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Strange Sounds in the Sky: High Frequency Active Aural Research

In 2011 people from all over the world started reporting that they had heard eerie noises seeming to emanate from the sky. The ‘phenomenon’ went viral and You Tube houses numerous videos of the ‘hearings’. As the videos play out over several minutes each, sounds can be heard that range from growling choral sounds to reverberating tuba. The scenes are usually views of empty, residential areas. The camera is pointed at the pixelated open sky. What unifies the footage is that the listeners seem to believe that the sounds are real and attribute them to a grand source, christening them: Strange Sounds in the Sky, Sky Roar or God’s Shofar. Responses to some of the video uploads have revealed a more mundane rational behind them. For instance, the a recording of sounds in Terrace, BC Canada 2013 was described as a melody by Kimberly Wookey:



The City of Terrace later took responsibility for the sound by posting a note on their Facebook page that they were preparing for some repaving work, and that the noise was produced by a grader blade while levelling the ground. The joy of the videos is their dual nature: if I choose to hear supernatural sounds I can but I can also hear the distorted sounds of planes, industrial tools, fans - various infrastructures vibrating, a fault in the electric grid, telephone wires, air caught in water or gas pipes. Link to a compilation of the videos:



 Many reports pinned the cause of the sounds on the research at HAARP: High Frequency Active Auroral Research facility for the study of ionospheric physics and radio science - based in a US Air Site in Gakona, Alaska established 1993 and temporarily closed. It was funded by the U.S. Air Force, Navy, University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Where there is military research there is often conspiracy theory and HAARP has been the target for some colourful ideas from mind control to weather control. Some online comment writers believe that the technology at HAARP will be used as part of an oppressive New World Order: ‘With the use of telepathic electronic two-way communication, HAARP wave technology can reach everyone on earth’ or it is seen as being used as a ‘second coming’ or the Apocalypse.

The aim of their research, say HAARP, was to understand the effects of the changing atmospheric conditions of the ionosphere that ‘begins approximately 35 miles above the earth's surface and extends out beyond 500 miles. In contrast to the dense atmosphere close to the earth, which is composed almost entirely, of neutral gas, the thin ionosphere can distort, reflect and absorb radio signals.’ The research is conducted by stimulating small areas of the ionosphere with a high power, high-frequency phased array radio transmitter and measuring the results of the artificial excitation. The aim is to make these systems for invisible transmissions more reliable for satellite communications: GPS and Ultra High Frequency systems and military surveillance. These systems, infrastructures in themselves, also aid in the securitising of utility and communications infrastructures.

Listening Seminar 3

Pleased to be taking part in this. More details on the Vocalities Course Blog - part of The Aural and Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths, London.

Cataclysm: tornado destruction from CCTV footage

There is a series of videos on YouTube of footage rescued from CCTV systems that managed to keep running during some of the worst USA tornadoes. These images are a melancholic reflection of the loss and fear endured during these cataclysmic disasters. The CCTV camera images, often attached to residencies, sometimes capture the malfunction of the camera as the tornado hits the electricity supplies. They have a still, stubborn resilience - always angled high above to oversee the scene of pool, driveway, porch or school playground, gym, car park. They are different to the footage taken by people on mobile phones that are uploaded alongside - whose reasonable reactions of panic and fascination are captured in zooms, shakes, abrupt loss of framing. These are fragile movies made by machines, at a time when no human can bear the conditions to watch.

Weekend OtherWorld

Weekend OtherWorld will be a brilliant event with presentations, films and performances at Goldsmiths College on Saturday 27th April. This event is being put on by English Heretic and MA Aural and Visual Cultures featuring English Heretic, Mark Fisher, Dean Kenning, Savage Messiah, Nicola Woodham, Tristram Adams, Carey Robinson, Haunted Shoreline, Antony Clayton, Mark Pilkington, Will Fowler, Hannah Gilbert, Alison Gill, Blue Firth, Cerys Thomas, English Heretic, Ken Hollings, John Cussans, Lisa Cradduck, Roberto N Peyre. (I hope I haven't left anyone out.) The presentations sound fascinating and I can't wait to see them. The venue is room LG01 in the New Academic Building at Goldsmiths College from 1pm to 8pm and is free.

Here's an outline of the event cited from English Heretic's post.

Weekend OtherWorld aims to realise a new form of aesthetic broadcast. It imagines a parallel present where the forensic documentary intensity of 1970s television, evidenced in World In Action, Man Alive, Weekend World and Chronicle still exists but at a sorcerous angle to reality. What if the earnest authority of these programmes could be extended to occult aesthetics. With hard hitting, convincingly paranoid reports of the concrete irrational, Weekend OtherWorld subverts the roundtable format of the current affairs programme to broadcast a series of films, presentations and concomitant discussions from a potent broth of hermetic psychogeography, revolutionary sacrifice, aesthetic psychopathology and eerie capitalism.  Distilling the essences of the recent AGM, the afternoon programme will further attempt to define these new breeds of creative research. By exploring reality at a sorcerous angle, might we also find that the machinery underlying politics and culture is a magical construct?

To give a bit of context to the work I'm presenting. I read a series of essays on the Amazon Economy published by the Financial Times that I had got to via a link to an interesting article about Amazon recommended by Mark Fisher. I was inspired by one reference in the essay Robo-pricing by US retail correspondent for the Financial Times based in New York, Barney Jopson to a story around selling a biology book 'The Making of A Fly'.  Michael Eisen, a biologist based a Berkley UC and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, noticed that a book he wanted to buy on Amazon had risen in price to over two million pounds, his full post is here. The biologist worked out that just two sellers were competing in price over the same item. But that there was a pattern to the pricing. One seller had set his algo pricing to always be 1.27 times more than his competitor, yet his competitor had set up his system to by .99 times less. So as one price rose the other would rise too, but just a little bit. Eisen proposes that one seller likely did not have the material item at all. He simply listed the item at a higher price than his competitor. The plan was that when he made a sale he would buy up the cheaper book and then sell it on for a profit. This links to a number of practises mentioned in essay. I think Eisen neatly makes the point that algorithmic pricing can go absurdly wrong, especially when these chance pairings of sellers activity happen. Just before the anomaly was noticed by the sellers the book price had risen to $23,698,655.93. Since reading his article I have spoken to several people who have noted anomalies in pricing on Amazon, new children's books going for £600 and the like. Jopson's cites the 2010 'flash crash' as another possibly monstrous algorithmic moment. 

