Lalgambook (or, this is what occupation looks like)

Visit my JustFreeWater site and find out how Coca-Cola occupies Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) as a brand name for their bottled water racket, and how Djadjawurrung resource and land theft continues today. There is not a single person of the Loddon tribe left to ask permission if we could camp at Lalgambook, let alone participate in the 'tanderrum', or freedom of the bush:

A diplomatic rite symbolising the landholder's hospitality, in which strangers were allowed temporary access to clan resources after a ritual exchange of gifts. Ian D Clark, 2003, p.117

Port Fairy

Permaplay 1

I'm taking a short break, but before I do I'll leave you with this summer holiday flick.

This video has been removed at the request of The Fugs, whose song "The Ten Commandments" was used as the sound track. See comments below. As I no longer have the film on my laptop and therefore cannot edit the sound out I have taken the whole thing down. This film was only to appear as a piece of home-brewed digital theatre for free public enjoyment.

Today's post, All right's relinquished (or, 'Copyright Nothing' after The Fugs) (19/1/09), will examine copyright and intellectual (private) property relations within a capitalist system of culture.

A de-civilising process

At this point, I can turn to Norbert Elias' argument about the civilizing process in Europe...essentially it came down to the attempt, largely on the part of middle class religious authorities, to improve the manners of those below: most of all by eliminating all traces of the carnivalesque from popular life. David Graeber, Possibilities, p31-32.

Earlier in his book David Graeber writes how gradually, from the twelfth century onwards, the social authorities imbibed a culture of shame and embarrassment for all things bodily – excrement, sex, etc.; things of common substance and their joking relations – think Rabelais’s dirty humour.

Property relations, not sacredness, was the rationale behind the church's enforcement of celibacy onto its priests. The eldest sons of priests were too often claiming church property as their inherited own, and the papacy cracked down on the loss of church property. If avoidance relations are so linked to property, as Graeber suggests, then it is little wonder that the ensuing culture of sex-secrecy – developed by so many priests struggling with celibacy, culminating in paedophilia and other abuses of power – has in turn led to the selling off of acquired properties to fund the thousands of law suites lodged by victims of their cause. It’s an interesting, sad and ironic several hundred-year cycle of avoidance, only checked due to recent demands of accountability on religious institutions by secular authority.

Every year in Daylesford there is a New Year’s Eve parade where various community groups and artists create themed floats or parade various skills, activities and crafts on foot. One year cartoonist, Michael Leunig, with some friends made a float using two inflatable sex dolls. It was called something like 'the garden of love'. The local authorities didn't share the humour and arrested them for public indecency, including the dolls. At the courthouse, while the trial was being heard, the male doll was brought into proceedings by a local cop who’d put a paper bag over his penis. A large group of locals, including kids, turned up to express their support for Leunig's float. I believe there was not a single local person against it. 

Last year, my own somewhat less contentious parade concept was in aid of my water activism; also using joking relations (based upon the behavioural relations between chance and cross-dressing). The purpose of this costume, after the joke for joke's sake, was to draw attention to a local thing of common substance – water, and its privatisation by Coca-Cola Amatil and Cadbury Schweppes for global profiteering. Meg handed out stickers that directed people to the justfreewater myspace page and over the next several days I watched my stats counter on the site grow measuredly. 

Photo: Peter O'Mara (as you can see he won't make Best Australian Photography, 2008, but he is included in this year's Best Australian Poems, UQP).

Zeph's mum, who was at the parade earlier on to drop Zeph off, made the joking remark, “no wonder we didn’t make it”, when she saw what I was wearing. Meg later jokingly said to me, “that’s why you're with me now”. Meg was dressed deliciously, as you’ll no doubt agree.

Photo: Peter O'Mara 

My ex-partner was raised in a Christian household. Her parents were missionaries, her dad become a scholar and translator, responsible for overseeing versions of the Bible into Chinese and other Asian languages. 

Sadly, his daughter and I now only have a relationship of avoidance based upon property rights, which regrettably over-rides a relation of common substance – our child. And it is tied up with the pressing issue of whether or not to sell the quarter acre, that constitutes the physical entity that partly feeds us and this blog: The Garden of Self Defence. 

Most people, most likely, relate with all three of the modes that Graeber and anthropologists before him have outlined: with avoidance, with jokes and with common substance. However, it remains to be seen whether the dominant culture, based on private property, waste and wealth generation – abstractions of avoidance in terms of the landbase that supports us – can ever close the broken cycle generated by capitalism's corollaries, and become a society more dominantly based on common substance again: children raised by whole communities; food not transported but grown within walking distance; natural resources not transported away from food and water bowls – in essence a permanent culture, based less on manners, restriction, hierarchy and capital growth, and more on an understanding of our place within a local ecology – where we consciously particpate in securing a sustainable and permanent future for those who come after us. A gift that has been provided by those who have come before.

