ways by cutting and placing.

I thought Paul Benedek's re- telling of the Tent Embassy forum in Sydney recently

...is a very good example of gathering material and bringing it together.

I had considered and suggested that the SA form its own video club to encourage support and upskilling ... and deal with the ongoing problem of getting the stuff circulated , out there or (egads!) viral.

I had also experimented in the past with an online channel aggregation: VideoActiv and recruited videographers as far away as Poland.

Nowadays with these small very cheap video cameras (and phones) shooting videois so darn easy. Editing, however, is much more difficult. I shot some of mybest video on a digital still camera with a vid option.

The problem generally is not that there is not enough video being shot but that people don't shoot anything -- not even still photographs let alone good ones -- as part of their journalistic engagement. The advantage of the new small video cameras (and I got mine for $50!) and the standard digital still camera or phone is that you can choose to shoot either still or video material.

More often a slideshow is more engaging than a poorly edited video that took a week or two to pull together.

Then, when folk shoot stuff they then often lock it away on Facebook making it so difficult to 'share'.

So I suggest some simple rules:

(1) If you shoot video: edit it before publishing it.(Or edit as you shoot --
with a mind's eye for that magic "under 10 minutes" rule )
(2) If you shoot still images publish your photographs on Picasa and mark them
'public'.
(3) If you shoot still, reduce the size of your images before you upload them
.Much easier DIY.
(4) If you sound is crap -- don't use it on the video. Bring in text instead or
maybe risk a voice over. I prefer text.

There's an interesting technique (under Montage influences) pursued by the Canadian film maker Arthur Lipsett:

Sampler:Very Nice, Very Nice

which 'alienates' sound from images. I think it suits the audio recording conditions we often find ourselves in. In fact you run two montages not necessarily in sync with one another: image and sound.

I guess I see Lipsett (now deceased -- he suicided in 1986) as a later day Vertov.

Today if you use the right free apps you can download and edit any video on YouTube as well as download and edit just the sound from any video on YouTube.

On terms of Montage -- and vox popery -- the world's your oyster.

A good example of what you can play with is what Brendan Cooney does with Kapitalism 101: He often uses old cartoons with voice over.

And then of course in full pro mode is the excellent 'the story of stuff'...

I think the point about film that matters is the way it is manipulated to engineer POV. (This is why I like the cinema of Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami who's 10 and ABC Africa you just have to watch to see what's possible so easily shooting straight without engineering.

Hollywood as well as TV using several cameras, over the shoulder POV shots and smart edits drag you into the intimacies of the moment in the same way that the novel is a quintessential bourgeois form. Then there is the way acting is played for the camera...

OUR advantage is that when we shoot digital in the context of being part of the action and also politically engaged with the subject we potentially can access a purer more real voice regardless of how grossly amateur and unskilled we are. We simply don't have the skills or tools to manipulate or warp the story telling.

So rawness rules with a certain undeniable reality about it...and passion.

Kevin Rudd vs Julia Gillard

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:19:37 PST

Who lamented the loss of hope when out of the unrelenting burden of our everyday oppressions comes once again this prince among men. Astride his mandarin stead and after spending so long, far too long, in exile he has answered our gagged utterances that we deserve something better. This time around we won't suffer the feminist bullying. This time around it's gonna be a fight between two anointed champions of the working class who have in their own way occupied the throne. At stake is whether one or the other gets the battlers' nod as represented in the editorial pages of the main stream dailies. Best show in town. Can't wait for Monday arvo. And on Tuesday...we'll know if our lives will be the same or very similar to what they were on Sunday. So you decide what really matters and have the option to back one or t'other. Who do you like? Who don't you? Choose your preferred arrogance and maudlin attempt at the common touch.Ah, the thrill of it all. Sweet Democracy we luvs ya heaps (and want to have your baby)!

Socialist Alliance: national conference discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:47:23 PST

The written - and online -- pre-conference discussion for the 8th National Conference of the Socialist Alliance's finishes today two days before the actual conference begins in Sydney.

The conference will be held at the new Activist Centre there which is big enough and flexible enough to house a large mob.

Discussion has been vigorous in the pages of Alliance Voices and there have been close to 100 documents, proposals and amendments contributed.

The key focus has been the draft resolution -- Towards a Socialist Australia -- which has already gone through a few re-writes as part of an ongoing collaborative process.

The idea to put together a document which starts to encapsulate the answers to the questions “Why Socialism?” and “What Does the Socialist Alliance Stand For?” in a popular style came about late last year.... This process has been the result of positive collaboration within the Alliance and reflects our current practice with policy development and discussion on our campaigning e-lists.Assuming that the draft is approved at the conference, the next step will be to commence a process of continuing discussion about the document within the Alliance, as well as public consultation with our allies, collaborators and individual supporters, with a view to formally adopting it as a document of the Alliance at our 2013 National Conference. How branches choose to go about this consultation will be up to them, and dependent upon the particular circumstances in each city and state, but branches should start a discussion about this soon after the conference -- Susan Price : Rationale for the Towards a Socialist Australia document

Since I've been under the weather I haven't been actively engaged in party debates to the extent I was two years ago. But ever a meddler I contributed two discussion items on what I called 'Atlargeness' -- Article I and Article II.

The advantage of being at-large as I am is that you get to meditate on the condition.

A theme in some of the exchanges has been identity which I think is a political trap. I'm dedicated to judging an outfit on what it does and how it does it -- not on what it thinks it is. On the socialists left there is far too much boutique identity politics. After 40 years of it I've had my fill of shibboleth making and program posturing.

Ironically Towards a Socialist Australia not only tries to define what the Socialist Alliance is and strives for but in its genesis it also suggests what the Alliance does.

The Socialist Alliance: ten years on

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:51:59 PST

While I've been waylaid by a bout of ill health for the past 2 years and consequently disengaged from the political coal face, I'm still a Socialist Alliance groupie.

I mean that because I'm very supportive of the project since I was dragged into its factional furore in 2003. when the various far left affiliates were determined to prevent the 'alliance' moving forward and developing into a 'multi tendency socialist party'.

When I say factional furore I do mean it was heated stuff, the worst of it unbeknown to the bulk of observers on the left and SA members. Then in dribs and drabs these affiliates who failed to win over the vast majority of the Alliance membership to their position , despite an open and extensive democratic debate, quietly licked their wounds and withdrew.

So in the period between its formation in 2001 and the split in the Democratic Socialist Perspective in 2008, the SA has been cause for much discord on the far left.

Not bad for a purported 'unity' project.

But then when you consider the history of similar unity projects elsewhere with the same international partners -- such as in England and Scotland -- a similar factional and divisive story emerges in the experience of Respect, the English Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party.

The Socialist Alliance success is that it has survived all this and still remains a viable enterprise.

I'll get back to that point later : how viable is the SA?

The SA can still argue for a left unity when the various tendencies on the far left have proven and stated often enough that are not the least bit interested in organisational unity for the foreseeable future. Consequently, these same elements have dismissed the Alliance as a failed exercise.

So how viable is the Alliance as a unity project when the far left orgs won't have a bar of it?