Sellers have a choice of software vendors to choose from who can provide endless amounts of data about their competitors. Much trading jargon and principles has seeped into this arena. Companies like Mercent who make ecommerce software for online retailers (not sure what words have been hybridised for this, merchant, percent, mercenary, cent, mercy, acquiescent....I could go on....) thrive on speculation about the habits of consumption based on an obsession with metrics. There is more to write on this and much has been written in the excellent current Mute Magazine 'Slave to the Algorithm'. 

For me I was fascinated by the literal problematic of the absence of the book worth twenty three million dollars. I immediately imagined an empty shelf in an ecommerce warehouse. So from this idea about an impossible object sprang a story that I've developed into an audio play The Gift Experience: where a cult springs up around an empty shelf where a set of screwdrivers priced at over two million pounds are not being stored. I also wanted to combine some element of this sinister obsessiveness of retailers with the everyday habits of consumers. How a trip to the same cafe every morning at the same time on your way to work becomes a seed for a wave, a pattern that is utilised to try to predict or influence your next shopping move. This is surely a kind of pathalogical stalking, a revelling in the implicit. I was especially interested in the whole issue of analysis of data about shopping habits that made me think that in the future we wont need to shop at all, commercial distributors will already know what we want before we do and will simply deliver to our house. I'm pleased to be working with actors Robin Bale, Susannah Ashfield, Tony Burden and Victoria Riley on this short play. I'm planning on developing the work more to fit a radio slot and to run it again in June.

Inescapable Angles: A Psychic Folly

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space was in circulation when Roman Polanski made Repulsion. Published in 1958, it appeared in English translation in 1964 just one year before the film’s release. Bachelard observes an intimate relationship between the form of a domestic dwelling and its inhabitants. Corners, garrets, drawers, chests all affect a way of being. In turn, the occupant leaves a trace on their home both physically and in the realm of memory and the imaginary. Polanski too made much of this interdependence in each of his ‘Apartment Trilogy’ films: Repulsion (1964), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976). They all encapsulate the feng shui nightmare of cheapskate landlord’s conversions: thin walls, creaking floor boards, damp and drafts. Polanski’s architecture of choice is the late Victorian flat with its excesses of cornicing, cast iron radiators, sash windows which all provide details for his lingering camera. These are pads with ‘character’, ornate abodes that have an agency in his films that make them unsung stars. For Carol, played by Catherine Deneuve, the South Kensington flat she rents serves as an escape from the busy streets and bustling beauty salon where she works. It is a place where she can resist the advances of suitors and relax with her sister, Yvonne Furneaux. Gradually, it houses and mimics her mental collapse where she becomes locked into an alternate reality of paranoid visions and catatonia. Polanski’s scenes of ‘living walls’ are some of the most memorable in the psychological horror genre.

Many writers have tried to decipher Carol’s mental state. Is she depressed? Schizophrenic? Is she ‘sex repressed’, or possessed by ‘demons’ of the unconscious mind as Bosley Crowther reviewing for The New York Times would have it in 1965. Or, more delicately, was she abused as a child? The cryptic family portrait we see in her lounge might suggest this. The film shrugs off definite answers but what is clear is that Carol is terrified of being ‘broken into’. Her comfortable routine is shattered by her sister’s oafish boyfriend and his clumsy stuffing of his toothbrush and razor into her water glass. Sexual imagery here speaks for itself. It is often mentioned in write ups of the film how openly Polanski exposes the intricacies of Carol’s demise. But just what does this involve? My interpretation is that Polanski creates a psychological space with his sophisticated use of the mechanics of cinema - a space where a woman is terrified of intruders and then he invites us in. We are with Carol every step of the way, perceiving the world as it is to her: when she is alone in the house, when she is visited in the night by the imagined rapist grabbing and pushing in close. We are given the spare key and invited to take up a kind of multiple occupancy of Carol’s mind. Polanski makes us psyche-cine intruders, able to come and go as we please. It is this that makes the film so unsettling and perversely enigmatic.

So what of this filmic architecture, how does Polanski build this cine interior? To me his methods are Lovecraftian. By fragmenting and dislocating sound and image Polanski creates monstrous and unearthly reconfigurings of the banal. One observation I made in seeing the film again was the fracturing of one of the early moments where Carol is walking outside and passes by a roadworks site. Piles of rubble suggest disintegration and recall the cracks in the pavement and wall that Carol is fascinated with. One of the workers, sweating and wearing a soiled vest leers at her and suggests ‘a bit of the other’. This one scene then splits into tiny shards that resurface during the remainder of the film. A similar vest keeps reappearing in the flat, as if it moves of its own accord. It is a sign of Carol’s curious disgust of male sexuality - one she finally absorbs into her own horrific version of domesticity. Later and quite separately from the initial workmen scene, Carol appears even more disturbed on her walk home. Here, within the drums and percussion of Chico Hamilton’s jazz score it is possible to hallucinate the sounds of car horns and drilling. The film is shaped by these explosions and dream logic arrangements. Cinematography (Gilbert Taylor) sound editing and mixing (Tom Priestley and Leslie Hammond), editing (Alastaire McIntyre), art direction (Séamus Flannery) are the building materials for Polanski that result in this psychic folly.

In Poems to my other self(1927) Albert-Birot pre-empts Polanki’s concerns in Repulsionand indeed his words suggest one of Polanski’s interior tracking shots. Bachelard selects this quotation in Poetics:

…Je suis tout droit les moulures

qui suivent tout droit le plafond

I follow the line of the moldings

which follow that of the ceiling.

Mais il y a des angles d’où l’on ne peut plus sortir.