Lousy at small talk

I'm now ready for the social season.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd have a t-shirt to give away. But I didn't have a spare one to print on. Instead, here's an old one of mine that fits a small person. Both are printed on American Apparel tops we found at the local op-shop. The first commenteer will have it posted to them on Monday.

Worship nothing not even Nietzsche! Now there's some small talk for the Christmas period.

Immutable fashion – notes on small talk

I have an idea for a t-shirt that says: 'Lousy at small talk', something I can wear to parties. I'll probably make one in the next few weeks, perhaps two, one for you dear reader, if you're inclined. 

Is small talk a thing of common substance or of avoidance?

1. Small talk as common substance: To speak small talk with others is to build relations based on a mutual lightness of spirit. Although I'm empathetic to this notion in terms of 'social warming', small talk functions best as an ancillary to something else, such as dancing or disruption: lobbing a boot at a psychopathic politician and calling him a dog after he has fucked your country.

The Dancers Inherit the party

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

            sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

2. Small talk as avoidance. The natural territory of small talk resides within the localities inhabited by the bourgeoise and petit bourgeoise. It is here that small talk is rarely allowed to become 'big'. It can be cut off with eye rolling, polite refrain or bodily squeamishness that breaks the social engagement. Small talk as a natural language modality of the middle classes is predicated on older religious boundaries of shame and embarrassment developed since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is when art, incidentally, turned from a practice of everyday social activity, practiced by numerous, to one where the artist became sublime and individualistic – the development of the capitalist construct of the genius; worthy of marketing and cultural exploitation. The cult of the nice is society's modern, secular equivalent – here the genius has a happy disposition (see the likes of John Cage), or for an alternative, winter baby's view:

On middle class poverty 

The poet's teeth are rotten.

The poet doesn't drive.

The poet has an empire in the mind.

The poet writes the god.

The poet is assassinated.

The poet's unAustralian.

Patrick Jones (listen to this poem here)

NB. I'm writing this post after coming home from a party where I engaged in mid-sized talk and ate beautiful food and drank local plonk, all for which I'm passingly grateful. 

Cuba's eggs

Cuba, one of our chooks, went broody this week. There are two things you can do for a broody hen. Either give her some fertilised eggs to incubate over 21 days, or place her in a cage in full sunlight with plenty of air, clean water and food.

Cities

After I posted the most recent WorkmanJones film, Tag, a friend of mine, Hamish Morgan, challenged me on why we chose to use the city as a site for our work. There are so many ways to think about and address this question. I initially gave some reasons in response, but having thought more about it lately, about impermanent culture (impermaculture), I thought I'd share some of this thinking.

Firstly, cities exist. Modern cities are toxicities, they rely on resources from elsewhere, they waste waste, they can (probably) never be sustainable, more people live in them than in rural areas (a recent global phenomenon), and cities are places of social invention and mutation. For all these reasons, critiquing, participating in and understanding the city is to understand the dominant psyche of modern humans and why centralised capitalism is killing us, and many other species, very rapidly and very cruelly.

Hamish has spent a few years living with an aboriginal community in remote WA, and I have spent the majority of my life living in occupied regional areas of Australia, namely the Wingecarribee district, Wagga Wagga and Djadjawurrung country for the past 13 years. Both Hamish and I have been educated in urban universities, where few questions are ever asked concerning urban impermaculture.

Recently, I voluntarily endured a paper given by a PhD candidate that cross-pollinated Situationist thought with her own desire to continue shopping. It was a seemingly clever paper using fashionable dérive poetics with individualist urbane desire. Michael Farrell brilliantly called it 'romantic shopping'. It simply repulsed me. She was a post-graduate student in sustainability and architecture. 

Her intellectual abstractions represented her mediated blindness. She told us that she drove her car into the city to carry out her shopping 'experiments', and that she had to consume things in order for her experiment to work. When I challenged her, pretty clumsily regrettably, on her work as capitalist embellishing, she exclaimed, "But what other system have we got?"

What was so offensive about this paper was that an architect working in the area of sustainability was not looking at urban permaculture in Havana as a model or focus point for her research, or any other transitional city. Havana is a living example that excitingly challenges my Jensenian belief that cities can never be sustainable (based on a reliance upon the importation of resources). Instead it was her own desire and its place in the world that was being indulgently understood. The other area this paper failed to investigate, regarding the question of future sustainability and urban psychogeography, was indigenous intelligence.