What these naysayers don't recognise is that the SA continues to unite socialists around a program of shared political activity. It continues its quest for left regroupment. It is open and accessible in a way that other far left orgs are not.

It is a step out of the far left ghetto because it has tried to develop an organisation that does not make a fetish over a boutique program or one that is ruled by its own 'circle spirit'. What unites the SA membership is a unity of shared activity not a coming together premised on a specific world view laid out in chapter and verse or shibboleth specific...

This means that in matters of platform and party program the SA develops slowly, even cautiously, as it tries to advance by dint of as much consensual agreement as possible.

It isn't line ruled.

This may, does and should have its handicaps but the Alliance nonetheless has survived a few sharp divisions within its ranks without the membership falling out among themselves. If you are trying to create 'a multi tendency socialist party' you are going to have divisions and differences. It will be par for the course.

At stake is how you resolve those disputes without alienating layers within the party while sustaining their commitment and allegiance.

At the same time you cannot simply ignore contemporary politics by allowing yourself the cop out the Greens employ and simply default to no position (and 'no' position so often means the relapsing to inaction).

Ultimately, this has to come down to a democratic challenge: how much real democracy there is.

Perhaps you could have a truly rooly democratic party but what's the point of it if it doesn't prosper?

And it's true that the Alliance has neither grown sharply over the last few years nor prospered at the ballot box. It has won one local government position -- Sam Wainwright in Fremantle -- but while the Greens may be seen as the main left alternative more general support for the Alliance at election time will have to wait.

Nonetheless, the Alliance is increasingly recognized as the socialists on offer come each polling day.

This handicap has not undermined what the SA gets up to the other 364 days of each year. This activity -- of being seen to always come out fighting in many and various campaigns while also standing in elections -- has drawn a mixture of people to its ranks: indigenous activists, people leaving the ALP, those disenchanted with the Greens, various ethnic community activists...and people who are located 'at large' where no significant socialist history exists, such as in rural and regional Australia.

This makes the Alliance a mixed bag of adherents -- a membership that is not readily summarized nor characterised -- of a nature that is not easily organised especially in the way far left Leninist type outfits tend to be. It is of no special type. While the SA continues to explore various organisational forms and norms it still is a party in waiting, for now more on a promise than at this moment on delivering the broad socialist party it set out to become.

It has occupied the green left niche in Australian politics and keenly advocated a sharp anti-capitalist agenda in response to Climate Change. In that way it is a major ideological challenge to the pragmatism and pro capitalism of The Greens and its platform is consistently judged the most radical but environmentally sustainable on offer at election time.

Similarly, its trade union perspectives both day-to-day on the job and its campaigning advocacy, are absolutely pro worker. While the SA has the broadest trade union implantation on the Australian far left , some unions will donate to the Alliance, but none, thus far, will formally and publicly support it.

That's in part due to its shallow electoral success (esp in comparison to The Greens) and the still strong rule Laborism has over the trade union movement here.

But I think where the Alliance has born the best results has been where it has forged broad alliances in a series of important campaigns and strived to sustain and build on those links.

The Alliance therefore exists on two levels: within itself in the form of a party associating and bringing different socialists together; and more broadly as an exercise in forging and consolidating broader campaigning alliances.

With its 7th National Conference coming up in January 2012, the world is still the SA's oyster.

Baiada: Portrait of a strike

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:16:12 PST

Community rally during the Baiada picket.

These interviews conducted during the recent Baiada Poultry Factory strike are POV gems that remind us that unions and struggle still matter.

Stick Together Show :Today’s show focuses on the ongoing strike by migrant workers at the Baiada poultry factory in Laverton, Melbourne. We discuss the Herald Sun’s negative coverage of the strike, followed by interviews with a Baiada worker, and a farmer who grows chickens for Baiada
Download audio file

Baiada workers celebrate victory

Graphics and politics : Bring back the red star

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:18:49 PST

Source: Venezuela Translating the Revolution

Iconic symbols play a role in politics. Shapes and colours resonate and stand for ideologies and movements in ways that are historical rich and seeming substantial.

Red suggests socialism. Green, the environment movement. Pink -- gay and lesbian rights. Purple: Womens Liberation. The rainbow of colours -- a congregation and community of different peoples. Black: Anarchism.... Aboriginal Australia has its own three colours.

This colouring in of political allegiance has also been associated with shapes -- a shape to go with the colour. So Pink went with a triangle, and the Greens here snaffled the triangle shape to patent a Greens symbol by coloring it to preference. Further left, flags predominated and maybe clenched fists: Red flags. Graphics of black fists. But flags and fists have been the norm for the new left.

Aside: I've never been much of a fister. Only if pushed by immense peer pressure will I raise my fist aloft. It may be a traditional choreographed moment within the chorus of The Internationale , but usually hands -- my hands anyway -- are put to other uses.

For us socialists while there have been an array of symbolic shapes to draw upon historically -- the hammer and sickle, the red wedge or the red flag -- often the star has been neglected although in some countries it is banned!. Stars were a potent theme in the iconography of the old communist parties. Unlike the Southern Cross on the Australian flag which denotes geography, stars on the flags of countries like Cuba can refer in the popular imagination to that country's politics.

So let's hear it for the star -- the neglected red star of socialism.

But while we are celebrating the star -- dusting off the cob webs and polishing it up -- in Venezuela it is getting a make over and the images above suggest how creative that make over can be.

Personally I'm so over red flags and outside a few bods on Mayday marches the red flag rarely gets an outing today.

But a red star to match the Greens triangle patent....I like the idea. That it is here presented as a kite (and elsewhere as a flower to be nurtured and cared for) is a creative renovation of a theme.

Unfortunately, the five-pointed red star, a pentagram, doesn't make for good kite flying aerodynamics if one wanted to make it air born. as the boy above is represented. So cutouts, stencils, profiles and totems are the only way to go. Lettering inside the boundaries of the star is also problematical. But as a once-upon-a-time street theatre type and puppeteer, I think the red star has a lot of street promise.

One complication: on a red star, which way is up?

The recent death of Shelagh Delaney

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:57:29 PST

The recent death of Shelagh Delaney warrants some attention.

Delaney isn't a household name. Maybe, at most, she is known because she is some how associated with British alt rock group, The Smiths.

But she had little to do with music being primarily a playwright and screen writer.

The Smiths adopted her sort of like an icon.

But in way of consequence, Delaney wrote her first play -- A Taste of Honey -- when she was 18 and if you aint seen it -- at least in the form of Tony Richardson's excellent film version -- you are missing something from your existence.

Why? Because -- to put it simply: "the play's the thing".

A Taste of Honey back at its premier in 1958 -- that's way back in stodgy 1958! -- challenged accepted mores of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. A poignant often frank play, it's kitchen sink realism captures a yearning and a protest that still reverberates today.

I was involved with a production of A Taste of Honey in 1967 at a Melbourne mental hospital. Fresh out of school,and only 18 myself, my university campus -- La Trobe -- abutted a swathe of psychiatric institutions. Being dedicated thespians a gang of us partnered a few projects in the neighborhood. Among these was a production of the play by patients.