But there are angles from which one cannot escape

Bachelard is a good way into Repulsion. Architecture as a metaphor for mental states was Bachelard’s calling card. But can’t we go a bit further. If the South Ken rented flat is symbolic of Carol’s psyche then surely we need to address what it means to equate a woman’s mentality with rented accomodation. I am thinking figuratively here. I don’t want to suggest Carol is a real woman. But let’s unpack this trope of woman as rented flat. Dido would sing years later that her ‘life is for rent’, and make Disney-esque laments about how unsettled and ungrounded as a person she is because she doesn’t actually own her flat. For naughties Dido homeownership was the ur-state of being a sorted post personal development woman. Girly independence a thing of the past or is it for Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City 2?  She manages to keep her single lady place on in the middle of New York (‘not the right time to sell’ is the narrative glue here). This allows her to go through rebellious married woman discomfort as she boomerangs from the crash pad to her opulent home with Big. For Carrie marriage doesn’t have to mean submission, but it ‘kind of’ does too. Ambivalence here is not liberating, just compliance dressed up as dithering. Another post might attempt to embrace the complexity that is Sex in the City 2 another time.

The South Ken flat is lewd, it’s creaky and unprivate. It’s got cracks and gaps under the doors. No family home would be like this. It speaks of the improper. It says: ‘these residents have got it coming.’ These are the ones that don’t want to sacrifice their freedom to the god of mortgage repayments. Social pariahs now, and more so since they can be slightly smug about not making the repayments all those years just to sit on a valueless property. The tenants can get out quick, they are not contributing to growth. There is no glory in lining the pockets of landlords, but less so in flaunting now useless mortgage debt disguised as a good investment. So thanks Bachelard for making us look at architecture as mind, but lets also think about the kinds of architectural signals that have become burried in the economic psyche of late-capitalism. Home owning took off in the 80s and it could be argued that there were less frowning attitudes towards renting. But still the film is a way for me to articulate this short hand, the way attitudes towards women are implicit to the extent that film narratives work because of them. These attitudes are bound to their economic position.

This use of the rented flat trope is used by Polanski as shorthand for flighty, economically uncommitted, untethered, transient, more at risk and vulnerable. How would the story have been if she had been married and in her own home. The valid excuse for her to kill the men would not have been madness but moral good. Her economic state would be all tied up in this version of the story. Cinema is very good as a tool for pointing out just how much women need an excuse to do anything. They cannot just do it because they want to or because they have reason to as individuals. As wives or protectors of the family (male dominated) home their behaviour is validated. The female psychotic must be explained by madness or dissolved into death. Female violence at large is inexplicable within patriarchal mores. Polanski wanted to create the portrait of a psychotic woman and part of his schemata was to present her as ‘the tenant’. The impermanent the unbound economically, the insignigicant and not quite a citizen. She is a virgin and a tenant, open territory, no-one’s yet, not citizen nor girlfriend or wife. She is placeless. As Polanski wanted to create this horrific affect of inviting us into her psyche, then it makes sense for him that we are ‘her first’, this makes for a greater ‘affect’ and as someone described to me his response to the film, a further sense of ‘ickyness’. By icky I mean this implicit, sneaky sense of being a seated cine sadist. We become complicit in Polanski’s plan for our viewing experience, we don’t turn away. It’s simple perversion and I’m not knocking a culture for viewing sadistic material in celluloid fantasy form, or for that matter real physical sexual sadists but Polanski’s methods for getting us here are notably underhanded.

Property Tours

Looking back at an old post on Burnt Offerings today I am making connections about some recent research into property tours and urban exploration. What binds these two phenomena is the style of filming where a mobile phone or small handheld camera is used to capture the POV moving shot through the front door into each room. Property tours allow the potential tenant to view before they view for real, the estate agent is alone and moves around the house narrating the pro's of each room on site. A strange quirk I have noticed is where the toilet has a bow round the seat or loo paper has been arranged on the seat, presumably as a sign that the 'deep clean' at the point of vacation has taken place, and the toilet has not been used since. The urban explorer is usually alone too, predicting reasons vocally on site as to why the property has been abandoned, often finding photographs and papers left in a hurried departure. There is a sense of the devil may care as they move up to the second floor or into dark basements that makes me think that they are aware of their role as Blair Witchesque narrator. In both YouTube genres the consciousness of the camera as presented via a style of filmmaking that is familiar from the horror film - the POV shot from the perspective of the killer/voyeur. Property tours videos are varied, I've been looking at: unfurnished rental, furnished rental, hi end sale, low end sale, hi end holiday home and low end holiday home.

Most holiday home property tours make me feel sad as what they sell is a place to have 'time off work'. These brief glimpses of involved time: with children, cooking, reading, cycling are spoken of as impermanent holiday activities that must be made the most of. The subtext is that this is a dream that will disappear when you leave. They also suggest that they can provide your fantasy for the aspiration that is no longer even a feasible option as you struggle to make ends meet and worry about how you are going to pay for your children's education. These are aspiration holiday camps where you can play at being the ideal couples who drink rose and eat asparagus everyday of the week, at having the time to aspire.



Hi end sales are uncanny in their use of automatic opening and closing doors that lend these furnishings an animistic quality. I wonder how the maker of this video could miss The Shining references, I've lent a hand:

Then I couldn't resist this either, it's a cheap effect:

Bunker Mentality documentation 2

Bunker Mentality documentation 1

Photos by Jamie Farrel of Suitable Management (2011, SD, colour with sound 2' loop)

Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors from Nicola Woodham on Vimeo.

Being shown at the Exploding Cinema Disposable Film Festival and Kill the Lollipop at Lewisham Arthouse.

Secret Societies podcast

A while back I posted about the Secret Societies event I took part in with Electric Sheep as part of East End Film Festival. You can listen to it here

Sarabet

Not the first to perform a coloured light and music works live, but Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1871-1951) invented machines, particularly the Sarabet, that she could use for her colour light art, that she called Nourathar, essence of light. Her inventions allowed her to respond in coloured light to music live, the first woman on record to create audio-visual performances perhaps. I enjoy the Crowley-esque title for her invention and the aesthetic of her set, high chair, long dress, psychadelic makeshift background. Here she is.

