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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Monthly Archives: December 2013

Annual Folly

December 31, 2013

Her long dark hair splayed upwards and outwards. Just the hair, and it could be an advert. Her face turning away, scrunched up in pain. Not hairspray but pepper spray, aimed at the woman in a red dress protesting against the closure of a public park in the centre of Istanbul. The man with the king size aerosol, a Turkish police officer dressed head to toe in protective gear, shoots his stuff right at her. He has never been more intent; he will never look less intelligent.

In China a crowd with arms raised to acclaim the spectacular high tide on the Qinglang River (an annual event). Superstitious? In each and every instance their hands are joined above their heads, the better to hold camera phones. The all-important ritual of I-Was-There and This-Is-Me: characteristic customs of our age.

Flights of Fancy

December 31, 2013

Supposing dependence on the financial economy is also freedom from the coercive momentum of capitalist production; and supposing there is an affinity between the distinctive patterns of London’s non-productive City-type activity and contemporary cultural activity, such that the position of the subject in contemporary London culture reproduces the subject position found in the financial economy, then Singing The News is an attempt to exploit the peculiarity of this position. As the financial economy plays on the ‘real economy’ (it is both sequel and prequel), so Singing The News is a fanciful remake of ‘reality’ as reported in primary news sources.

With two provisos:

1) Attention to form is the means of reconnecting flights of fancy with the cultural corollary of abstract labour, i.e. that aspect of labour, the concrete abstraction only fully realised in capitalist production, which is truly universal, common to all. Thus form – working on a piece of writing in order to formulate it – is what makes it and the experience rendered in it, common to all (even if the further realisation of this property requires additional work on the part of readers). This in marked contrast to the formlessness characteristic of the digital conversation between ‘journalists’ and ‘the people formerly known as readers’. This kind of conversation amounts to mimicry of the financial economy; instead of answering back.

2) Whereas the spontaneously fanciful character of the financial economy tends to negate the human –  this negation is widely experienced as an ‘unbearable lightness of being’, in Singing The News similarly fanciful characteristics are semi-consciously (as conscious as I can make it!) induced with the aim of adding weight to our common humanity. read more

Failing Better?

December 31, 2013

Justin Welby, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, quizzed on BBC Radio 4 Today on falling church attendances and the future of the Church of England.
Thinner voice than his predecessor, Rowan Williams (ret’d), he of the fruity baritone. Photos ditto. Welby seems lightweight by comparison: small chin, the bishop’s mitre looks too big on him; more Rowan Atkinson than Rowan Williams.

No mistaking the calling in his voice, however. Thinner; but maybe more effective? Likewise his business oriented vernacular is possibly more pertinent: the ‘what we do’, and having to be ‘very intentional and very flexible’.

Welby’s voice cracked at a key moment during the interview: ‘what we do is the worship of God and to lead people to faith in Jesus Christ’, where ‘Jesus Christ’ showed momentary hesitation and/or a not-quite accent; either a way a hop, a skip and fault in the Archbishop’s enunciation.

Aha! We all heard the fault in your faith. So you can’t quite believe in it yourself. Gotcha!

But perhaps that’s what the people want: the sound of faith faltering and then the recovery of belief.

Obama Care

December 31, 2013

Henry Fonda with close cropped hair and purple lips.
There is an Open Face in the Oval Office.
The rate of incoming is daunting. So many client-citizens here to see the patron-president.
All eyes on the prize…….real time, face-to-face facetime with the president himself.
Buoyed by the Office and its extensive trimmings, he manages to stay Open. Ready for visitors and ready to be seen receiving visitors at the Resolution Desk.
But it’s hard to believe that his second term only Opened earlier this year. Aside from numerous theatrical performances (the theatre of National Security, the theatre of Poor America, the theatre of International Delegations), he is already starting to seem like a spent force.
And who will care for Obama, open face and all, if he can’t get any Closure?

High Tide

December 30, 2013

A 30-something woman has rolled up her jogging bottoms in order to wade through flood water and escape her ruined home in Yalding, Kent.
Top half: careworn face focused solely on getting out of here. Thick fleece and an anorak over it. Make-up? Don’t be silly! Clutching a plastic bag (passport or hubby’s Christmas present?) with blotched hands (maybe there’s something toxic in the water).
Knee high: staring out from underneath the rolled up joggings, her bare legs are fashionably tanned; slim, trim and ready for the beach. This is Home Counties womanhood, more used to holidays abroad, commuting through the Garden of England and sometimes the beauty parlour.
Meanwhile Prime Minister David Cameron, in action man garb of pullover and wind cheater, stands like King Canute at the village Post Office facing a rising tide of residents’ complaints.

What Is Singing The News?

December 30, 2013

Poem. Prayer. Riff. Second take. Re-make.

Unstinting criticism and infinite tenderness.