We helped out.

Imagine a one off performance in a large sitting room -- the ward's day room -- for 30 residents by folk who's issues with existence paralleled those addressed in the play.

It was a special experience. One of the best in my theatrical life.

Thanks to YouTubery you can watch the film version online and maybe get a feel for why the Smiths were infatuated with the play and its author, and why The Beatles deferred to Delaney and recorded a cover version of the film's theme song.

I guess A Taste of Honey has cult status among those who are in the know. Delaney wasn't fashionable and in a sense she missed out on a ready Feminist imprimatur as her initial output predated the Third Wave.

But her achievement -- in creative isolation as it was -- is remarkable.

Good discussion about Delaney: Shelagh Delaney: extraordinary, unique, bloody marvellous and the documentary below is renowned for its insightful portraiture of a working class life. One of Ken Russel's better works....

SHELAGH DELANEY
A genuine poet has passed through the world. Shelagh Delaney exercised a wide influence with the shock of plain language, and shafts of satiric wit, into a severe and donnish 1950s world where working-class people had thus far been assumed to be simplistic, flag-waving cannon-fodder. Her writing was a magnificent confession of life as it was commonly lived in her hometown of Salford, with all of its carefully preserved monotony. She was attacked for immorality, which, then as now, is proof that you have hit on something.
'A Taste of Honey' was a sentiment that had not been expressed before its time - far more real than life.
It was the Salford of sagging roofs, rag and bone men, walk-up flats, derelict sites, rear-entrance buses, and life in tight circumstances.
Shelagh Delaney did not become fat with success, or become a celebrity, because she was of richer intellect.
She has always been a part of my life as a perfect example of how to get up and get out and do it. If you worry about respect you don't get it. Shelagh Delaney had it and didn't seem to notice it.
MORRISSEY (lyricist for The Smiths)
Los Angeles, November 2011

Two useful documentaries on noir fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:34:13 PST

Useful? Maybe they are essential viewing if you want to get a feel for the scope of what's out there especially in the Nordic countries.

Dave Riley on Kurt Vonnegut

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:31:06 PST

This is now...

Here's a rule of life: never go more than 10 years at a spell without re-reading Vonnegut. I mean ALL of Vonnegut you can get your hands on. So I'm back there on rewind, reading Kurt Vonnegut.

And starting back with Breakfast of Champions seemed like as good a place to start as any.

But then there is no beginning and no end to Vonnegut -- it's all one big story written in parenthesis. It's stuff that ambles through the universe and into our social and political lives like the musings of a indulgent Alien, who ,after so long on earth, has learnt to appreciate the locals.

Pity them too.

Always there is pity coming from Vonnegut.

***

This is 1993...The view from Tralfamadore

Fates Worse Than Death — An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980sBy Kurt Vonnegut
Vintage, 1992. 240 pp. $12.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley

Once upon a time artists were people; that is, they were for the people, by the people and of the people.

But all that changed. They began to fall back on themselves in search of a private vision, which in their lonely quest for profound expression made them incomprehensible to the rest of us. They tried very hard to tell us of our plight, but they had read so many books and thought so many thoughts that they forgot our language.

Then came Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote weird stories. People seemed to like him. His popular acceptance as a paperback writer rested on his literary prominence in the 1960s. He was a hero of youthful radicals, and his books sold in their millions.

Now 70 years of age, Kurt Vonnegut is still pumping it out.

Fates Worse Than Death is a freewheeling memoir of the '80s done as only he can. Recollections and anecdotes range through time, written with the wry wit and the sardonic good humour of an affable tolerance.

Vonnegut's idiosyncratic views are so profoundly human that he has not recovered from the fire-bombing of Dresden — which he witnessed as a POW in World War II — nor has he forgiven the United States government for the Vietnam War.

But he is not bitter enough to be satirical. "Listless playthings of enormous forces", is how he once described his fictional characters. In this most recent book, that listlessness seems to include himself. His attempted suicide and his mental breakdown are all part of the universal narrative. As many a Vonnegut devotee will tell you: so it goes.

Vonnegut really doesn't live in anyone's street directory. Formally a resident of the United States he seems to have his abode elsewhere, perhaps on his beloved planet of Tralfamadore.

Written from that perch his books have a quirky long view about them, where earthly time and place have little significance. In Galapagos — which he wrote in the mid-'80s — the human species is wiped out and replaced by a gene pool generated at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

In the books of Kurt Vonnegut the future comes uncomfortably close. The fates that are worse than death are really with us now, if only we could recognise them. Fortunately, surveying from a distance, Kurt Vonnegut is there to chart them for us.

***

This is 2007...

If you haven't read Vonnegut, you don't know what you're missing. More than any other writer, I think he embraced the political promise of the sixties. It's almost impossible to consider that he could have had a career as a writer without a marriage with that broad insurgency. His initial success basically had to wait until that radicalisation began to kick in.

The period saw many novelists being taken up and embraced as radical chic: Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Hunter S.Thompson, Herman Hess, Jean Genet, Allan Sillitoe, Gunther Grass, Yukio Mishima, Joseph Heller... (yes, primarily a list of males)but I doubt few were as generous as Vonnegut was in offering substance to mull over.

I think I've read Slaughterhouse Fivefive times over the past thirty years and I have tried to read ALL he wrote because there was so much there that was worth the reading, even though like a massive serial, the novels tend to merge with one another as often as the distant planet, Trafalmadore , becomes part of all these seemingly separate narratives. It's like this long line of montages:Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan...

"and so it goes...."

Of course, Vonnegut -- he died this week at the age of 84 -- was no optimistic idealist. He was dogged by a very bleak vision indeed, affirmed in Dresden, that nonetheless was played out with such tension in his novels that you had to get caught up in the struggles this guy was having with himself. Vonnegut wasn't about insularity and angst or about giving up(despite his unsuccesful attempt at suicide ).

In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden not because fate or some god willed it, but because other men with morals and interests beyond Billy's comprehension, put him there. It wasn't his fault.

And Vonnegut thereafter kept on asking: why?

And Billy, like all of Vonnegut's protagonists,were victims of this nameless barbarity which for some unknown reason they had the capacity to survive as though survival -- humanely and desperately -- was all you could hope for.

In his way, Vonnegut was a bookend to Harold Pinter because they kept addressing the savagery that stalks us from without and, I guess in the case of Vonnegut, the only way he saw you could protect yourself from it was to ignore it and adopt an alienated & sterile existence that was such a shallow shell that to go looking for anything else was to court madness or a stint on a planet far far away.

I'm having trouble here trying to describe the way Vonnegut pitches all this. He is/was unique as a writer. A science fiction novelist -- who wasn't. That's because his stories were about the here and now rather than fictional futures. These were not hypotheses, at all, but exercises in lives lived in alienation under capitalism.

KV:" …I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now."
-- Appearance on The Daily Show (September 2005)

***

This is about Kurt Vonnegut dying...

Vonnegut: This stuff-that-he-wrote.

The very best thing about someone dying is, as the late Kurt Vonnegut is sure to agree, that you have an excuse to think about them.

"Oh," you say, "Kurt Vonnegut is dead? He wrote stuff."