She also invented the rheostat, still used today as a form of resistor of electrical signals (volume/light). Her patent was disputed by General Electric but she spent some years fighting to be recognised as the lawful author for this device. She won.

Above is an example of her notation for a light performance.

Malmberget

Malmberget, Gallivare Municipality, a small mining town in Lapland, Sweden, is on the move again. The tunnels of the mine stretch for miles and have created a network under the town. Older tunnels have made the structure of the ground unstable to the extent that part of the ground started to cave in, starting in the fifties. Each year more of this residential area falls away into the mouth of Gropen, 'the Pit'. On the standard map, Gropen is represented as a grey, nondescript, mass. But the birds eye view shows a huge cavern. Not the mine itself, but what was the town, now a pit, gradually getting bigger.

Small posts, seismometers, stuck in the ground are dotted around the town. A fence marks off the area around the pit that has shown to be unstable by the readings. Within that fence are many abandoned homes. The people that lived there have had to move on.

Here is Gropen in the 60s:

And now:

Malmberget established itself as a result of high wages from mining work, it began to flourish from the 1880s onward. When Gropen became a danger, offices and houses were moved. But even these settlements and more around them are transient. When the mining companies (now LKAB, a state owned company) realised there was more ore under the town, and more danger of subsidence, they attained permission to enforce the removal of houses to nearby Gallivare. Some houses can be moved successfully, not all. The upheaval has been well documented.

I don't speak Swedish but I can tell from the facial expressions of the Malmberget residents in this report that they are sad to leave their homes. At one stage the woman in her kitchen looks perturbed, this is because everynight around 11pm the mine blasts can be heard, in this video the vibrations are visible.

Children's nightmares here, possibly, are not of a bogey man under the bed, but of the bed, and the house falling into the ground. To the east of Gropen are a hundred or more houses due for demolition. Gropen threatens their foundations and the owners have mostly packed up and gone. The abandoned, detached, residencies look recently vacated. They have been. There has been no chance for maintenance to lag. Paint is fresh on the walls, windows are boarded up, but others are in tact. Strangely no graffiti here, no break in, traces of teenage fires. Round the back of a house a chair only just has a twine of ivy growing round it. Gardens are yet to overgrow. The place has more of a sense of evaccuation than desertion. The reasons to leave are invisible, but the rumbling of explosions heard everynight from the mine, are a reminder. The blasts, to mine for iron ore, copper. Also, more sinister, and unexpected rumbles, small tremors are also reminders.

Walking through this area at night in the summer renders it even more strange. An unearthly light, midnight sun behind a clouded over sky. The dank, bleak emptiness met us with bone cold. Deserted roads, boarded up windows, silence. Intrigue and aesthetic interest was dragged down, indeed by the 'oppressiveness of the place'. This puts me in mind of Andre Breton's Mad Love (1937 Chap. 6), where he questions whether the oppressiveness of some places was due to their history, or whether some primordial, metaphysical presence 'made' people act immorally or despairingly:

As we gradually moved forward, the dismal nature of the site, which developed without changing in any sense, took on a poignant twist we could sense in our conversation, however increasingly vague...The presence of an apparently uninhabited house a hundred metres along on the right added to the absurd and the unjustifiable nature of our walking along in a setting like this. This house, recently built, had nothing to compensate the watching eye for its isolation. It opened out on a rather large enclosure stretching down to the sea, and bordered, it seemed to me, by a metallic trellis, which, given prodigious avarice of the land in such a place, had a lugubrious effect on me, without me stopping to analyse it. My gift of observation, which is in general not remarkable, was noticeably diminished by sadness.

Breton goes on to say that the walk between this house, across a stream and to a small fort gave him a sense of inner despair, and a rift grew between him and his lover. When he returns to his parents they explain that they had passed the site of a murder, a woman shot by her husband. He speaks also of the painting The House of the Hanged Man by Cezanne.

This is not just anecdotal: it is a question, painting for example, of the necessity of expressing the relationship which cannot fail to exist between the fall of a human body, a chord strung round its neck, into emptiness, and the place itself where this drama has come to pass, a place which it is, moreover, human nature to come and inspect.

He establishes, from his parents accounts, that the space between the house and the fort was 'the world' of the man, Michel Henriot and his wife, the site he and his lover had walked through earlier that day. He too had felt diabolically separated from his partner. Was it the site itself, the genus loci, that was the cause, or the gory details of the crime that had happened there that had made it so miserable:

Thus the space between these two buildings, which had been for me that afternoon such an exceptional place of disgrace, revealed itself in its very limits, to be the previous theatre of a singular tragedy.

Black and white archive images above courtesy of Gellivare Bildarkiv.

Stay Home Tonight

One motive for the riots is 'See what you get when you take away a kids future'. Indeed cuts have ensured that opportunities for access to higher education are nil, job opportunities, possibility of affording a decent place to live, negligible. Even after a patch up job, where community figure heads might try to take some of the blame here and ensure the provision of more youth services, improve police dialogue etc UK society will never provide financial equality for all if neoliberalism remains central. I think an important question we actually need to ask 'what kind of future?' ... a great future as a wage-slave, working all the hours in the week to pay the mortgage and buy 'stuff', or work in goal/corporate orientated academia, or a social sector driven by key performance indicators etc? - in the neoliberal emerald city, the streets aren't paved with gold for most. I think the kids have seen through this and nihilism has set in.

What these looting kids are doing in a 419 culture, cut out the middleman, style is cutting to the chase. They got the trainers, the gold, the track suit, and did they have to work for months or nurture soul scalding credit? ... they did not. The way these objects of desire are produced and distributed is the problem, not the objects themselves or the desire. Look to Adam Curtis' All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace for a history on the oil crisis in Nigeria for insight into the actual costs of primary source theft, i.e. oil to make our Play Stations etc. Surely this is the individualistic entrepreneurship neoliberalism advocates, talk about instant profit. Fast wealth looks bad and unfair, but at least these kids have the guts to do it out in the open, not behind false shrouds of dignity like the political elite and the mega-rich.

