Watching this footage (which I've just come across) gives me goosebumps.
It comes from a pro-Sandinista solidarity concert held in Nicaragua in 1983, billed as a "concierto por la paz centroamericana." The soundtrack was released as "April in Managua." I used to own the cassette version, which I was given in Honduras sometime around 1988. I practically wore it out listening to it.
Wikipedia tells me that Alí Primera, the singer here, died a couple of years later, at the age of 42, which only adds further poignancy to this video.
“We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier: we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4).
I love Aki Kaurismaki, and here's the trailer for The Man without a Past:
Best line: An electrician helps M to "borrow" power from the closest pylon and connect it to his container. When M enquires about his fees, the guy answers "Turn me over if you find me face down in a ditch one day."
While I'm posting videos and thinking about Neruda...
Here are the Brazilian Girls (perhaps my new favorite band; incidentally, they're neither Brazilian nor, for the most part, girls) with a rendition of "Me gustas cuando callas":
Sadly the visuals for the above video are far from inspiring. It's worth seeing the song live. Here's a performance from a couple of years ago in New York:
One of the things I like here is that this rendition is something of a performative contradiction: though the poem speaks of absence and a woman's silence, in the person of singer Sabina Sciubba we see a woman very much present and the focus of attention (while the male members of the band hide behind their instruments) and it is her voice that sounds out, rather than being hushed.
Indeed, is she telling us to be quiet?
Meanwhile, Sciubba is renowned for hiding her eyes. So while making herself the center of visual attention, she also seems to want to resist the gaze. In her words, "I can do whatever the fuck I want because nobody is going to recognize me in the street."
A particularly fine video (amazingly, it seems it was shot with only one camera) of the Catalan tradition of building castells:
There's much to be said here about bodies, tall buildings, sovereignty, and community. Indeed, in some ways these castles are almost literal embodiments of the famous frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan. A multitude constitutes the temporary illusion of sovereignty.
So what's fascinating is the discipline and coordination invested in the construction of these human towers. But also their inevitable precariousness.
Contemporary advertising is more about branding than anything else: it aims, as the etymology of the term "branding" suggests, to imprint the body rather than to convince the mind.
Take the current advert for John Lewis, which has quickly become an Internet sensation for the ways in which it so successfully tugs at the heartstrings, leaving its mark directly on the body.
The ad is particularly targeted at women. Heidi Scrimgeour's account, in "Why We Love the John Lewis Ad" on Mumsnet, records (as she herself soon admits) what is a typical viewer response:
[I] watched, riveted, until a sob took me by such surprise that it turned into an embarrassed laugh, and I sat stunned and snotty on the sofa, crying in an empty house over an ad for a store I can't even shop in without boarding a plane and flying back to England. [. . . I soon] realised I was the cliche; one of hundreds of thousands of middle England's mummies who had watched the ad repeatedly and cried into their John Lewis scatter cushions.
More cynically (however much we're told that "cynicism must be set aside", which is itself surely the apogee of cynicism), in the inevitable "Making Of" video, a John Lewis marketing manager states that the "campaign is really about delivering emotion for the brand."
This is what advertising does today: it delivers emotion for brands. There's probably no better instance of posthegemony.
And of course, the soft-focus affect that envelops the life portrayed in the 90-second slot, in which we see a woman's life from infancy to old age, has little if anything to do with the brand's famous tagline, Never Knowingly Undersold".
That, too, is now merely a matter of affect; or rather, it has been so infused with affect that it has become what Ernesto Laclau would call a purely empty signifier.
The same goes, of course, for the rather misogynist lyrics to the accompanying Billy Joel song, which are at best merely an ironic counterpoint safely (and again, cynically, "we know, but...") ignored by the viewer.
Smug liberality is one of Canada's less endearing traits. Some (too much) of that was on display yesterday at an event I attended that went under the title of a "Foreign Policy Camp" organized by something called Canada's World. The basic impulse was to ask how Canada could lead the world, as it was apparently born to do, by spreading its fine liberal values to the less fortunate mass of humanity who sadly live elsewhere on the globe.
I participated in person (with a call for Open Borders that went down surprisingly well), but some of the discussion can be found on twitter. In the fray, I seem to have started a bit of an argument with one of Canada's best and brightest after she was quoted as saying that the influence of "diaspora communities" made the country "vulnerable". Oh well.
(And yes, those who are so minded can follow me on Twitter here.)
I also, incidentally, got to meet up with my old buddy and sparring partner Carlo Dade, who mentioned what to me is the astonishing fact that immigration has never yet been on the agenda of the Summit of the Americas.
Anyhow, I happily admit to having an ambivalent relationship to Canada. But increasingly I come to discover that such ambivalence is itself rather Canadian... and in so far as it can be considered a potential antidote to the temptation to smugness, it is one of the country's virtues.
Perhaps the same fundamental insecurity drives the smugness, too. But far better for it to be articulated as openness to others, and a willingness not to tout "Canadian values" but to rethink them. For indeed, this country is far more hospitable to others than many. And, for instance, fear-mongering against immigrants has yet to make great inroads here, unlike (say) in the UK or the US.
But all this is prelude to the following video, which I was indirectly recommended by a guy, Gord McIntyre, whom I first met twenty years ago, at a very difficult moment, in Guatemala, when we were both attached to a human rights NGO in Santa Cruz de Quiché. (It was that experience that first really made me doubt the whole discourse of human rights, by the way.)
Recently Gord got back in touch, and it turns out he now lives in Winnipeg. He suggested I might like one of that city's local bands, the Weakerthans, and I find that they wrote this marvellous song that encapsulates something of Canada's virtuous ambivalence and self-doubt. Long may it continue thus. And long may Canada continue "weaker than" it would rather be.
To put this another way: let us all hate Canada in exactly the same way as the Weakerthans hate Winnipeg.