Whereas the inverted pyramid (standard format of 20th century American-led journalism) begins with the end and is structured as if to confirm that the result was always predetermined, i.e. each prior segment of the story is already locked in to the final outcome, i.e. cause and effect are hermetically sealed;

Whereas 1960s New Journalism changed the running order of journalism and its modus operandi (from event analysis to personal narrative) but maintained the assumption that the characters caught up in the narrative were always going to do what they eventually did;

In contrast to each of the above, Singing The News tries both to capture the essence of the eventual outcome and release the possibility of different eventualities. This on the basis that:

What’s done was not done until someone went ahead and did it. And even after having done it, that personmight still have behaved differently. 

Postings

December 30, 2013

Michael Schumacher: the postman sometimes rings thrice.

1) Seven times F1 motor racing world champion, he retired in 2006.

2) Seriously injured (neck and spine) in a motorbike accident in Spain, 2009.

3) Currently comatose and ‘fighting for his life’ after a skiing accident in the French Alps.

You and I

December 23, 2013

It’s often early morning when we meet, you and I. Before anyone else – or even the possibility of anyone else – is there to see us. Though there’s nothing much for anyone to see. Only that in one glance of shared recognition, we see each other entirely. You and I. I and You. Workers on their way to work; father, mother, son, daughter – it doesn’t matter what homes we have come from or where we are going.

In a nondescript place owned by neither of us and common to both, we look each other in the eye, hold it for a moment (that look: comprehending, comprehensive). Then move on, never to meet again.

This journalism – if that’s what it is – aims to perform that look. The look between strangers who are not estranged. It is not a look of innocence or naivety; neither is it dismissive or destructive.

I want to hold you in my eyes, to see you for who you are. It’s only fair, then, that I should make myself open to the same kind of scrutiny – unstinting but also sympathetic.

Not Playing

December 22, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former oil tycoon pardoned by Russian president Vladimir Putin, perhaps with the Sochi Games in mind, was released from jail having served 10 years for ‘tax evasion and fraud’, and interviewed in Berlin by Christiane Amanpour for CNN.

Half a century later and she still looks like Jackie K. Same length hair (no flick-ups, they’re too Mad Men nowadays). Lips thickly drawn, firmly penciled eyebrows and heavily painted nails – especially nails because there are plenty of florid hand movements. And she isn’t wearing an Alice band but she could because it would go well with her tailoring (royal blue).

After JFK was shot dead, the New York Times reporter wrote that Mrs Kennedy’s ‘stockings were saturated with her husband’s blood.’ Now Amanpour wants Khodorkovsky to spill.

What was it like in that jail? And weren’t you attacked, stabbed? You missed seeing your family grow up…..

As she is animated, Khodorkovsky is subdued. So much for the coarsening effect of prison: he is fine; he has finesse. Frameless glasses and close-cropped hair combining Prison House and Designer. His words are finely chosen; his lips more finely drawn than hers.

Fifty to a hundred inmates in a barrack-like room: he merely says there is nothing good to say.

Food? Comes the answer: ‘bread’. The translator gives us to understand this was his one and only word on the subject.

The stabbing? He went for my eye but the blow glanced onto my nose; and the prison dentist was also a plastic surgeon, so now there’s not even a trace of it.

No trace of Khodorkovsky playing the scene for personal gain. But perhaps this is his play – the persuasive power of underwhelming. Except he is surely not acting when Amanpour asks about his family, and his performance is just the same. read more

The ‘I’s Have It

December 21, 2013

Her upper lip plumped up. Permanently puckering. Ever-ready for sex or stimulated by food or bruised, or – most likely – fluffed and buffed by the collagen of publicity.

Nigella Lawson: buffeted by the break-up of her marriage to Charles Saatchi; embarrassed by salacious evidence given during the trial of the Grillo sisters (former personal assistants whose successful defence against fraud charges rested on discrediting Nigella as a prosecution witness).

Not Grotto or anything like it, but the Grillos are dunnos when it comes to inflating themselves; whereas Nigella must always have known (with a name like ‘Nigella’, perhaps she always had to). In the tilt of her chin and the set of her mouth as she is seen going into court, the domestic goddess keeps faith with self-promotion (requiring tireless dedication to the sacred cause).

Motto: manifesto ergo sum; manifesto ergo ego.

Meanwhile on the BBC Radio Four Today programme, with pencil-thin lips (drawn on like a second moustache in the midst of his clerical beard) Anjem Choudary will not condemn the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, butchered on a London street in May. Choudary will not enter into the personal domain where normal persons are seen to have acceptable feelings, because he is there to promote the Not-I, the annihilation of self. How I feel is not the most important thing, he insists. Compared to Islam, he seems to be saying, we are nothing. And for saying this, he is pleased to receive plenty of attention.

Manifesto ergo non sum; manifesto ergo non ego.

The negatives cancel each other out. Nigella and Anjem are mirror images of each other: posing and deposing the supremacy of self; in their opposite ways, both equally selfish.

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