The gangs already have their organised unions, I think it shines a light on the lack of other Londoners to come together and take to the streets to protest. I resent Teresa May et als exclusion of these kids as 'thugs' that 'Londoners' should unite against. These kids are Londoners. At this time any demonisation should be abhorred. Denying responsibility for social malaise is a tabloid tactic. However, I think the governmental stance will play on the idea that at this time of great austerity, everyone should be making do and mend, altruism is key. These kids are not playing fair, not showing allegiance to the Big Society and not showing the negative solidarity that is needed. Their criminality will be seen as a great burden, they will be outlawed. I think everyone is looking for significance here, political intent, or a logical motive. Of course the rioters' motives will be mixed. But on the whole I think the motive is angry revenge, revenge for taking out one of their own (Mark Duggan) revenge for being poor and for being bored.

As I write short term solutions are being proposed - further denial of civil liberties, legal police brutality in the form of surveillance of phone calls, use of water canons and plastic bullets.

Psychic Fayre

Stake Land

Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2011) is a pretty good watch, with rousing action scenes where locals turned vampires tear up rural America, although this is hindered by some unneeded frills. The film is set in apocalyptic America (what has caused this is unexplained). Towns and cities are dysfunctional and many are deserted. Various groups jostle for position: an extremist Christian cult, disenfranchised ‘simple folk’ searching for a new frontier and a pack of blood-guzzling vampires, each aiming for supremacy.

The story follows the travels of vampire stalker Mister (Nick Damici, Mulberry Street, World Trade Center) and orphaned Martin (Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl), picked up by Mister as an apprentice/vampire killer pal (I hope named after George Romero’s awkward be-fanged teenager). They are trying to find the promised land, a mysterious place called New Eden.

Stake Land is part buddy movie, part road movie, part sci-fi, part social commentary, part Western. Watching the film is like flicking through cable channels:Mad Max follows Karate Kid follows The Champ, all with teeth. There is a lot going on and it’s impressive that the filmmakers manage to cover so much film territory. But it feels a bit like an attempt to cover their bases and have something for everyone: slowed-down glamorous sections where the leading actors look cool, set to a melancholic soundtrack, are next to gripping and noisy action scenes of blood lust and staking (the best part of the film for me), and sensitive bonding scenes between the characters as they travel through a stunning landscape. All this set to music that is so unnecessary it feels like being smothered with a pillow of emotional impact.

The subtext of the film seems to suggest that in a new era of sluggish economies and ecological disaster only the fittest will survive, and those commonly portrayed as a drain on resources and not ‘pulling their weight’ are cast out. Indeed, many sequences are reminiscent of media-fetishised disasters. Vampire-struck towns with deserted houses, shops and people scavenging for food reminded me of images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or images of terrorist attacks. The vampire format has been used before to flesh out a particular time’s anxieties (disease, addiction, etc), and here it’s a fear of terrorism. With Stake Land, we’re made more aware than ever of a ‘watch your back’ generation of Americans desperately in need of a bit of meditation and some Ritalin.

Some of these references to contemporary society work well. One of the film’s strengths is the way familiar American suburban tropes are adjusted to fit this apocalyptic vamp landscape. The scenes where these mythical beings are seen as roadkill for ’Nam-styled Mister, or where an infected Santa Claus awaits his impending doom in a cul-de-sac, dripping with tar-like blood, are high points. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are not allowed to fully develop, so that the audience can neither genuinely root for them, nor really despise them. Damici’s character has some great moments and his cool lines give the film some laughs, but part of the narrative draw is dropped too early. Four of the people that Mister and Martin befriend are promptly killed off, notably an old woman and a black man, and rather predictably, it’s the young white couple who survive long enough to try and reach the promised land in the end. Published in Electric Sheep Magazine June 2011

Electric Sheep book launch

A good time was had by all at the Horse Hospital, London on Tues 7th June and I was really delighted to see the anthology. Its a brilliant collection of visual and written work. Here are the remains of the celebratory cake - suitable gore.

Secret Societies

Transcript from my talk 'Witchcraft and Commodification in Night of the Eagle and Season of the Witch' at the Electric Sheep event about Secret Societies, held as part of the East End Film Festival on 2nd May 2011 at The Masonic Lodge, Liverpool Street, London:

First of all I want to focus in a bit and let you know what kind of witches and covens I’m going to talk about. You’d agree that witches in cinema cover a broad spectrum. We have the films that are based loosely on actual witch hunts in early modern Europe, we also have the broomstick, black hat and cat type, thinking of the Wicked Witch of the East in Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter. But I’m going to concentrate on the ones that are portrayed as living secretly among us, who could be your professor, your family friend or your neighbour.

The films I’ll be looking at are George Romero’s season of the Witch (1973) and Sydney Hayer's Night of the Eagle (1962) - these films expose societies of witches living among ‘normal’ people, for this read everyday, western suburbia...these are law abiding folk...keen to ‘get on’ in the world. In this way I think of them as Society Witches, as well as secret societies! They occupy commonplace spaces - I’m thinking cul de sac as opposed to say Jean Rollin’s exotic castle locales or even as we saw earlier today the closed fairytale reality of Argento’s Suspiria. No, these are the witches who’ll lend you a cup of sugar.

What makes them so enigmatic as subject matter? Well I think films about them tap into the fear and unease that comes with the idea that any secret society could exist in close proximity to your own society. We like to believe that we know people, that they are who they say they are. Films about witches suggest that you can never be sure... ‘these are people so close to you that you wont see them coming’.

I think that the way directors like Hayers and Romero put this across is by really emphasising how normal the worlds the witches move in are. The horror is built in, rooted in the quotidian. It’s the way witchcraft is accommodated by the ordinary in the films that I want to talk to you about and show you some clips that I think have a certain camp black comedy that is priceless but also illuminating.