And so it goes that you wonder about this stuff-that-he-wrote.

I did that. I went to Wikipedia and vetted the bio. I then thought I had a very little bit of Vonnegut to catch up with before I could put him to rest.

So I tracked down and read his last book, A Man Without A Country.

Darn good book. In his eighties Vonnegut is still very much Vonnegut. It was so poignant that it almost moved me to tears for its celebration of living even if that in turn is dogged by a massive desperation.

The thing was almost wise and wise isn't a term so much allowed today.

Headline:Wise old Vonnegut dead at 84.

Stiff bickies , Kurt. I guess it had to come some day.

As for me, I get to exploit the opportune excuse offered by Vonnegut's dying to go read what I missed and re-read what I hadn't.

So after I put down Timequake everything else is a going to be e-read.

That's what I call a fortunate death.

You should try to do that more often, Kurt.

Line Dance Me

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:15:19 PST

By definition, a line dance is a choreographed dance with a repeated sequence of steps in which a group of people dance in one or more lines or rows without regard for the gender of the individuals, all facing the same direction, and executing the steps at the same time.

I guess as far as we all know or care, line dancing is presumed to be boot scooting type dances where folk wear leather boots and Stetson hats while dancing to tunes like "Achy Breaky Heart". But a 'line dance' can be any dance done in unison by a group of people.

What Country and Western has given us is the social and cultural phenomenon that is now so common that there is likely to be a line dancing group in cooee of your doorstep.

Often line dancing sessions are aimed at retirees and the aged because while exercising bodies they are not strenuous activities.

So there's a lot of bias engineered in what we may perceive to be line dancing: it's country and western music; it's for the aged; mainly for women (because they don't have to wait to be asked to dance) and it's ever so hokey.

I admit I shared some of that view. I used to organise local community festivals and the local line dancers who always performed fitted the stereotype to a T. The line dancers and I did many a gig with me working as emcee. We put on a very jeans, belt buckle and boot scoot show.

But something happened -- to me anyway. I have an unbridled passion for Zydeco Music -- the bluesy dance music of Southern Louisiana Creoles -- and in my desire to dance the Zydeco dance I discovered that there has been a major change in line dancing form: the boot scooters don't have it all to themselves.

Amen and Hallelujah! While I am a dedicated aficionado of American Old Time Roots music and used to play the clawhammer banjo in sync with the traditional music of North Carolina and West Virginia, a lot of modern 'country' music turns me right off.

It seems to live out its own caricature. But a year ago we moved to the Caboolture district here in South East Queensland and this neighborhood boasts its own Urban Country Music Festival -- and besides, Keith Urban comes from here. With its annual calendar of rodeos and gymkhanas, acre upon acre of horse farms and the national headquarters of the Australian Professional Rodeo Association in the main street -- our 'suburb' is consciously countrified.

So in this context, and with some trepidation that I was letting my music snobbery down, I went to a local line dancing class.

To my delight, line dancing ain't all boot scooting. The country and western tradition has imbued line dancing with moves, forms and techniques that are easily adapted outside the ten gallon hat template. ... and adaption has proceeded a pace. Line dance here and you are as likely to be doing the Zorba The Greek dance as the schmaltzy beginners dance to the C and W kitschy tune, Elvira.

As well as this eclectic mix of tune and footwork, the sheer massive scale of the phenomenon -- as it now is a truly international obsession -- means that this huge community world wide gets to share its dance choreography through medium such as YouTube.

This is where engineering and consensus rules because line dances are known by their set choreographies rather than their tunes. That means, for instance, while Elvira may be a single song -- it is also a dance that can be performed to other tunes.

This makes 'line dancing' very eclectic and potentially extremely adaptable. Flash mobs are line dances, aren't they, if choro is involved? But beyond that what seems to be happening in the United States , emanating from the Southern States like Texas and Louisiana is a very conscious attempt to adapt soul, zydeco, rhythm and blues, to the line dance format.

Here's an example: T.K Soul's Zydeco Bounce is a very conscious attempt to package Southern Soul with a Zydeco line dance delivery.

In fact when you do your homework,what used to be the on stage dance antics of performers like James Brown is now being replicated in various line dance moves by Afro American choreographers working in the community. So the permutations are endless.

This phenomenon is democratising dancing in a way that seems quite novel. After the various waves of dance fashion which have washed over us we seem to be have on offer a dance form that any one can do: whether geriatric or junior. And there's no strictly ballroom about it nor any need to compete.

Tt may be 'exercise' but it transcends the sterile focus of aerobics.

It's also gender neutral.

My family spent years ferrying our daughter to Irish Step Dancing events, competition and classes, and while the activity was always culturally significant -- my name's 'Riley' after all -- it was always exertion for the young and nimble. After a certain age, most Irish dancers retire.

Step dancing a la Riverdance may indeed be a line dance but it isn't something Grandma would be getting up for.

So in an odd way, we have to dip our lid to the many aged line dancers and the c and w aficionados who have preserved an engagement that is now being offered to the rest of us despite our seeming preference for ignorance and two left feet assumptions.

We also get to learn that group dance fun doesn't have to end with the Macarena. nor do we have to be sentenced to the rank commercialism and fitness obsession of Zumba.

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
- Samuel Beckett

Want more line dancing? Check out the politically emergent comrades-- VIDEO Nepalese Maoists do Saturday Night Fever. As for the ethnic and cultural mix, consider the Bollywood influenced Hare Ram line dance as choreographed by Malaysian Jennifer Choo Sue Chin. So when it comes to 'Screwing the light bulb and patting the dog' (lingo for Bollywood dance moves -- you can attend Bollywood line dance classes too) -- the world is your collective oyster: Below we have a Indonesian line dance, taught in English by an Indonesian to a class of young people in Norway....

CRIME FICTION : There is no mourning with dignity: Karin Fossum

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:03:54 PST

The Water's Edge by Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum

I think Karin Fossum is the most emotionally interesting of crime writers. She moves you and makes you think about our relationships to one another in our communities. Regional Norway becomes a crucible of the rest of our existence and what assumptions may rule our perceptions. Her stories aren't so much about Inspectors Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre but about us. These coppers are mere conduits to confronting underlying conundrums. This story has a lot to say about the relationships mothers have with their young sons and sons have with their carers; about the yearning to have children and the struggle of child rearing.

The criticism levied at this novel -- that it indulges pedophilia is bunkum. In Fossum's universe there is no strict separation between good and evil. The medley of humans existing, of growing up and ageing in cohabitation with one another -- in the communities bequeathed to us -- is far more complex and engaging that the simple rule of law. Law, after all won't explain brutality -- it serves at best only as a means to assuage it.

In that sense Fossum isn't a very noir novelist. Darkness isn't as pervasive as the over bearing complexity that we have to deal with every day especially among the other humans with whom we co-exist.

But then Fossum is always open to lightness (and being! if you want to be truly empathetic) , to hope and the pleasures that we can obtain through knowing others -- including, it needs to be said, faithful dogs! We need to celebrate these pleasures because when we lose them -- such as through murder -- the loss is the more difficult to bear.