Our urban film, Tag, was never meant as a critique of the city, rather an example of using an impermacultural domain as a site for post-consumer play. A critique of the city occurs in other parts of my practice, as it does here. It was also made to demonstrate the body as common substance, devoid of shame and embarrassment, and directly influenced by the abstract and toxic environment in which we were courting chance behaviours. 

Photo: Kathryn McCool

The fox flies the Zephyr

Property relations

Photo: Kathryn McCool

If property is so closely related to avoidance, and if these two principals of identification and exclusion really are so consistently at play (and I think they are), then is it really so daring to suggest that the person, in the domain of avoidance, is constructed out of property? David Graeber, Possibilities, p22.

An angry post cheered up by a harvest of garlic, freshly washed

The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free...they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living... Gertrude Stein, 1943

The daughter of the businessman, the income to write, the ordinary business of privilege; ever expanding post-war growth, ever expanding freedoms: cars, white-goods, confectionary, packaging, holidays; ever expanding art and art memorials; ever-expanding construction of culture well beyond the capacity of the landbase. Impermanent toxiculture; the mass market, the small secondary markets of the bourgeoisie: the snobs, the aspirants, the collectors, the publishers, the biography factory; ever-expanding obsessions of the civilised; utterly pre-tending to life.

"The world is round", Stein tells us, "and you can go on it round and round", she adds, as she did, as we do now, up and up, down and down, around and around, adding and expanding, unchecked and ill-managed, unbridled freedom, unlimited population, unleashed psychosis.

We have had 65 years of run-away capitalism, and here awaits us the blurred edge of run-away climate change: gas chambers lit for a new era holocaust by industry's furnaces and our desires.

Ashes and boxes (some notes on death)

I'm thinking of Alice B Toklas in her seventies, and similarly an old friend, Val Herbst, trudging damply around her dry garden, fat fag smoking from her lips, high cloud drizzle falling on dying perennials, drought around, drinking coffee through unwashed glass alive with unnameable film, Alice, tasting her oldness in everything, listening to her thongs slapping the peddles of the baby harpsichord, punching out Scarlatti, lionising him while attacking the polite memorials, her mind that brave, her bed dank, a cat's bed under the Murrumbeena bowls and foxing shelves of printed thought. A lifetime corroding in full view of my early twenties, drawing her pictures; her decomposition a gift reversed.

Instead we burn our dead or box them tight from soil in coffins – the pollutions of avoidance. Val insisted on the right to be buried in her half dead garden and years later the same spirit home-birthed Zeph; the stuff of common substance becomes an argument with the fearful. 

The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free...they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living... Gertrude Stein, 1943

Avoidance relations (a mesostic)

          

             unfathomed fear is criPpling negation;

                           an immutable Agent for the simplistic and cruel.

 if your heart is sweet-juiced, Thirsty and open,

          your fear's reimburse 'a Human kind' (PO) –

                                 unlike the cOld and made-up minds that poison; 

                             the stupid are So dangerous, so blinkered and vain.

Marcel Duchamp's early success as a pedlar of art, namely Brancusi's sculpture, afforded him about thirty years of independent income, which in turn provided him the time to pursue his thought and art. Gertrude Stein's independent income was afforded to her by her father's success as an industrialist. Along with her own dedicated temerity (and Alice) this income provided her the opportunity to pursue forty years of thought and writing.

For years I have tried to foster a Duchamp-like canniness, or pathetically longed for a Stein-like stipend, but mostly I've made work on the hop, so to speak, my method is based on 'stealing time'. And when circumstances amalgamate so as not even theft is possible I tend to overheat, breathe far too thinly, self-loathe and spiral downwards, sometimes taking loved ones with me. 

The Garden of Self Defence – an experiment based on self-sufficiency – is my most ambitious attempt to live, not of independent income but independent of income, not outside of an ecology, but ecologically co-dependent. I've come to realise that 100% self-sufficiency is hard-core living, and I'm not sure I'm capable of it. However, I think 70-80% food, water and energy self-generation is possible, and I'm determined to find out whether this will provide a post-industrial income. 

Maintaining this life (a 'lifestyle' is a mediated perversion of capitalism), using permaculture and referring to indigenous intelligence, may result in permapoesis – a term I've developed to define a practice of sustainable meaning-making – but I'm not sure, so the GOSD remains an experiment of life founded on giving time, rather than stealing it.