by Neil Vodavzny

I see steam-punk and pulp-fantasy as alternative futures to the bland tech-visions of silicon-valley. There seems to be some inherent dehumanising effect to a cyber-verse. I was looking at 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) the other day, and realized all the space-ships were models and Bowman’s psychedelic trip through the Jupiter “stargate” was done by photographic effects. Checking with youtube confirmed it was an archaic slit-scan technique whereby a camera dollies towards a slit beyond which are slowly tracking matt jel-patterns. As the commentator says, it’s a spatial/temporal illusion that fits the journey.

This real, visceral quality is sorely lacking in CGI, which always looks like a very good fake. I’d go so far as to say the best sci-fi is retro-futurism , not where we seem headed for, but the future as seen through the eyes and techniques of the past. The awesomeness of 2001 is almost all visceral – the 18th century drawing room where Bowman’s pod alights, the geometrical floor seemingly suspended in space, the monolith you can almost touch.. You almost get religion.

The closest filmic approximation might be Watchmen, also a retro-futurism set in the cold war era, where Dr Manhattan becomes a simultaneous space-time entity, as apparently does Bowman (Starchild). Snyder’s film version’s OK, but doesn’t have the Moore/Gibbons comic’s fantastic sense of hyper-realism. It seems to me, old-fashioned craftwork always has the edge owing to the artist’s ability to physically render and manipulate materials – it’s real, basically. Comic books are perhaps best served by CGI if only because it literally transcribes what’s on the page, so for a fan it’s a fair deal. But the original creative impulse comes from the traditional craftwork – the new X-Men mega-buster Days Of Future Past is born of a mere several issue series by Claremont/Byrne that caught the imagination.

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Pretty odd title for any utopia, no doubt, seeing as utopias are seemingly perfect. Luckily this is no utopia, more of an alternate vision to the one dreamt-up by silicon-valley. There is a school of thought that the perfection sought by Apple’s philosophy is doomed to failure because not only does life’s interest lie in its imperfection, but its essence. Without the Dionysian urge, the creative spirit is dulled and the body languishes in ennui.

Such an ethos is often most apparent in pulp fantasy (of the 30s on). Men and women truly thrive in the maelstrom of epic struggle, roaming through quaint kingdoms and fantastic islands. Whilst reality can’t hope to compete with such exotic vistas, there is a sense in which the worlds of romantic dreamers have far more in common with history and prehistory than our own. The societies of heroic sci-fi/fantasy are real in the sense they pit people against people, ethos against ethos, in fully-imagined landscapes of group-oriented settings, whether it’s Heinlein’s hippy-ethos (Stranger in a Strange Land), le Guin’s pastoral Earthsea, Howard’s Hyboria.

Essentially, any society is group-oriented, neither wholly individual nor wholly egalitarian. This never is a conflict-free zone, since obviously that would be dullsville. More to the point, in order to have any group dynamic worthy of the name, instead of just individuals in a melange, societies have some autonomy. That’s obviously why heroic fantasies imagine city-states, unique tech-design, rural resources. Imaginary societies are very well put-together whereas real-life present-tense ones aren’t.

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Anti-Racism is not innocent, far from innocent, it is prejudiced, it is hurting and it is killing people. It is an impossible, pure Cartesian ideal, prohibiting necessary social perceptual grouping and accountable discrimination accordingly.

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by Neil Vodavzny

In these post-Enlightenment days the signs are ominous, regardless of facts A to Z. Nowhere is this more apparent than with theory-mongers of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I intend to bypass all that rigmarole and cut to the chase.

In order to make sense of the weather, we know it’s divided into 4 seasons. We also know there are 2 equinoxes (day and night of equal length with sun crossing the equator) and solstices (sun furthest from equator). We know there are longer cycles that precipitate glaciations.

These are vast and overarching astronomic cycles of largely unknown dimension. The evolution of Earth’s tilt in its spin takes 47,000 years; a “wobble” of equinox precession takes 23,000 years; cold summers beckon Frost Giants since winter snow doesn’t melt. Man’s efforts are puny compared to these age-old mythical-cycles. Not forgetting Maunder’s cycles of solar activity, idle sunspots and little ice-ages. That’s certainly a lot to play with, but no obviously rational way round the maze of information. It does seem possible a Maunder Minimum could act as a counter to AGW. I get the impression sceptics are clustering around this notion, clucking knowingly to themselves like novice initiates to the Masons.

I jest; the odd thing is each side thinks they’re right for the reason they’re so clever at sorting through all the noise to get to the “real” information that tells them sunspots, AGW, capitalist conspiracy ... are to blame.

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Reports of the grave escalation of violence in Kiev’s iconic Independence Square, the Maidan, have contained references to “hard-line” and “neo-nazi” nationalists manning the barricades against assault by the riot police, and acting as the military wing of the protest.  These guys are operating under an umbrella group named Pravy Sektor (Right Sector).  Nationalists in the West have become accustomed to viewing Putin’s Russia both as a bulwark against the expansionism of the European Union and a proponent of traditional Russian values against the bromides of Western liberty and decadence.  But Ukraine has its folk memories of the decades of Soviet rule ... of the Holodomir ... of the young men conscripted into the Red Army to be cannon fodder for the Wehrmacht ... of the arrests and deportations and disappearances into the gulag system ... of Chernobyl.  The nationalist movement wants neither a Ukrainian future in the arms of Russia nor the European Union, and it is supplying men to fight for that right now in the Maidan at the cost of their liberty and, for some, their lives.