Pain is given absolute respect by Fossum. It is never a plot device. Pain and anguish, rather than murder and sin, are the most human of our collective existence. It is what enriches our humanity. It's not the dirty deeds --- dirty and brutal as they may be -- but that we must all learn to live with the weight of their dead hand.

So for Fossum the prospect of loss -- of having loved ones brutally taken from us -- is the most painful of what we may have to bear.

The funeral described in the novel captures that anguish so very well. After a ritualised, highly theatrical ceremony, seemingly beautifully engineered, the facade falls apart:

"Then something happened. No one was prepared for it. The vicar was shocked, everyone could see that. Some people clasped a hand over their mouth in fear, and Sejer felt an icy chill shoot down his back. Elfrid Løwe started to scream. The service had helped her maintain her composure, she had clung to the vicar's voice, but now she was screaming uncontrollably heartbreakingly, a protest which made people jump in their pews. The screams came from deep within her and pushed their way out with a force no one would have believed such a tiny woman possessed. For the best part of an hour the vicar had built a fragile construction of comfort and resignation. Now she tore it down. She screamed and she demolished it and people could no longer mourn with dignity."

Mourning with dignity? Evil doers will be punished (if not by us then by some god)? Law and coppers can make it all better again?...that's what society asks of us, or at least, asks us to believe in.

That's not how Karin Fossum tells it.

Climate Change: Social Change Conference LIVE STREAM Sept 30/Oct 3

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:09:54 PDT

Some sessions at the Climate Change Social Change conference are livestreamed.
Welcome to Green Left TV1
These are trial broadcasts but between September 30 and October 3 we will be broadcasting live from the Climate Change Social Change Conference in Melbourne, Australia
For more information about this conference go to here. There will be 80 speakers, six major sessions and 40 workshops

Watch live streaming video from greenlefttv1 at livestream.com

Go to live stream page.

Roberto Perez Rivero: Permaculture's Use of Water in Time of Climate Change - the Cuban Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:59:16 PDT

This is a very useful over view of Cuba's Permaculture strategy. The presenter, Roberto Perez toured here in 2008. See resources.

This presentation was delivered to the Tenth International Permaculture Conference (IPC10).

Image at left:London Permaculture.

Presentation Files:

Slideshow (115mb)
PDF (29mb)

Tip: Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

(film noir) Force of Evil: "money has no moral opinions".

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:37:19 PDT

Trailing through film noir archives is always a source for fascination as you never know what will jump out of the celluloid.

If you do some homework you'll be guided to alight upon particular films among the several hundred deemed to qualify for the label.

Among these gems is Force of Evil.

At its 1948 release it was misunderstood and dismissed, but Abraham Polonsky's beautiful movie is one of the starkest of the noirs I've come across.

Here there are no good guys but the inevitable tragic ending generates a much broader ruling on the world from which this noir came.

John Garfield plays a lawyer working for a gangster and in his effort to enrich himself destroys the life of his own brother -- a role played by the always excellent Thomas Gomez ( a person who I think is one of the great film actors).

Standard noir melodrama perhaps. Throw in a love interest, some guns and street scenery -- and you get a formula film, right?

Wrong.

For one thing, Force of Evil boasts one of the most lyrical scripts you'll come upon.

Polonsky -- the writer/director -- into a brutal and relentless storyline, wove dialogue that is stand out gorgeous chat which almost attains a sort of Shakespearean relevance to the lot of these humans on screen. Caught up in conditions that rule their lives, everyone is forced to make the best of what may be to hand: who they work for, what they do...as they have precious little choice in the matter. That's what you have to do in order to survive.

Sylvia Morse: [referring to Joe] Don't have anything to do with him, Leo. You're a businessman.
Leo Morse: Yes. I've been a businessman all my life. And honest - I don't know what a business is.
Sylvia Morse: Well, you had a garage... you had a real estate business.
Leo Morse: A lot you know. Real estate business... living from mortgage to mortgage... stealing credit like a thief. And the garage - that was a business! Three cents overcharge on every gallon of gas: two cents for the chauffeur and a penny for me. Penny for one thief, two cents for the other. Well, Joe's here now - I won't have to steal pennies anymore. I'll have big crooks to steal dollars for me!

That's Force of Evil's core moral presence: we are all shadowed by the evil the permeates the society in which we live. We may learn to coexist -- we have no choice -- but at its infective core the relentless force of this evil can only destroy all it touches as it is a resident evil driven by singular greed.

Leo Morse: The money I made in this rotten business is no good for me, Joe. I don't want it back. And Tucker's money is no good either.
Joe Morse: The money has no moral opinions.
Leo Morse: I find I have, Joe. I find I have.

And that's the problem: money does indeed have no moral opinions. It rules over us by its promise of opportunity such that it warps our morality.

Joe Morse: To go to great expense for something you want – that’s natural. To reach out and take it – that’s human, that’s natural. But to get pleasure from not taking, by cheating yourself deliberately, like my brother did today, from not getting, not taking – don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do?

Force of Evil is a very thinly disguised metaphor for capitalism, and Polonsky, the dedicated soon-to-be-blacklisted Marxist that he was, pulls no punches in directing his first and the only movie he was allowed. This is stark stuff formatted by an overriding menace that those who object or protest, or try to drop out, will only suffer consequence.

Just like its writer/director did.

But then, Force of Evil -- despite its rank cynicism, brutal tragedies and its measure of the corruptive power of fear -- reminds us that hope rests in one option: if you don't fight, you lose.

[last lines - voice over]
Joe Morse: I found my brother's body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks... by the river... like an old dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead - and I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up to Hall; because if a man's life can be lived so long and come out this way - like rubbish - then something was horrible and had to be ended one way or another... and I decided to help.

Derek Wall and Muckaty women to participate in CCSC conference

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:00:56 PDT

Leading British ecosocialist Derek Wall (pictured left) has confirmed that he will prepare a video presentation especially for the World At A Crossroads: Climate Change Social Change conference in Melbourne September 30-October 3. It will be on the topic "Organising for ecosocialism" and we will probably show it in the plenary session on the evening of Sunday October 2. He will do a Skype audio connect to that session so he can join in the discussion as well.

We also have confirmation that two women traditional landowners from Muckaty (the site of the planned nuclear waste dump opposed by the local Aboriginal community and many others), Dianne Stokes (pictured below left) and Kylie Sambo(who is also a hip hop artist-- pictured below right), will be travelling all the way from Central Australia to the conference.

Wall is running for chair of the Green Party in Britain and will know if he wins on September 8.
In the current issue of GLW, there are interviews with keynote guest speakers John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus and also a profile article about the three young Cambodian women activists who are coming to the conference.

The longstanding and globally respected Monthly Review magazine, which Foster edits, has become the latest co-sponsor of the conference, joining Melbourne University Office for Environmental Programs, Friends of the Earth (Melbourne), climateandcapitalism.com, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Labour Party Pakistan (LPP), Sydney University Political Economy Society, Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM), Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM – Philippines), Australia-Asia Worker Links, Left Unity Adelaide, Adelaide Climate Emergency Action Network (CLEAN), Community Radio 3CR, Transform Asia and Action Aid International.

