Author: joseph

Titled “sooperabundeburg.jpg,” Radiohead.com‘s splash page image on 1 May 2006 depicts a field of tightly-grouped houses, an image that appears on the front of a recently introduced tshirt called “New Surburbian.” The shirt’s back image more clearly shows the houses as a sort of gestalt-like image, an arrow pointing up and down simultaneously:

These houses are an emerging icon adorning the latest round of goods at W.A.S.T.E.

Returning to the splash page, today’s caption was: “Uchronia?” The word means, loosely, “alternate history.” A wikipedia entry on Uchronia covers briefly the word’s background and usage. The web site Uchronia: The Alternate History List is a useful starting point for those wishing to explore the topic further in books, essays, etc. A more famous alternate-history novel is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. … And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

1 Corinthians XIII (adapted): epigraph to George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

Chris Churmusi emailed Pulk-Pull* with the following information:

I noticed something interesting while re-reading The Iliad. In Robert Fagles translation,

So in the years to come Poseidon and god Apollo
would set all things to rights once more. (12.41-42)

In “2+2=5” the song opens with the lyrics:

Are you such a dreamer?
To put the world to rights?
I’ll stay home forever
Where two & two always
makes up five

The passage from the Iliad comes when the Acheans are beaten back to their ships, and the gods destroy the ditches and barriers that were built. And soon, nothing will remain or remind people what was there, just sand and water.

Samuel J.P. Shaw’s essay “Where Murakami Ends and Radiohead Begins: A Comparative Study” has been added to the site. It is available in the right-hand column.

Donwood’s comments about the image below, see message 232, politicize the blinded monster’s destruction, making it a stand-in for the U.S. military in Fallujah.

The monster’s whiteness and the white “incendiaries” recall accusations that during Operation Phantom Fury—an Operation later renamed Operation Al-Fajr, or “dawn” in Arabic—the U.S. military used white phosphorous bombs as incendiary devices. According to the U.S. Department of State, this accusation first surfaced in a 3 December 2004 opinion editorial by Sam Hamod in Al-Jazeerah which claimed the U.S. used “outlawed napalm, poison gas and phosphorous shells.” The same month, the U.S. Department of State, on its “Identifying Misinformation” web site, denied any U.S. use of napalm, continuing: “Phosphorous shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.” In November 2005 a documentary by Italian state television, Rai, revived claims that the U.S. military used white phosphorous bombs as incendiary devices on Fallujah. On 10 November, 2005, the U.S. Department of State updated its 9 December 2004 article with this bracketed note:

we have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, “The Fight for Fallujah,” in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, “as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ….” The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.

To its credit, the U.S. Department of State has not deleted the earlier statement, but the ambiguous passive voice shifts blame, “we were provided,” and the relative clause claim that phosphorous shells “produce smoke,” is true, but obscures the fact that, as a U.S. Department of Health and Human services web site says: “White phosphorus munitions are intended to burn or firebomb the opponents, in other words, to effectively produce widespread damage but not kill the enemy.”

At Slowly Downward Manufactory, Donwood offers his cryptic short short stories gratis and sells screen prints of his visual art. The caption for “Operation Phantom Fury“—a limited-edition pr selling for £200—reads:

What we have here is some kind of hateful monster orchestrating a rain of incendiaries upon a burning city. Operation Phantom Fury was the codename given to the US military assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja in November 2004. You can read as much or as little into this picture as you like.

Drawn with clean lines and colored a careful, surgical white with crossed-out eyes and sickly long fingers, the monster stands with a determined, stitched-closed frown over a city with Mediterranean-inspired architecture that burns in unmixed reds, yellows and oranges. Explaining the print’s title, Donwood gives us an interpretation. But the caption’s closing sentences undermines any interpretation: “You can read as much or as little into this picture as you like.”

A November 29 press conference with Donald Rumsfeld and General Pace answered questions regarding white phosphorus. Rumsfeld deferred to Pace on the matter, who answered:

White phosphorus is a legitimate tool of the military. It is used for two primary purposes. One is to mark a location for strike by an aircraft, for example. The other is to be used — because it does create white smoke — to be used as a screening agent so that you can move your forces without being seen by the enemy. It is not a chemical weapon, it is an incendiary (sic) [It is not an incendiary weapon as defined by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons], and it is well within the law of war to use those weapons as they are being used for marking and for screening.

Q: But you and I have both seen the results of “Willy Pete” in Vietnam. And when it’s on the skin, it doesn’t stop burning until it goes all the way through or runs out of oxygen. It’s a pretty tough weapon. Do you want to use it in urban areas such as Fallujah?

GEN. PACE: No armed force in the world goes to greater effort than your armed force to protect civilians and to be very precise in the way we apply our power. A bullet goes through skin even faster than white phosphorus does. So I would rather have the proper instrument applied at the proper time as precisely as possible to get the job done in a way that kills as many of the bad guys as possible and does as little collateral damage as possible. That is just the nature of warfare.

Dubuffet, Jean. Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writing. Trans. Carol Volk. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1986.

Professors are grown-up schoolchildren, schoolchildren who, once their school days were over, left school through one door only to return through another, like military men who reenlist. They are schoolchildren who, instead of aspiring to an adult life, that is to say a creative life, cling to this schoolchild’s stance, a stance which is passively receptive, like a sponge. The creative spirit is as opposed as possible to that of the professor. (13)

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