archive : s0metim3s

A short film by Eleanor Gilbert (via WGAR) of a brief protest outside the Australian Minister for Indigenous Affairs’ office, and inside Centrelink (welfare office).

Where Barb tries to figure out a way - short of begging and dumpsterdiving - around the Basics Card’s controls on movement, on eating, and on housing. And doesn’t.

I’m all for a cooking meme. There should be more recipes on blogs. We do eat, right? A Cornish Pastie recipe at Wrong Side. Here’s one for duck (or chicken) and poached quince - one of my favourites. There’s nothing quite like poached quince - even if it takes some time to poach to that amazing colour, it’s incomparably delicious.

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Speaking of land, I do enjoy a good zombie film - so, looking forward to George Romero’s Land of the Dead. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that one of the great innovations in this episode of Romero’s opus (that the zombies begin to go about ’simulating’ life, going to work, etc) has been ripped off what I think is possibly the most radical exploration of the genre: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.

I got an email a couple or so weeks ago from someone who’d read my article in Mute, but found it, as they put it, “difficult to digest”, and wanted me to suggest other things to read on the topic of precarity. Around the same time, Danny Butt remarked elsewhere on, as he termed it, the consumptive dynamics that accompanies the discussion of ‘precarity’. And in the middle of this, I came across Adbusters’ most recent ‘Big Idea’ forum on, yes, ‘precarity’. Adbusters, of course, being the quintessential propagators of a consumerism - hip niche-market - posing as politics.

That said, here are a few articles that are worth reading and not simply digesting for the purposes of the being-seen-to-be-in or the forming-of the niche market:

Anonymous, ‘Is Precarity Enough?’
Werner Bonefeld, The Politics of Debt
The discussion paper from the Frassanito Network, which I posted here (scroll down some).
Franco Berardi’s article is also worth a look, if you can read German or Italian.

I’m sure there are others - I’ll add as I can recall. Not to mentioned the numerous studies on intermittent, casualised work, or simply changes to labour markets and so on, which don’t use the term ‘precarity’. Then, of course, there’s the whole philosophical discussion on precariousness, little of which discusses this in relation to work, but much of which turns on the question of the foundation of politics or, rather: the non-foundation of politics. But that makes it all that much more difficult to digest, I suppose. Bon apetitit.

Ethica Anthropofagon, by Aleksandar Prokopiev

1. Always be hungry! Then you’ll become like each other.

2. Treat him or her like a pancake. Smear with honey, cherry jam, peanut butter, chocolate. Taste as s/he wants to be tasted.

3. Give him or her a little metal box, decorated with your initials, containing your index finger without a ring or your ear with an earring. S/he will be enormously satisfied by this gesture, as if you’d given the last rose or a new time-travel machine.

4. Be gourmands. In every mouthful find something of yourself. Chew sincerely and you become necessary to each other.

5. Imagine! Searching for food really is as exciting as eating. Be falcon and chick, wolf and lamb, lioness and stag. The role of prey will change with the weather: when it’s hot you’ll be the victim; when it’s rainy, s/he will be.

6. Improve appearances! Use lace, velvet, silk or mohair: inspired by the refinement of French hedonists. Their deepest drive is to bring together spring water and ripe cheese; decay and pink skin fresh from the bath. The smell of incense could be as brutal as a god biting into an over-ripe pear.

7. Make jokes! Write a suicide note and put it in an envelope. Next, ravenously eat a miniature marzipan replica of yourself (or it could be made of jelly or blancmange). Then, nonchalantly, rip open the envelope and read your testament: “I donate my body and soul to culinary progress.”

8. Romance dies on an empty stomach. But to be stuffed is banal, makes you lethargic and punctures fantasies. Every day tickle your appetite but never overfill your stomach. Always be hungry!