Individual sessions are being sponsored by the Victorian Trades Hall Council, Earthworker and the Society on Social Implications of Technology (Australia).

Left publishing at an impasse

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:14:06 PDT

When I began to move leftward my journey was trail marked by a succession of left bookshops. I came from the Baby Boomer perspective that you could read your way into a new identity. And left books -- by registered socialist types -- were seen as an extension of the avaunt garde and Bohemia.

In fact they were. For a time there Modernism's offspring was having a passionate but illicit affair with stranger danger gang of Marxism.

So the template that the New Left worked from was a written one: left bookshops, left publishing, left newspapers and left journals.

But over time that easy positioning of the printed word -- of advancing your agenda in hard copy -- has receded somewhat as newspaper and book publishers -- the boss cocky millionaire types like Rupert et al -- know so well.

The locus of interaction has shifted and, let's say, it no longer is only positioned over the counter in a lefty bookshop or across a card table at a protest gathering.

We can regret this -- but them's the facts.

But in my coal face experience there are many on the left who won't accept that these changes are occurring and adhere to the view that the only real political text worth the sharing is one on paper. Part of this preference is sustained by the complication that online text after one thousand words or so is hard to read in a single sitting. So hard copy looks good as an option.

I have no argument with that.

What then happens is that because there is such a strong publishing culture on the left some accommodation is engineered and layout skills are given their deference enough for folk to share their written work as pdf.

If you don't know, pdf is primarily a printer's format -- the best way to get exactly what you laid out, where you laid it out (pictures, headlines, graphics, etc), printed on paper.

The problem is that it isn't very good as a reader's format as it presumes a hard copy stage and the pdf page is presented on your computer , in effect, as a slide show of photographs of pages.

I should point out that the left isn't alone in their use of pdf. Publishers still use it and you'll find millions of pdf books packaged as 'ebooks' for online sale and download. For large format books such as coffee table works, comics and manuals with many illustrations it is still rules the market place and illustration preference.

The complication is that the most useful way of getting the pdf text off the desktop computer screen at the other end is still to print it.

Now with the burgeoning growth of ebook apps, ereader software and portable devices -- even mobile phones can read some ebook formats -- pdf is an extremely cumbersome sentence for all the text the left offers.

The irony is that the left's library is overwhelmingly made up of dense text. Just go visit the Marxist Internet Archive to see what the catalogue offers. It's all words.

There's no pretty pictures at all.

That Archive is now beginning to offer its books in epub, mobi and odt formats -- as well as pdf -- but I fear it is almost alone in doing that.

So what to do about this?

I think there is a case -- indeed a potential niche -- for an online left bookshop that offers left texts in formats other than pdf. My experience with platforms like Smashwords is that the potential to create an online independent publishing house is opportune. You can charge whatever you want or offer freebies and build up a catalogue that will be much broader choice than any stall at any protest rally or any wall of dog eared pamphlets in a bookshop. You can link various texts for study purposes to a syllabus and, if required, append learning to presentations (aka powerpoints).

On top of that you 'may' get some items in your catalogue taken up by the big online bookstores.

And when you charge you make money. You have a bona fide retailing outlet in the same way that the once upon a time well patronised left bookshop was. Here's a sample from a single author/publisher -- Lenny Flank -- which carries a few radical texts in the (rather eclectic) catalogue.

For the rest of us -- the lefty consumers -- what we get is going to be so much cheaper (or free), easily accessible, and in the formats of our choosing. And it's always going to be there downloadable any time as a ready reference.

The result will definitely be that more of this stuff will move ('off the shelf')and more of this stuff will be read because the audience is going to be so much larger than those who visit a hidden away bookstore or singular card table.

I personally think that there is also a case that left journals could also be offered in a range of ebook formats as well as in hard copy. That may seem anathema -- but let's just say it's early days. But look at it this way: a journal offered in a range of ebook formats (other than pdf) can be sold and subscribed to in the way an online web page cannot. Example option -- one of many. In fact the left press would have an ebook format advantage over the bourgeois media in that it is not advertisement driven and any reader of online newspapers will tell you that ads kill the experience of news monitoring. (eg: individual newspaper apps on iPad for instance are brutal in-your-face advertising trolls).

Them's are apple's worth liking.

If you have not been exposed to ebook mode click here -- -- and see if your desktop has an ereader. For a great free one, Download Calibre. You can also run Calibre on a USB stick!

Lucky you! Another (free!) eBook : Life of Riley (a satire selection)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:58:07 PDT

The very generous author

I am a generous kind of guy. My mother's son. Here I am putting in all this work wearing my few available typing fingers down to their phalanges and I then offer you -- my reading public -- free stuff.

I aim to serve.

And serving up don't come much cheaper than this.

Free.

At least while I chase a book deal.

Life of Riley is a retrospective selection of satires I wrote in the 1990s with some dating from the following decade BB (Before Blogging).

They are a topic mix mainly published in the ‘Life of Riley’ column in Green Left Weekly which I wrote on a weekly basis for a few years.

Some were recycled as dialogue for performance as I was also writing for street theatre troupes at the time. Some I recorded and published as part of a podcast I produced -- The Blather. Some were aired on radio both here in Australia and in the United States.

They even had a fan base.

I think that their satiric quotient still exists.

Free eBook Download: Life of Riley
Gain entertainment from politics. Source your bitterness in the real world... and laugh at it.
Life of Riley is a collection of political satires written by Dave Riley.

DOWNLOAD Now

Satire: And the nominations are...

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:17:58 PDT

You'll have to keep coming back to this post as I add to it as impulse dictates. It is set to be one of those off-the-top-of-my-head lists generated over time.

I'm not going to be formal about my rulings and offer strict criteria for my judgments. Nor is the list formatted by structure.

It's just note taking of what issues forth.

With these provisos, here is the shifting list of preferred and favorite satires.

Dave Riley's Preferred and Favorite Satires (because I know what I like to like)