So, let's start with Night of the Eagle, southern provincial England, husband and wife, Tansy and Norman Taylor have recently been to Jamaica where Tansy was introduced to witchcraft, back in Britain she is convinced that it has provided good luck for her and her rising academic husband. She soon realises that her arch rival, who also hopes her husband at the same college gets promoted is a practising witch as well. On the surface these are society wives, battling it out over the best crumpets, bridge and committee teas, but underneath they are calling on the black arts for wealth and prosperity. The main thrust of the film is to ask ‘does witchcraft exist or is it all just a coincidence’. Norman lectures in superstition and neurosis and fears for his wives mental health as she gets more involved. He throws away her charms, pats her on the head and tells her not to be so silly. But his fortune takes a dive when he does this and he is also accused of harassment. Tansy fears the worst and their bad luck increases, resulting in near death for Tansy.

Night of the Eagle film clip here

Its the way the whole representation of witchcraft practise is entwined with the prosaic that I find so effective. Tansy hides her good luck fetishes all around her well kept house, it all seems like business as usual but look a bit closer and you’ll see that your enemy has tied a voodoo doll into your lampshade tassels. I love the way her acceptable ritual arrangements of domestic objects Norman has financed around the home are interwoven with this unacceptable independent activity that he disapproves of. This gendering of witchcraft is something I’ll come on to in a bit.

So onto the next clip and Season of the Witch (1972). Views on this film vary from Romero’s - who felt it wasn’t successful - 'an attempt at a Women's Lib film', he says in one interview. Again, we have the bored, housewife Joan whose successful husband is away from home alot of the time, she has a mild anxiety disorder and wild dreams where hubby is torturing and controlling her. Joan joins a local group of women who have formed a coven and witchcraft gives Joan the excuse to have an affair with a man years her junior, she believes her spell brings him to her - when really she just gets drunk one night and calls him. And it explains the loosening of her grip on reality that makes her mistake her husband for Satan and shoot him dead.

Season of the Witch film clip here

Metaphors for control are heavy handed in the film, and the plot is out there, but even the dream sequences and delusions have a deadpan reality to them: more so because of the shaky acting and jumpy editing. Here we find a merging of fantasy and the banal that Romero went on to push to it limits.

I love the emphasis in this clip on ‘browsing’, and that buying the witchcraft tool kit is just part of a normal shopping trip. I think this use of the motifs of the witch and the zombie, all constructs based on West African-Yoruba derived religions, (Candomble, Vodou to name a few) combined with modern activity, like shopping and harbouring material goods, is at the heart of Romero’s work. Witches and zombies here are metaphors for the consumers who fetishise material objects to gain power and social acceptance. Ok, so here’s my offering, my analysis of these films. I want to attempt to tie together the idea of the neighbour who isn’t who they say they are, with the portrayal of the domestic and the influence of modern life on all of this, and say a bit more about the role of women here.

So my basic argument has been that the filmmakers raise this question about ‘can you ever really know someone?, and is ‘real really real?’ - the most familiar faces can be false ones. That mousse the neighbour brought round really does have a chalky under taste, it's not your imagination! The films have a strong theme of paranoia, and they really draw on images of women and men loosing their hold of reality as they get more and more involved in witchcraft, or try to work out if witchcraft is real or not.

But why would this be so interesting around this period of their making and still hold some interest now above and beyond the drama? I think these films are saying something about a particular unease people felt about the changes Western modernity brought about in the mid sixties to early seventies. Suddenly your neighbours are getting rich quick, moving around, what was familiar no longer is. Friendship and routine, that once gave us a foothold on reality is now shifting and in flux. The filmmakers propose the question: In this environment where we no longer know our neighbours that well, how can we be sure they are who they say they are? And to add to that, previously, when people wanted to get to know you for who you were not what you owned wasn’t it all alot easier? Indeed, common to both of these films is aspiration, these are aspirational families who are putting professional success and material gain over and above their familial relationships. Tansy and Norman have recently moved to a new area for Norman’s job, Joan’s husband isn’t around to help raise their child etc. Old values of kinship, familiarity and routine are being replaced by mobility and professionalism.

Overarching all of this is the idea that women are the gatekeepers of safe domestic places, the ones who keep order, the ones we can trust when all others fail us. These films pick out the horror of women turning their back on their previous roles as home makers and carers. This horror is the horror of the maternal figure not being who she says she is, she is the ultimate figure of the familiar made strange. The motif of the witch or witches covens echoes the fear that one, more and more we cannot be sure if people are who they say they are, and two, that if these untrustworthy people are women then this is much worse.

So, the 'society witch' is an intricate motif where the witch wives are seen to abandon their house keeping (read the tending to the charmed material objects or rather commodity fetishes that hubby funds) for their own worryingly independent magical activity and use of fetishes and spells. On top of that the witch also stands in for the new fearful, distrusting relationship with the neighbour and those close to us, that comes with modernity and an investment in the commodity. So on one hand you’ve got this real value for material wealth and power portrayed in the films but on the other a portrayal of the cost of these - upheaval and paranoia.

So to round up - the filmmakers I’ve talked about emphasise ‘the normal’ and suggest that the familiar can be made strange at the drop of a hat, and this make us ill at ease. They say a secret society can also be part of your society, and be barely recognisable. Your neighbour might be a witch, so who can you trust? Next time you’re up for promotion, watch your back!

Suitable Management

New video

suitable management from Nicola Woodham on Vimeo.

Dido as Axiom

For some time I've been thinking about the lingering effects of popular culture of the 90's and their part in shaping the neoliberal subject that we know. Thankfully the neoliberal dream is on its last legs and as we 'look back in anger' I'm still haunted by the lingering shadow of she who I see as it's face and postergirl. If neoliberalism has upheld the value of homogeneity, people reduced to their labour power as measured by key performance indicators, positivity at all costs then the 'singer' who heralds these values has to be Dido. This obsession all began when I included her song 'Here With Me' in a video as part of the Empty Orchestra series. This is a series of videos that looks at the pathos of the working world. The script for one of the films is below. I wanted to use the Dido song Here With Me in the film as short hand for a kind of poverty of spirit particular to that experience of sitting in the Wetherspoons in West London after work, scavenging for romance. You can watch the series of films here.

