German arachno-musical-operas and lots of boredom

Signs are the new signifiers

It's early March and it's freezing. My nose, fingers and cheek bones are gone already. Gone the Ranulph Fiennes way, soon to be followed by toes, legs and ears. Why is the weather so inconsistent? Why was this Sunday so boring and why on earth can I not find my second Christmas sock?

These are the worries of a middle-class Capitalist. Me. But, today's clutter holds a couple of pearls. Well, let's say well-made costume jewellery. Another completely bored Capitalist from the land of Oz facebooked something about making an opera about the ongoing drama about Spiderman: the Musical. Yay. Because I have neither talent nor education, only a serious passion for puns and lame jokes, I signed up to do the lyrics. In German. Wagner, eat your heart out. I should emphasise, I have no idea what is going on with the musical, I haven't followed the news and I have certainly no interest in Spiderman. In short, I am the man for the job. Woman, woman..... (feminist muttering).

I like semiotic layering - there is nothing as comforting as discovering a second layer of signs after peeling away the first layer with much care and precision. The second, third, fourth etc. layers are for the knowing, you know, dear non existing reader. Knowing is knowing, as George W. Bush might have said, but he didn't, he said something about fooling, which really was just foolish, and he knew. But he didn't know. Knowing goes beyond knowing theoretical crap that fills academic volumes since the invention of the printing press, or rather, since the invention of academic volumes. Knowing now is no longer just knowledge, it is knowing  and knowing how to use the knowledge, where to find it, and what to exclude from our search for knowledge. Take that Victorian toffs and your encyclopaedias. It's knowledge 2.0, where a Twitter status is worth just about as much as the entry for 'screwdriver'. Mind you, it has to be the right status. What I imply is that a lot more intellectual and social weight is accorded to a message less than 140 characters,  airport-tweeted, coffee-break-tweeted, before-descending-to-tube-tweeted or waiting-for-date-tweeted, more or less carefully crafted and then spewed out into the world by the touch of a button. And there it is then, it can be deleted, but it can never be revoked - it exists in cyberspace. Think of an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: before it comes into existence, it is checked, double-checked, edited and signed-off and then printed. A tweet only benefits from the Fruit's ghastly spellchecker and autocorrect, which fails to recognise terrible grammar mistakes involving the use of apostrophes. If you can't spare two characters for the benefit of your reader, why bother at all?

Literati should rejoice over Twitter: it is a platform for the essential Haiku, the short, short story and other Hemingway-inspired writings, though mainly about life, not about death. For the witty, Twitter could be the nec plus ultra in their writing career, for the not-so-very-witty, it is yet another platform to display poor punctuation, self-importance and narcissism. Did I mention that I tweet?

Boredom, a subtle change of subject, yet another Sunday spent sitting in the cold, trying to convince people that their taste is NOT universal. I am of course always ready to get the big guns out, hit them frontally with Bourdieu and Hebdige, Panofsky and that other guy, Cowell, but then again, I leave it. As much as my Sundays are devoted to intellectual exchange and Monday's readings, other people's Sundays are devoted to bad fashion and roasts. Those things do not work well together, especially after a couple of pints at the local boozer. If a non-art student then wants you to leave your prejudices behind in favour of a more structural, stylistic or economical view of the world, you get really cross. Yes, I am talking to you, man in the green sweater and woman with the rather heavy perfume. If you don't like what you see, why do you start talking about it in the first place? Both of you, among others, missed the moment to just shut up and keep it to yourselves. Or start writing a blog that nobody will read, or better still, write your comments on a piece of paper and burn it when you're done. Or tweet it, where people have the option of not following you (why would they???).

A little learning is a dangerous thing (Alexander Pope) if formulated in less than 140 characters.

Dictatorship of the Fruit and other things addictive

As of today, I am tweeting. (Today in fact was Thursday. Thursday is today once a week, which makes Thursday really happy, if only Thursday could be today everyday, but then everyday is today all the time, which makes Thursday really confused)

Me and Ravi in the latest Sci-Fi flick Fondue: The Next Generation

It wasn't meant to happen. I was an accident, I swear. In an attempt to have a lookie-look at someone else's Twitter account, I accidentally registered myself. So. With a full stop. I could have deleted the account immediately, but as it is the case with all things new and ever so slightly unknown, I couldn't resist. And spent most of my leisure time (some people in my semi-direct environment pronounce this word 'liiiiiisua time') trying to track down people I could stalk with my newly extended Go-Go-Gadget vocal cords. Again I must insist that I am innocent and that I couldn't resist the fangs of the evil tweeting bird of procrastination. 

