Rejects?

Cinematic Mis-mnemonics

I would like to bring myself back in touch with my culture. But I have restricted means to do so. I thought America was the land where anything can happen. I thought  cyberspace could produce a surrogate culture for me. I guess I will have to make do with whatever I can find – even if it is reductive and offensive to me. And kind of funny at the same time.  Cinematically manufactured mythologies.

Locating the feeling visually, through cinematic and televisual detours:

The Prelude

Greek fires kill 60 but spare ancient Olympia

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2543062320070826

By Vassilis Triandafyllou

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (Reuters) – Firefighters saved the temples and stadiums of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, from forest fires which razed nearby villages and took the death toll from Greece’s three-day inferno to 60.

Dozens of blazes, from northern Greece to the tip of the Peloponnese peninsula in the south, have blackened hillsides, destroyed forests and raced through towns and villages, causing unprecedented destruction.

Hundreds of houses have been burned and thousands of people have fled the fires, seeking temporary refuge in schools, hotels and regional health centers.

On Sunday the government offered rewards of up to a million euros ($1.36 million) for help in tracking down arsonists who it suggests have played a major role in Greece’s worst forest fires in decades.

Thick black smoke billowed over the well-preserved ruins of Olympia, on the Peloponnese. The blaze crept up a hillside, engulfing surrounding pine and cypress woods.

“With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought ‘trench battles’ to rescue these sensitive and important sites,” Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters.

Fire scorched the yard of the museum at Olympia, housing famous classical sculptures such as Praxiteles’ Hermes, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters beat it back.

Some 60 firefighters and six trucks remained at the site to battle any flare-up, the fire brigade said.

Ancient Olympia, which hosted the Olympics for centuries from 776 BC, holds an Olympic flame ceremony every two years and is among the most popular tourist sites in the country.

“Here it is, the contrast: ancient Greece gave the world civilization and modern Greece gives it destruction,” a resident of ancient Olympia told Alter TV station.

Towering walls of flame have cut a swathe of destruction through the southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia near the capital and swept across other regions, prompting Greece to declare a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday.

“The destruction is of biblical proportions,” Nicholas Orphanos, a volunteer firefighter in the Peloponnese, told reporters. “There are villages we want to go to and we cannot because the roads are blocked. In 30 years, I have never seen such destruction.”

The fires have covered Athens in thick white ash that swirled round the temples on the Acropolis, and the smell of smoke permeated the city.

REWARD OFFERED

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who has called a snap parliamentary election on September 16, has suggested arsonists are behind the fires, and the government has offered a reward for information leading to their capture.

“The reward is set between 100,000 and 1 million euros for every (act of) arson, depending on whether death or serious injury occurred and the size of the damage,” the Public Order Ministry said in a statement.

Many local mayors have accused rogue land developers of setting fires to make way for new construction on virgin forest and farm land. So far, police have arrested two elderly people and two boys on suspicion of starting fires deliberately.

The first fires broke out on Friday and others erupted in scores of places around the country. The death toll rose to 60 and health officials said it could increase as many villages remain cut off.

“We will all burn tonight,” a resident of Matesi village told Mega television on Sunday. “Where will we go, we are trapped everywhere. Are we all going to burn like mice?”

The overstretched fire brigade threw reinforcements from Greece’s EU partners into action to fight blazes stretching over 160 km (100 miles) across the Peloponnese, the island of Evia and northern and central Greece.

Two French and one Italian firefighting plane dropped water on burning hillsides and 60 firefighters from Cyprus joined the fray. More help was expected from at least 11 countries.

Villagers used garden hoses and buckets in futile efforts to save their homes. Others jeered politicians, including Culture Minister George Voulgarakis who visited ancient Olympia to assess the damage.

The government has been criticized for reacting too slowly to forest fires that killed 10 people earlier this summer and the blazes are sure to become a central election campaign issue.

Resting on Laurels

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

The Affect as Part of the Experience Economy

How does the affect find its way through the logic of the general economy? One example of the affect being used as a “brand” or a marketing tool is the emphasis on the consumer’s product experience. Experience commodified; experience as capital.

Product researchers such as industrial designers associate product experience with affective experience, and often use these terms synonymously.

Cultural, social, and personal experiences interfere with, affect, stimulate and often guide a consumer’s product experience. Of course, this depends on the kind of product as well.

In reading marketing research surveys and analyses, I noticed that the affect has become an emblem of consumption. The affect is now used for branding consumer experiences, and thus assumes a material form – in more ways than one.

No, this is not enough, yet too much. Let’s just call it affect for now.

Nontruths

Myth as a nontruth (but not untruth) “still protects the bygone which will have no effect, at least for those (all of us) who, being alive, seem to recognize only the active power of the present” (Blanchot).

[1] Turks fire shots at British soldiers – no injuries

[2] Cypriot police are closing in on killers of Solomou and Isaac

[3] Rauf Denktash reportedly was present at Cyprus’ latest violent incident

[4] Turkish doctors are cooperating with torturers, according to British newspaper “The Observer”

[5] Arrest warrants issued against Turks

[6] Warrants of arrest issued for the murder of Solomos Solomou

[7] State Department protests shooting against British soldiers by Turkish troops

[8] International warrants for the arrest of six suspects in the killing of Greek-Cypriot Tasos Isaac were issued by the Greek-Cypriot police

[9] Arrest warrants issued for murder of Tassos Isaac

Athens, Greece (2009). Wall outside the Greek parliament. Riot police officer standing next to the wall. The slogan on the wall was written by anarchists protesters that joined hundreds of migrants to demonstrate against police violence and demand more liberal immigration laws.

British popgroup Pet Shop Boys used QR-code for the artwork of their download-only single Integral in 2007. The videoclip for the song also features QR-code. When the codes are scanned correctly, users are directed to petshopboys.co.uk, and web pages about the British national identity card plans, respectively. ***

Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.  (Wiki)

Catalysts

Narrativizing disasters = fictionalizing history = historicizing fiction.

Any account of the disaster attempts to impose coherence and mastery over random or unpredictable “events”.  Myths provide us with ready-made adaptable narratives that resonate within culture at large, and can therefore be applied to any disaster. Myths attempt to bring the disaster – an intangible presence/ absence that escapes cultural logic - inside the culture so as to render it comprehensible and, ultimately, [retrospectively] predictable. As Steven Biel asserts, myths are welcomed by culture because they locate “a disturbing event within routine structures of understanding.”

Although not immediately obvious, the typical structure of myths is based on – and forged through – catalysts. Any myth can be traced back to a  catalyst(s) that not only stimulates the (re)creation/ (re)cycling of the myth itself, but also provides myth-makers with a tangible starting point on which they can elaborate their myth.

An iceberg. A bomb. A plane. A boy.

With this in mind, I turn myself to the identifiable catalyst (or even scapegoat) that is thought to have triggered the Greek Riots: Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

15 year old Alexandros is dead. The only thing certain about his dead is that he is dead.

Alexandros was shot by a policeman.

Alexandros was accidentally killed.

Alexandros provoked his death.

Alexandros is a political scapegoat.

Alexandros’ murderer is a social scapegoat.

Alexandros ……………………………….

This is where most related narratives begin.

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”  Paul Auster