Party Fears, Tosca and New Zealand!

[tcpip]

Well, I've finally managed to get (nearly) all my things in the same place, thanks to the help of the superkind caseopaya. Part of this was the discovery of Party Fears - heads up reddragdiva. For those of you who don't know the reddragdiva is a long-term rocknerd. He used to produce a good quality independent music 'zine in Perth in the mid-80s to early 90s.

It even won an award. (No really, you must read this link).

Bar_bar_rella! The page is down ! Fix it please! For the sake of the relationship of musicians to gormet chefs! Please!

Anyway, the good Dr. is putting his olde journal online. If it's any help I have issues 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18....

The lovely severina242 took me to the opera on Saturday night - Puccini's Tosca. What a lovely story. What a excellent performance. What exceptional value for money. I mean, about 10 main actors, a few dozen extras, a full choral orchrestra, three magnificant sets... And less expensive than a "rave" party or some moderately popular international rock band.

This causes me some pondering. Popular culture is now more expensive than high art. Will pop eat itself? Quite possibly under those circumstances.

The other thought that ran through my head (a la Horkheimer/Adorno) was that only capitalism could debase the Enlightenment art of the opera to the musical (which I must admit does work when it's incongruous - "Dancer in the Dark" or parody - "Rocky Horror Picture Show").

Finally, I'm in New Zealand - country number six for the year!! Flew in via Emirates (haha, the day that Saddam was caught, how ironic), who did pretty well. Currently in Auckland, leave for Palmerston North tomorrow. About to head off to a warfside pub called "Lenin's Bar". If I can't find a decent full-bodied red there I'll eat my hat.

Speaking of Saddam, did anyone else notice how the news photos of "cheering Iraqis" vanished so very very quickly once it was discovered that they were cheering members of the Iraqi Communist Party?

Comments

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Saddam, did anyone else notice how the news photos of "cheering Iraqis" vanished so very very quickly once it was discovered that they were cheering members of the Iraqi Communist Party?

i totally saw them! it was crazy. they were on CNN.com and then it changed a few minutes later when i went back. friggin amazing. that kinda shit always scares me. i mention it in my post with the pic of saddam/george

oh and here are some feminist/marxist type authors (aside from emma goldman):

Angela Davis
Bell Hooks
Rosa Luxemburg
Zillah Eisenstein
Heidi Hartmann

those're cooooool.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Rosa Luxembourg is an interesting one. Her approach to "spontaneous revolution" contradicted sharply with Lenin's "organized party" approach. They had some huge debates over this. There's only one marxist group which I've ever encountered which seems more sympathetic to Luxembourg over Lenin on this issue and that's Worker's Liberty.... Heidi Hartmann I've encountered a couple of times in empirical research on the gender division in wealth and income - something which I think there needs to be a lot more emphasis on... Zillah's pretty good but she tends to engage in the grammatical confusion between patriachy as a system and patriachial culture (mind you, very few feminists are that careful on the distinction and it has caused, imho, considerable problems in gender politics)... bell hooks (note lower case) is someone who I've read occassionally, but not for a while... tres cool if I remember correctly. Angela Davis I don't know that well... will give her a look..


Other feminists of this ilk which I'm fond of includes Evelyn Reed, who does a magnificant job and maintaining a developmental approach to anthropology whilst the mainstream of the discipline has collapsed into extreme relativism. Lynne Segal is another favourite of mind, particularly as someone who actually understands psychoanalysis and has a more rational approach to the "sex industry" than the so-called "gender feminists". Simone de Beauvoir always has a special place in my brain, mainly because she was a much better philosopher than Jean-Paul Satre, but he gets all the glory...

My own "education" in feminist thought came primarily from a href="http://wwwsoc.murdoch.edu.au/wsp/staff/c-bal.htm">Cora Baldock and Zoe Sofoulis. The former taught me the economics of gender division and the latter the psychoanalysis...

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

cool stuff :)

yea gender is really interesting...i dunno what else to say aside from that right now. my hands are really numb and it's hard to type. heh.