For me, Dido is shorthand for a poverty of spirit, the epitome of bland, dull, innocuous and non-committal. She is the air brushed face of aspiration, a premonition of the hoardings on the side of sites that were council estates, now soon to be the dream homes for the 'even more tightly squeezed middle'. Her songs played out everywhere, lulling the working people along as they fell in line, crank up 'Life is for rent' as you sleepily leave the slip road. She's the face of the normalisation of normal, the default. That insipid look, heavy lidded, encouraging the consumer to go to Gap and Next for those work clothes, to look nice for work, to get highlights at the weekend, the highlight of the week. Dido is the giving up and giving in, the cul de sac, the putting up and shutting up and smile sweetly while your doing it. She's the moneyed lone female, in her one bed, eating her Waitrose ready meal, sipping the Chardonnay, except that the ready meal is vile and the Chardonnay turns into a bottle, two, a gin and tonic - oh hell, the rest of the bottle and a co-codomol for good measure. In the morning when her alarm clock goes off she wont be thinking about the bloke in her office who does less work than her but earns more, or the overtime she's obliged to do to keep her job, just whether she can fit in a trip to Debenhams before work to get those place mats. She's the chattering voice in your head as you go to buy a low cut top for work: 'not very managerial' she says, 'remember, you've got to fit in to live the dream.' Poor Dido, emancipated and free to be a wage slave like anyone else. Her face, tattooed into our minds, ubiquitous.

Dido is also the 'ordinary' girl. I read that she was popular because many girls identified with the way she dressed, t shirt and jeans, and that haircut, the Dido flick. So if she was a 'positive role model' for the female populace, should I be leaving her alone? But wasn't this saying that Dido made it ok to be ordinary for this read poor i.e. too poor to afford to look like J-Lo? Or she was also the face of social mobility - you can do it too, I know you can only afford a pair of cheap Primark jeans and a t-shirt in the H and M sale, but girl, stick with me and you can make it to the top. Carl Neville in Classless: Recent Essays on British film (Zero Books 2010) writes about the way class was erased, and continues to be erased in some British film, like the Richard Curtis project. Part of this, is the way the films reflect a trend urged on by Blairism to accept poverty in Britain and see this simply as symptomatic of not seizing opportunity, rather than a right to a fair share of resources, fulfilling jobs and homes, British people should choose success over other distractions like getting bogged down about not having money and doing silly stuff like turning to cheaper thrills like booze and skag. he extends this to music. He mentions Eminem in this argument: "In the state of late capitalist precariousness, readiness is everything. "Opportunity comes once in a lifetime Eminem's ''Release Yourself'' tells us; you will have your chance, if you blow it you know who's to blame: not the system that democratically allocates an opportunity to all, but the individual. Given Dido's links with Eminem, safe to say they were part of the same project to promote social mobility that operates in a dodgy territory of perceived fairness.

In the article Blahspeak by Stefan Colini (LRB Vol. 32 No. 7 · 8 April 2010) exposes the current meaning of aspirational with reference to the Milburn Report 'Unleashing Aspiration: the final report of the panel on fair access to the professions. He points out the inherent flaw in any Blairite argument that 'everyone' in Britain should have a 'fair' chance at fulfilling their aspirational goals (financial security, social mobility, successfully educated children, properties at a good market value):

'The mixture of bounciness and vacuity indicates that the report is written for the most part in Blairspeak – or, since this idiom is now general not individual, ‘blahspeak’. In blahspeak, social mobility is equated with realising ‘pent-up aspiration’. One of the absurdities here is that the second phrase refers to subjective experience, the first to an objective pattern. People may realise pent-up aspiration in all kinds of ways without altering their position in the social structure in the slightest. This slide into the subjective once again reveals the individualist assumptions behind the Thatch-Lab pact, signalling the transition from do-good to feel-good. Social life is a benign competition in which most shall have prizes.'

He argues that for every success there must a failure, for every winner a looser. In the end its just the middle-class aspirer with the sharpest-elbows who'll achieve/acquire enough to truly 'get-on'. what Blair provides in his Blahspeak is a linguistic trap where meaning is occluded, nonsensical concepts that confidently put on the guise of sense:

'The Milburn report talks the language of optimism, but its assumptions actually reveal a deep pessimism. It is a pessimism, first, about there being any way in which society collectively, acting primarily through the state, can reshape its underlying socio-economic structure. Staggering inequalities of wealth are simply taken to be part of the natural order. Where it used to be said that ‘the poor are always with us,’ eternal existence is now granted to the rich as well. The market distributes wealth; government then tries to see ‘fair play’ in the resulting (destructively unequal) situation. And it is a pessimism, too, about there being any way for people to agree on what is valuable in life other than in terms of market-modelled consumer satisfaction. The only goals people may be assumed to share are a desire to ‘get on’, to move up some imaginary ‘social ladder’.'

In his article he goes on to provide current figures for the distribution of wealth in Britain and to counterbalance Milburn with the National Equality Panel’s Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK . This presents the larger picture:

'The concentration of inequality at the top end of the scale is what emerges most clearly. The disparities of income among the bulk of society (those in work, at least) are certainly substantial, but they are not huge: 90 per cent of those in employment earn less than about £42,000; the median income is around £21,000, so even the 90th percentile is only earning twice the median. But where the seriously better-off are concerned, the report draws conclusions that should stop all current talk about ‘equality of opportunity’ in its tracks. To take one example: ‘Households in the top tenth have total wealth (including private pension rights) almost 100 times those at the cut-off for the bottom tenth.’ It is worth spelling out that the ‘cut-off for the bottom tenth’ is quite a long way from the very poorest in society; below that point the graph falls away very sharply. Nonetheless, the households in the top tenth are not just two or three times as wealthy (the sort of differential we are used to observing in everyday patterns of consumption), and not just ten times as wealthy (the sort of multiplier that makes for wholly different kinds of life-experience), but one hundred times as wealthy as those who are themselves some way from the bottom of the heap.

