Gerald Keaney's blog

Communist philosopher Anthony Hayes has written an good anti-Warhol blog as the blockbuster exhibition continues at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art this week (23/1/2008).

http://antyphayes.blogsome.com/2008/01/09/p18/

I added a comment:

I thought Ant was clear — I had more problems understanding the relevance of the divisions Patrick raised [this refers to the previous comment on the blog site pasted above, though my comment here should make sense even if you do not go to that blog]. To show why a short comment may be useful.

Taken as an entirety, Warhol’s praxis is thought to engage with the market in a clever and appealing manner. Aware of the influence of pop culture, like ‘his’ Velvet Underground or later The Ramones etc, Warhol as artist and person then became an icon for those who are attracted to a cultural alternative to the mainstream. He is taken to be important to “counterculture,” and shares the appeal that counterculture understandably posseses. Thus in Queensland the Warhol exhibition was opened by figures like Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens, a band that began in a scene opposed to Sir Joh’s conservative vision of post-war Australian society.

Do not vote for Holly Kemp

Holly Kemp is running for the position of secretary with the leftwing Catalyst group in the coming UQ St Lucia student elections. Voters should know that she misrepresents students if she thinks it is in her interest to do so, and that she does indeed think it is in her interest to do so.

At the 2006 SOS (Students of Sustainability) conference Holly Kemp misrepresented my friends and I.

We were interested in campus activism at the 2006 SOS. The main target of this activism was to be campus militarism such as the scramjet program at UQ and Boeing sponsorship at St Lucia. We wrote a leaflet that argued it is irrational to develop military technology when there are other technologies that could benefit from resources currently allocated to the military, and when these other technologies could help us address (for e.g.) environmental concerns. Our recommendation was that we demand more R&D funding for (inter alia) renewable energy, while also pursuing the abolition of research projects into hi-tech weapons. The leaflet took up the counter-argument that investment in militarism is desirable in order to deter attackers, for instance scramjet tech supposedly may have anti-ballistic applications. However leaflet argued the best way to prevent of war is an international peace movement, and that such a movement is incompatible with deterrence (for a copy: s200408@student.uq.edu.au).

On Tuesday 3/7/2007 SBS aired Naama Pyritz’s "Bahais in my Backyard." Pyritz worked through her misgivings about the Bahia faith, a more recent religion based in Israel and with connections to Islam. What was interesting that Pyritz invoked the ghost of Dr David Kelly.

"Kelly (May 17, 1944 – July 17, 2003) was an employee of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD), an expert in biological warfare, and a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. Kelly's discussion with Today programme journalist Andrew Gilligan about the British government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq inadvertently caused a major political scandal. He was found dead days after appearing before the Parliamentary committee charged with investigating the scandal...The Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death, ruled that he had committed suicide.... [However many believe] that the official account of suicide was implausible because the means Kelly was said to have chosen is an unlikely and ineffective means of suicide … [and] that the most likely cause of death was murder." (Wikipedia entry)

It was interesting to find Jello Biafra in Don Letts’ 90 min doco on punk (aired Tuesday 5/6th/2007 on ABC 2) claiming that Kurt Cobain had a influence on the Seattle anti-WTO riots in 1999.

The band Nirvana has inspired rebellion (e.g. the early 90s mini-riot in Canberra, when fans debarred entry ripped open a section of the ANU venue and got in to see the band). Of course it is also true Cobain himself was a bit of a mess; his lifestyle would have prevented him from being a very effective activist. In fact it has often been remarked how conservative heroin users tend to become — or already are. So given the context of the interview I take Biafra’s point to be not so much that Cobain himself was an effective rebel, but the band, and more than that, the zine and music scene in Seattle from the later 1980s on, were conducive to rebellion.

“Beam me down mam!”

Participant Michelle Watson placed herself in the transparent teleport cylinder. She was ready. Also, as she was all too aware, she needed to be ready. From the moment a button was pressed, and in the time it took Watson to travel to her destination, which was about 12 nanoseconds as far as anyone could determine, she would be in the early part of the 21st century. New York City, 11th of September 2006 to be exact. NYC was not the place to be – not then. Then again, or more accurately then then, nowhere was the place to be then.

The Globe recently showed the Sex Pistol's film Never Mind the Bollocks, so I'd thought I'd write a brief comment.

The film "Never Mind the Bollocks" argues for an old idea about punk, namely that there is a lot of hype around what was at best just tight professional rock and roll. And who better to tell us all about it than The Sex Pistols?

The film now has to do what its title claims; discard stories about the genitalia of the rooster as much as the male bovine. It has to justify key claims about The 'Pistols.

The professional musicianship of The 'Pistols and associated players is therefore a primary concern. And indeed The 'Pistols sound incredible. In Never Mind… we find naturals who just had to get the hang off it.

Comments on Hakim Bey: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchy. Find a copy @ http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

I will consider two of Hakim Bey’s positions from the standpoint of a new revolutionary group, the Logocist International. Of Bey’s credentials and pretensions, I will say no more than he has had a readership in progressive and activist circles over the last decade, which is why he is of interest here.

We can begin with his position that we should not take an interest in, and so not write, apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature is an ancient biblical genre that describes the end of the world, often in lurid terms. The Book of Revelations is probably the best-known example of this genre. Bey argues that interest in, and the writing of, apocalyptic literature is life negative. This means that instead of encouraging the virtues of joy de vive and free-spiritedness, life negativity encourages the kind of death fixation that leads to such vices as warmongery, Puritanism and mindless, life wasting work.

Motives and the Operative

"It needs to be said, loud and clear, that it was not the CIA or Mossad who bought down the twin towers and bombed the tube but Muslims".

(Jason Burke, Guardian Weekly, July 22-28 2005).

Is the professed creed of the terrorist really the most important fact in determining why bombings, such as those that rocked London 7/7/2005, were carried out? Here I will argue even declared motives might not tell much of the story. I consider the relation of the motive to the individual, motive being the reasoning justifying a certain act, explaining why it is done. Declared motives are considered as potentially misleading or likely to be absent in section 1, and then, by comparison with certain developments in art theory, as amenable to being overriden and manipulated in section 2.