The Loved One (Evelyn Waugh) is to my mind so well realised as satire and dark comedy that you have to wallow and roll about in its darkly humorous depths.If the novel is not enough for you, Tony Richardson's film of the work -- written by Evelyn Waugh (novel) Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood is a naughty piece of business enriched by some delighted comic performances -- especially Rod Steiger's Mr Joyboy.
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb takes satire to the horrors and laughs all the way. Stanley Kubricks' film is one off magic and its like has not been attained. Another writing input from Terry Southern ( with Kubrick) and the improvisational genius of Peter Sellers.
The South African novels of Tom Sharpe. While Sharpe may be better known for his Wilt and Blott series, he began his writing career with two novels pitched at South African Apartheid. Crude, rude, grotesque and bitter, Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973) are like Malotov cocktails thrown at the South African police establishment.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov may be notorious for its pedophilic theme but the story also works (preferably for me) as a wonderful satire of suburban life. That rich telling is captured in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film .
Pickwick Papers may be Charles Dicken's first novel but its sentimental charms carry with them a wry satire of morals, manners and greed. The book is out of step with his other works with their intense grotesques and dramas but Pickwick suggests another Dickens was possible if the melodrama (and great melodrama that) had not ruled.
Bertolt Brecht's plays are usually thought to be parables for the theatre but my favoriting alights on his satires, especially Man Equals Man and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui . To this list you could add The Threepenny Opera but Brecht's most famous play unfairly overshadows the 1728 original by John Gay and all its satiric charms.
The original idea for The Beggar's Opera came from Jonathan Swift and John Gay's ballad opera is still a boisterous attack on the ready criminality of society and its self serving pollies.
Gulliver's Travels is a sort of satirist's DIY manual. Each journey, each country, ups the anti for Swift's agenda. He wrote chapter and verse that still lasts centuries on.
The Good Soldier Švejk may be the best known literary output by a member of the Bolshevik Party but the fun keeps on coming. Jaroslav Hašek managed to package a lot in the one story that bounces all over the place. Hardly a bitter storyline but if you go to war, it will be fools (and greedy fools at that) that will rule your life.
Lenny Bruce deserves his reputation as America's pre-eminent stand up satirist. The recorded albums are useful resources if you want to access what he achieved, but since you may not get the guy's full measure, try reading the transcripts available in The Essential Lenny Bruce .
Kinflicks has a cult following among a few generations -- like mine -- as it sends up the business of transiting the sixties gleaming with fun, verve and a sharp eye to gender politics. Lisa Alther's book is a much more unsettling counter ruling to the often asinine chick lit that has followed.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a fire cracker of song and dance that presents as musical comedy. But for all its wit, romantic storyline...the work takes aim at corporate culture and undermines its self serving logic by burlesquing it.
How I Won the War is a 1967 film by Richard Lester which takes the original satirical novel by Patrick Ryan and turns it into a very bitter anti war parable to confront the gung ho demands of the Vietnam slaughter. Since the book and the film diverge so much, it is worth partaking of both media. The film is a neglected gem.
Joe Orton's plays are fiendish black comedies which go a long way in turning social mores up side down.More farce than is decent without taking prisoners.Of the filmed versions the 1970 adaptation of Entertaining Mr Sloan is worth the look at.
The Ruling Class may be known as a film with a wonderful performance by Peter O'Toole but the play by Peter Barnes is much better. The rule of one class over we others is brutally attacked for its systematic brutality and inherent conservatism. A play superbly written.
Early Morning has been called a 'savage satirical dream play' and I guess that is an apt description. In Edward Bond's play Queen Victoria has a lesbian affair with Florence Nightingale, and the princes Arthur and George are locked together as conjoined twins. A final act set in heaven sees the characters consuming each other as they descend into cannibalism. Bond doesn't usually write satire as he is more tragic in mode. But Early Morning is special.
Vladimir Mayakovsky is usually known as a Futurist Soviet poet but his playwrighting suggests a different engineering. Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery play written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has been transformed into a material paradise.
Marat/Sade has been called satire but I think the overwhelming theatrics obscures that underlying theme. It is a satire about the French Revolution but at its heart is an eager political discourse and the playwright, Peter Weiss, deploys satirical means to relieve some of the intensity. But as satire it works very well indeed.
Myra Breckinridge is, for my money, Gore Vidal's most neglected work. There is always plenty to like about Vidal anyway -- but Myra sits alone as a superbly realised satire about sex and gender politics -- perhaps like no other work Myra breaks all the sex and gender rules.
As puppet plays go Ubu Roi is a crude, rude burlesque that takes on power and greed with such abandon that despite the century since its premier, it's hard to note its like. Alfred Jarry may have written it but the play almost stands alone as a statement that helps to define a whole movement that arises every now and then as rambunctious satire.
The New Adventures of Jesus is as underground as you can comix get . In fact it is reputed to be the first underground comic. I think Frank Stack (who drew Jesus) is neglected -- but in saying that I don't want to detract from the contemporaries: The Fabulous Fury Freak Brothers and Wonder Wart-Hog. But for me, Jesus rules because its sharper and less indulgent. Highlights include jesus going for a swim with the apostles (he bounces off the water); raising lazarus from dead by first turning him into a loaf of bread; the hollywood version of the crucifixion with a buff jesus beating up the romans with the cross and getting the girl...
America Hurrah is a lot of things: three plays coming at you from very different performance modes.Absurd theatre; grotesquery; satire; angst and audience abuse... Jean-Claude van Itallie’s trilogy of short plays is such a tinder box of stuff that they can be exhausting to experience (you should be so lucky!)
Thomas Love Peacock is long dead. A friend of Shelly, the Romantic poet, Peacock's mockery of his peers may be an arcane taste and his novels overly dramatic but I love them for their seeming simple form. That only serves to make the setups easier to engineer.
Dario Fo may have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but let not such acceptance detract from the strengths nor the political alignment of of his many satirical plays. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) may be well known outside Italy but my favorite is Mistero Buffo -- ("Comic Mystery"), a play of monologues based on a mix of medieval plays and topical issues.
Kurt Vonnegut -- no matter where you start reading I don't think there is anyone like Vonnegut. In his penchant to pursue his POV he kept remaking it in a succession of unique novels.
Doonesbury may seem all a bit insular and de rigeur today but Garry Trudeau's comic strip had an earlier life that was cutting edge naturalistic satire and totally addictive panel by panel.
The Great Dictator (1940) by Charlie Chaplin is stand out among his films as a partisan take on the then conjuncture of world politics. Modern Times' take on our collective industrial sentence is similarly astute and both films are sharp satires,quite consciously created with that perspective in mind, of the capitalist system.
Carl Hiaasen's novels may be a tad kinder than you'd expect from his subject matter. -- relentless corruption and development spin in contemporary Florida. His is creative fiction for investigative reporters and if you are like me, you'd want him to publish more often.
James Gillray is for me the epitome of satiric caricature. There's not a subtle line in any of his work.(Sample above). Caricature and satire is a perfect marriage and Gillray is a master of the fusion. That he comes from the 18th century suggests his provenance. (I'd like a Gillray print for Christmas).
Norman Lindsay's politics are a long way from my own but as a caricaturist and cartoonist you won't find a better draftsman who re-moulded the human form with a enough situational perversity to lampoon politician and common folk alike.
To Be Or Not To Be -- the Ernst Lubitsch film with Jack Benny in the lead role -- is a near perfect comic gem that Mel Brook's couldn't improve on 40 years later. I like both versions but with either you have to defer to the superb plotting and relentless farce that belittles the arrogance of Fascism at a time (in 1942) when it looked like things were crook.
Blackadder Goes Forth may be the last of the Blackadder series but it is the most successfully realized of the four. Some episodes in earlier series are funnier, but with Goes Forth, the perspective is clearer and -- unfortunately by the finale -- relentless; and Edmund Blackadder, despite his scheming, had to 'go over the top'.
There aren't many laughs to be had from Nathaniel West but his four very short novels are brutal satires of America. They are a strange mix perhaps -- especially The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) -- with a ready nihilism, and a strong Apocalyptic vision that would fit in very well today. A Cool Million is his sharpest satire.
Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.It's hard not to like Daumier's simple lines and the subte mix of sharply offensive caricaturing on the one hand and sentimental engagement with other subjects on the other. His caricature sculptures are superb and better any plasticity that has been attempted since.
Mike Judge. Who you say? Whose Mike Judge? Judge is the brains be hind King of the Hill and if you cant relate to the propane universe of Hank Hill you don't know suburbia up close and personal.
The Weimar Satirists:While it may be de rigeur to talk about the sixties 'satire explosion' for my money a much better period for 20th century satire was the Weimar Republic's cabaret scene and print media. Among the writers who drove the exciting satirical culture of the period were Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) and Karl Kraus (1874–1936). For me Tucholsky is major influence. 'Tis a pity he wrote in GErman and is so little translated in ready access. Some of Tucholsky's satires in translation.
Brian O'Nolan (1911–1966) (Pen Name: Flann O'Brien) is also known as Myles na gCopaleen. His novels are satires about Irishry but his newspaper columns -- Cruiskeen Lawn -- are staggeringly inventive. He has to be my favorite satirist.
Chris Lilley is some one many Australians know because of Summer Heights High and other series on local television.Lilly takes up where Barry Humphrey's left off I think as they both caricature Australians by replicating them as identities. Humphreys characters always had a bitter edge, but Lilley is more celebratory, more indulgent...of us.
The Larry Sanders Show may not be on everyone's list (as they may not have seen it) but Garry Sandling's take on network television is relentless stuff.
Mr Fish. There may be many Fishes on the planet in any number of guises but for my money, Mister Fish is the most brutal of the lot. His cartoons are often devastatingly observant and cut through so much political crap. Mr Fish cartoons. Theres' no one like him. Except...
Ron Cobb. Cobb may no longer be a political cartoonist but in the seventies he drew the measure of the times especially during his residency here in Australia. Ron Cobb Cartoons.