In no particular order here are a few passages from press articles that have appeared over the last few weeks about these “hard-liners” and “neo-nazis”.  Their thinking seems clear and their instincts pretty good to me.

From The Guardian:

Pravy Sektor, a murky grouping of nationalist and far-right groups, has said it is co-ordinating the violence, and the coalition represents very different ideals from the initial protest goal of closer links with the European Union.

Andriy Tarasenko, one of Pravy Sektor’s co-ordinators, agreed to meet the Guardian in a cafe in central Kiev. Wearing a rollneck jumper and with a quiet voice, he seemed a far cry from the warriors on the street, but his message was clear.

“For us, Europe is not an issue, in fact joining with Europe would be the death of Ukraine. Europe means the death of the nation state and the death of Christianity. We want a Ukraine for Ukrainians, run by Ukrainians, and not serving the interests of others.”

Tarasenko said the goal of the group was a “national revolution” that would result in a “national democracy” with none of the trappings of the “totalitarian liberalism” that the EU represents for him.

...  it is clear that the popularity of Pravy Sektor is growing and that many of those lobbing molotov cocktails and preparing for all-out battle are influenced by their ideas.

Tarasenko said it was hard to say how many active members of Pravy Sektor there were, but noted that its page on the social network Vkontakte had more than 50,000 members. On the barricades, “hundreds are quickly turning into thousands”, he claimed.

... Pravy Sektor says that if Yanukovych does not resign, he should be forced out.

“We would give him and his family 24 hours to leave the country, or there would be a revolutionary tribunal,” said Tarasenko. Asked what he thought the most likely medium-term outcome of the clashes would be, he said: “Prolonged guerrilla warfare.”

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by Neil Vodavzny

New technologies will spawn new jobs in new industries that will be far more rewarding than those they displace

… says Gerald Warner (prev), and the question is what does he know, what secrets is he privy to? The answer is he’s saying what his ideology is telling him, namely that through investment in technique human life is made cosier. Thus does social capitalism trample everything underfoot in its pursuit of comfort. Unfortunately, the natural order is not built on comfort but on antagonism – predator-prey relationships, harvests, seasons. This is the world of action.

It’s worth pursuing this dichotomy. In comments to the recent piece on the new hostility evident in the Daily Telegraph editorial line, DanielS asks where are the true Right? (when you need them). Civilized living indeed is cosy, no more so than at royal courts. Prince Charles sometimes gets criticism for his eco-centric values for speaking from a life of privilege.  In that link to the Telegraph, they have in ‘parenthesis’ that William and Harry had returned from a wild boar hunt in Spain, implying some degree of contradiction.

Why? Because it’s not a comfortable or cosy thing to hunt down wild beasts (not quite Atten-bore). Prince Philip in a recent interview with Fiona Bruce, when asked why he was a conservationist but not a Green, referred to “fluffy bunny huggers”. He was clearly thinking game-keepers and grouse-shoots on Scottish heather. King Juan Carlos is in perpetual sin-mode for his hunting safaris – how sickening to slaughter such proud beasts (not the royals, the buffalo etc), que no?

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by Neil Vodavzny

We are told by no less an authority than Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph’s business editor, that:

New technologies will spawn new jobs in new industries that will be far more rewarding than those they displace

They’ve been telling us that since the Luddites were displaced from their spinning-jennies. By relating this mantra to the Mad Max franchise – and specifically Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – I will endeavour to show that the machine-age generates conspiracies by virtue of the fact that it displaces peoples into a no-man’s land. The habit of the mind is to plant seeds of doubt to occupy the negative space.

This has already partially been approached in “Mythical Action” (and sequels). That is to say, myths are predicated on action which is antagonistic, involving predator-prey relationships, harvests, seasons. A world without action (in that sense) has no myths and therefore in the mythical sense doesn’t exist.

However, myths belong in a fantasy-world, which is why I’ve argued that superheroes are more real than reality in that sense. They have the moral authority notoriously absent in conflicts of unfathomable motivations where the action we see are not morally comprehensible in the sense of good versus evil, fidel versus infidel. A lot of this is down to social capitalist ideology crawling like an omnivorous slug round the planet, leaving a trail of destruction wherever it roams. Meaning, the global money-machine that tramples traditions, and I suppose doesn’t generally benefit living systems, as opposed to monetary systems. How can the moneys invested in such a desolate cause be put to any moral use?

This paradox is indirectly the subject of the third instalment of Mad Max – second only to Planet of the Apes (1968) in the sci-fi allegory stakes - set in a de-fosilised steam-punk dystopia where machines have run silent since the last saurian carbon-reserve was consumed. Exactly what powers the renegades’ gambling-den of Barter-Town is succinctly put by Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity:
“You know how to shovel pigshit, don’t you?”

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