This is dramatic enough in itself, but the aggregate figures disguise an even more extraordinary disparity. Within that top tenth, the gap between the 91st and 100th percentiles is huge: the former have approximately four times the median total net wealth of the population, but the top 1 per cent have almost 13 times that median figure. It is repeatedly (and laconically) recorded that the income or wealth or other advantages of the top 1 per cent cannot be properly represented visually in this report because they would be ‘off the scale of the figure’. All the distribution charts and bar graphs have this absurd appearance, with a huge chimney at the right-hand side disappearing off the page.

The Hills report establishes incontrovertibly that, first, this has not always been the case, and second, it is not the case in other European countries. It shows a massive increase in income in the top tier of society since the 1980s, and quite staggering increases for a small (but still numerous) elite since the 1990s. The top 0.05 per cent of the population had seen its share of national income decline pretty steadily from 1937 till the 1970s, as might be expected as societies moved in a broadly social-democratic direction, but by 2000 its share was higher than it had been in 1937. And the very rich got richer faster than the merely wealthy. In the 1980s, every group in the top tenth of taxpayers increased their share of national income, but in the 1990s ‘the increase in the share of the top tenth was all accounted for by the top 0.1 per cent.’ Certain occupational groups stand out, and not just bankers, celebrities and footballers. Between 1999 and 2007, the real earnings of all full-time employees in Britain were almost static, but ‘the real earnings of the CEOs of the top 100 companies more than doubled (reaching £2.4 million per year), and those of the next 250 companies almost doubled (reaching £1.1 million).’ (According to a calculation by Compass, not quoted in the Hills report, the average ratio of CEO-to-employee pay was 47 in 1999; ten years later it was 128.) No less striking is that in other leading European countries the top 1 per cent’s share of the national income, having declined from the 1930s to the 1970s as in the UK, thereafter remained broadly flat. ‘The rise in the incomes of the very top,’ Hills concludes, ‘has not, therefore, been a global phenomenon.’ It has happened, of course, in the US, whose Croesus-versus-helot economic arrangements the UK seems more and more determined to ape.'

This indicates that the resources the aspirational are fighting over (time, energy, money) are all that's left over after the rich have taken a good fat slice of the pie for themselves. The crumbs are what this so called 'level playing field' is made up from. To talk of fair chances suggests that everyone has a fair vantage point, but Colini indicates how the rich are thoroughly excluded from this. Colini uses this Hills report to emphasise just how axiomatic the Milburn report is. In every sense Blahspeak is a coded language, occult, that works as a cover up act for a most despicable ideology that aims to fool the British reader. Still, as always, its up to the British reader to reject it. (Credit to Robin Bale here for directing me to this article and his insights, see his blog purge/glut for more on this.)

So Dido, to me, is a symbol of acceptance of the unfairness of the median, the quotidian, the 'normal'. This fetishisation of the normal in the 90's comes hand in hand with a Blairite blinkering of the truth about distribution of wealth. Just look at some of the song lyrics: See you when your 40, Life is for Rent, Stoned, Let's Do Things We Normally Do. She hovers in the zone where the desire for aspiration meets its impossibility. When I was in Wetherspoons (the best thing about this scenario) in Finchley Road some years ago I heard her on the juke box, I was drinking my continental lager alone in my semi industrial setting, the light from the Holiday Inn opposite dancing on my glass, knackered from work, drinking to break up the commute, when I looked down literally there were mice nibbling away around my toes, when I got home I wrote this and it became the script for Empty Orchestra II.

Weatherspoons Finchley Road north west london. open plan top floor of a shopping mall, glass A large window overlooks the dual carriageway sodium light and florescents cast a sickly yellow haze on the faces of the occupants of the pub. A man and a woman, greying hair, walk in. He orders a pint of guiness. She looks at the continental lagers on offer ‘erdinger, san miguel, leffe’ she chooses ‘lucky.’. They vere to some intimate – ish looking seating booths. As they sit down they are aware of a woman within earshot, wirey hair and a wild look. She mutters in some self built language like tongues. (beat) so they move to a sofa.
the cars rumble and Dido is playing on the jukebox. the woman drinks slowly and the man quickly. (beat) they talk awkwardly, too quietly to hear. The chattering woman keeps catching her eye as she continues to talk to the man ( beat) finally she looks down. the man finishes his drinks and gets up to go, he leaves (beat) mice scurry around on the soiled carpet (beat) (beat) lit by blue and red neon from an outside hotel she drinks down the lager - tears drip down her face.
Pause
A psychic fayre off the A40 in middlesex The doorway sheds only light on the pathway to the old raf hangar, inside is a long room and a large wooden dancefloor. the roof takes on the curves of the arched hangar, the walls are a thick mock tudor, draped with rose pink velour curtains. (beat) David Joylina Jenny are sitting at tables in a semi circle. and at each table a person is hunched listening close and in the air the gentle sound of secrets, an investment a promise. A group of traveller girls hang around the stage at the end of the room waiting for the action. dressed in flourescent thongs and thigh lengthboots.
She is waiting in turn with the other visitors. A man, puffa-coated puts his head round a door and beckons to her. she gets up and follows him through to the back room of the hangar. It has a seedy cottagey feel, small dining tables and floral armchairs. a deformed man is sitting in one of the arm chairs. ‘he cant hear you’ says the usher but he’ll ‘sign to you’. the woman looks at him, taking in the shape of his head, the way his skull merges into his shoulders and how his face slips down on one side. He smiles and gestures for her to come and sit next to him and takes hold of her hand. he looks far into an imagined distance the his mouth opens and a horrible sound exudes ….the hard metal deep rattling, the sound of metal bones snapping and a hurtling gravely heaving sigh (of the motorway traffic) she holds her ears and slips to the ground her face looks white and cold. the travellers gather around her, looking at her lying deathly still, they prod her with their boots. (written London, 2007)

See also k punk's post where he compared existential Dido to consumerist SATC.