Peep. So at half two I have one of these super insight moments, where all of a sudden life makes a little more sense in the wider context until I wake up tomorrow with a sleep deprivation hangover, a sleepover, thinking what an idiot I am to stay up that late, and wake up this fucked(ly). Not in the literal sense. If indeed I had been fucked all night (presumably some one-sided action) I might not feel fucked. Communication is low tonight, I apologise, dear non-existing reader, but remember I have tweeted my way through irrelevant human history until just now. To write a blog post... All this could not happen, had I not a piece of silver fruit lying in my lap. Another one of my sleek, suave transitions to refer back to the title: for the metaphorically challenged, I am writing this post from a silver Mac. On its throne of human leg it condescendingly stares at me with the bleak expression of a tyrant who only values its sovereigns for their willingness to submit themselves unquestioningly to its commands. Shift A, em, iiihh, enn. 

Without my silver dictator no Twitter, no Facebook, no Emails, no life. Big fruit is watching me.

Which does not at all cohere with the other half (1/4 more likely) of my life that is crafting away all evening, wearing my thrifted dress, my retro specs with a botched victory roll and a large cup of tea (victory roll on head, tea on desk). How come that there is a increasing discrepancy between my technologically advanced life and my smudging, crafting existence? This question doesn't come out of nowhere; it is tied into the narrative that will become my dissertation at some point later in the year. Why is there an increasing interest in practical skills and rather traditional occupations that contrasts the hyper-technologised life? And this is just the beginning: I wasn't born into a technoliterate society, and I certainly wasn't raised to embrace the use of all things computer-y. Now however, we take it for granted. Try and imagine life before mobile phone, or life before Facebook. WHAT DID WE DO?????? (I sort of have a hunch that I ate most of the time....) Is there a correlation between the above collective loss of memory of 'what was before the computer' and the revival of a lifestyle before the technological awakening? Are select cultural subgroups celebrating the cult of vintage (like a religion) to built a new faith from scratch, one that is both incredibly stylish and comforting in an era where iPhones hit the market like marbles the bullied kid in school? Are sewing and crafting substitutes for values that are lost in the speed of our times? And how much more can we take? We all tweet, facebook, flicker, google, youtube, pinterest ourselves, blog, update, download, upload, stream, comment, like, unlike, unfriend, add, follow, block, tag, untag, scroll, track and click on a daily basis: we are not creating a spectacle - we ARE the spectacle (thanks to Guy Debord for this spectacular insight). There is no longer a distinction between me, my Mac and my Twitter account.

Hm, maybe there is. Spectacular, spectacular, no words in the vernacular, can describe this great event, you'll be dumbed with wonderment. (hooray for Baz Luhrman) I agree with certain grumpy, dead German scholars that quite possibly, we've reached a state of complete commodification, and that now, all attempt to escape it involves a wooden box and cheap flowers (which are bought in by the bucket load). To escape the technified world of pretty, white goods of consumption originating in Silicon Valley, by way of cheap Chinese labour, means to choose but a different commodity to cling onto. Fail, if you observe it from the outside, which you can't really, according to dead German philosophers. But I like consumption. (Also, I would quite like to destroy Victorian/Edwardian metaphors here: I am not Leonard Bast - there are antibiotics - there is more or less central heating: it is time to rid consumption of its negative connotations.) I like to identify myself with a particular group and this year's great event is the Vintage Festival in July, where like-minded vintage consumers gather to celebrate consumption in its purest and retroest form. Hat included. The dictatorship of the fruit is at work here too: how many vintage lovers do you see scrolling up and down their iPads or iPhones to see where one can find the best original YSL gloves in their original packaging bought in 1953 in Indonesia from a passing Frenchman in return for a bowl of soup? Hm, maybe I went a bit too far with this example, but the truth is, because the Fruit still benefits from its 90s and Naughties artsy image, a lot of the artsy vintage crowd are proud to use the Fruit. And I don't see as much of a contradiction in using the Fruit and liking vintage simultaneously. I must admit that I have written myself into a oneway street, and I am way too tired to talk myself out again. So this ends abruptly.

Leadership theory. Is it just me?