Since I've exhausted my brain's recall batteries I'll sign off. If you have suggestions as to further works that 'belong' please append them below ... so we can be online satire friendlies.

Of course I've left out stuff that I'm sure you think belongs. But mine is a list of material that is important to me since I like what I like to like.

List of satirists and satires: Wikipedia offers a very useful list of satires and satirists from ancient to modern times. I doubt that you find a better list from which to draw sustenance.

The would be satirists need buckets of gall

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 02:33:31 PDT

As it happens I was mentally composing an introduction to a retrospective of satires I had written 'over the turn of the century' when I was referred to a piece in today's Australian Not easy to be jester in court gone mad.

In the article, historian and novelist Ross Fitzgerald laments that while "satirists exaggerate personal characteristics and situations in much the same way as caricaturists do," they do so in order ,"to get people thinking about the way we are and where we are heading.This is why writing satire is so difficult, and so necessary, never more so than now. Even so, any self-respecting satirist has his or her work cut out playing catch-up with the absurdities of real life."

Way back when I was writing these satires -- primarily theatre pieces and a weekly newspaper column BB (before blogging) -- my engagement was serious stuff. I ran a thing called The Satire Workshop and would now and then be called upon to rule on the contemporary state of satire.

I ruled in interview mode enough to be a registered expert.

Without over writing this post instead of composing my introduction ahead of time, I need to point out that there is no subject as old penny relentless as 'the death of satire'.

Despite its imperative -- as Fitzgerald insists -- why should satire die off every now and then so that it seemingly appears to be in a permanent state of funerary?

I think the answer is a strange but simple one: satire requires satirists. With the construction of satire there is always a shortage of trades people.

It has to be a chosen career path. And once chosen, the artisan must willingly accept its vocational limitations.

Unless you are Michael Moore it won't make you rich. In fact the more savage your attack the less likely you are of winning a wider audience.

That's the rub, you see. For satire "to get people thinking about the way we are and where we are heading" requires frank honesty about where we are at. No punches pulled.

Often to do that requires the would-be satirist to step outside the accepted bounds of regular humour-making into a world of such mordancy and bitterness that you are going to make your audience very uncomfortable.

My objection to much satire that is written or performed is that it loses its political nerve precisely when that challenge is approached. It deflects, and drops its sights to target an easier quarry: an individual rather than 'the way we are' or 'language' rather than the consequences of what is being said.

In a sense, this penchant to diversion panders to a ready obsession with the Absurd. Instead of 'satire' you'll get an exploration of madness but a disjointed madness that loses conscious satirical interest. Madness that has no political meaning: it just is. This is why I think so much of what we accept as satire masquerades as parody.

I may say that satire requires satirists but the complication is that there is no international fellowship which has peer reviewed membership. To "get people thinking about the way we are " is going to require a bit more than a few political jokes in front of a pub crowd.

That begs the question of whose satire is better than most's?

If you do your homework you can have a fun time: Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, etc in classic mode will raise the bar; but for me, the master of 20th century satire (and there was a 18th Century vogue of course) is the German (Austrian actually) Karl Krauss -- some one you have probably never heard of.

Like Jonathan Swift, Krauss (portrait above by Oskar Kokoschka) is a total satirical package.

Without having to reference the rather limited samplings of Krauss in translation, my respect for his work rests on his courage never to drop the ball -- to chase a political contradiction all the way way home.

A Krauss Sampler
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
When someone behaves like a beast, he says: 'After all, one is only human.' But when he is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, one is human.'
The real truths are those that can be invented.
You don't even live once.
The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

That's what I aspire to in my fashion as after blogging ab hoc these last few years I'm moving back into satirical mode.

Thus the introduction to the retrospective collection -- an exercise designed to give me confidence. .. and gall (as the would be satirist needs buckets of gall).

After thought: Since I have gone on about a favorite topic maybe I should offer some in situ suggestions? Maybe I should post a list of works by the selected few which I think make for ~~good~~ great political satire -- my favs? Why not? So soon enough I will post here an annotated list from atop-of-my-head stuff that I like and respect such that you can imagine me before them laid out in a state of groveling obsequiousness.

And since I always want more...if you have a preference for some one or some work, please share it with me so I can partake of it too.

Community Voice gears up for elections in two weeks

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Riley) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:32:03 PDT

The Wollongong council election campaign is in its final two weeks now, and the Community Voice campaign is ramping up.

The CV campaign has letter boxed nearly 60,000 houses across the three local wards, and candidates have addressed numerous meet-the-candidates forums, while receiving sustained media coverage, with campaigning on the streets with stalls, door-knocking and more!

If you are in NSW and want to experience campaigning at the grass roots, help CV out for the last two weeks, and email Tim Dobson to volunteer.

The weekend edition of the Illawarra Mercury featured a half page photo of the CV meeting to decide its preferences.

Click here for TV coverage of CV launch of CV's youth unemployment policy.

The campaign to stop coal seam gas mining continues to gain strength too, and it's having an impact on the election campaign.

Stop CSG Illawarra's 200-strong meeting on Sunday is pictured above left.

Nearly every candidate (excluding Labor and Liberal) has pledged to back Stop CSG's demands if elected.

Check out WIN TV news, ABC TV news and Illawarra Mercury coverage, all of which feature Jess Moore!

Click here for CV latest media release on the BlueScope sackings.