So happy friend/audio Jedi master Felix Petrescu (from famous electronica unboxed duo Makunouchi Bento) made me aware that this fabulous podcast by the likes of NZ The Flight of Conchords exists online for free (not for long though if I get it right). Jemaine Clement was the Vladislav to Taika Waititi’s Viago in that amazing vampire movie that all of you must have seen. This podcast made in 2016 is an incredibly funny silly madcap no-limits comedy piece. It is incredibly produced, sound designed, and written. It comes closest to the DE Hörspiel format I am familiar with and I rarely find it in French or EN. That said, please listen to The Mysterious Secrets of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium with an open ear and an open heart. It is definitely my favorite and one of the best EN podcasts I have ever had the pleasure to listen to.
Why? Primarily because it is utterly delightful and full of botanical and natural history nonsense, yet a contemporary bastard of those very real colonial histories – when the search for the so-called ‘green capital’ by botanists and botanical hunters established the fortunes of Britain and ensured that the first pots made it to wet humid interiors of the Imperial Botanical Gardens of Kew. As Londa Schiebinger showed a while ago in the Carribean slave women brewed the ‘peacock flower’ into an abortifacient to ensure that no future children were born into slavery and exploitation. Such local herbal ethnobotanical lore was actively suppressed when the plants themselves got collected and traveled along the Middle Passage into Europe’s nurseries and botanical gardens. They arrived in our garden pots or plots as simple curiosities & ornamentals. That also speaks about why biological capital is still being extracted and privatized as we speak and speculated upon by biotechnological companies under capitalist regimes that grew out of the Ecological Imperialism of previous epochs.
The podcast is basically the quest of Lord Joseph Banks played by Jemaine Clement (based on the famous naturalist Sir Joseph Banks 1743-1820) and his manservant Solander (Lawrence Arabia aka James Milne who also provides the musical soundtrack) in a quest for the infamous Heaven’s Clover (a pun on Heaven’s Tree??). I´t satirizes the way early naturalists sexualized nature and genderized botanical science according to their mores, biases and values.
Botanical science was one of the few places where women were welcomed (but also only according to the Burkean binary beauty/sublime gendering of aesthetics, where women were supposed to be feminine, delicate and interested in delicate, fragile things). Botany was a harbor or research and scientific opportunity for women in a world that was as much patriarchal as it was elitist and classist. A bizarre example of applying sexual categories to classifying and identifying plants is the graphic sexual taxonomy developed by Carl von Linne in the 18th century (the inventor of the binomial classification system of species that is still in use today). Linne basically imagined that plants have penises and vaginas, and was very literal about it. He also used on purpose highly eroticized scientific language in order to recruit a wide net of botanical collectors. Others within the Calvinist redoubts of Edinborough tried to combat such “disgusting strokes of obscenity” (as Martin Kemp writes in a delightful article – Sex and Science in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora) in response to the perceived Linnean risky taxonomy. Robert Thornton had tried for example to de-sexualize plants and emphasize the logical and mathematical character of taxonomy that would thus regain the lost innocence of plants and allow women to pursue botany without embarrassment. And this is not a fiction.
Illustration showing “Cupid Inspiring Plants with Love”, in this case the Strelitzia reginae, or “queen plant”, a plate from Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807)
Suffice to say the podcast The Mysterious Secrets Of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium is suffused with such botanical conundrums, unwittingly political, theological and erotic plants, butterfly-insect collecting naturalist manias, picaresque travels and Victorian battles. Railing against hedonistic dangerous pleasures and ‘immoral’ botanical heretics (such as those exhibited Uncle Bertie) is a constant feature of them. They are mad in the best of ways – being a full-range attack on British aristocracy and privilege, its conservative values, its totally ridiculous prejudice, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, classism, and racism. They are at the same time poking fun at everything – including scientific rigor – fully indulging in exhibiting an almost Swiftean dimension of describing the habits and orthodoxy of these alternate English snobs – such as milking (back tits of a cat!) cats. There huge amounts of Orientalism – with the visit to Batavia (a pun on actually existing Batavia in the former Dutch East Indies) actually producing a breaking down of crew morale and much botanical perversity. The Anderlugians are the sworn enemies of the Gravy Islanders (both a mixture of Spaniards and Germans? but also some sort of weirdo Communists or Socialists as well).
These podcasts offer something refreshing and cheeky in terms of historical accuracy or literary solemnity. They are both trashy and highly sophisticated, more akin to the exuberance of Douglas Adam’s Hitchkickers Guide Through the Galaxy (or Oceans in this case), completely different from the usual histories and at its best described as a deeply humourous take on the excesses of naturalism and natural history. There is also a lot of speculative botany at work and speculative ethnobotany involved as with a lot of the species collected since the times of Buffon that got endowed with very (Western!) human virtues or vices, serving at times as symbols of modernist artificiality, social decay and bio-matter for theories of degeneration. Even today with the recent legalization battles around Hemp, THC, and CBD health fads we are still in the middle of such fervent and frequent botanical reshuffling.
Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.
In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.
With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.
It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.
One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.
After watching Part 5 — The Lordly Ones the last series docu by Adam Curtis episode I felt like finally posting this study here that I have not read but sounds very compelling. The archival materials Curtis assembles and edits trace the shifting contours of another underlying pattern that emerges from his centrifugal (vaguely non-linear) history VJing (?!) kaleidoscopic rush towards now. His initial giveaway – from recently departed D. Graeber – takes history, memory and future as something made and in the making. All the unnerving loose-ends, valuable archival footage fragments, documenting both personal trajectories and ebbing planetary emotions keep chasing each other and keep producing new contradictions and dynamics that one may refuse to acknowledge but cannot ignore. I am not a historian nor an academic, but I am keen follower & curious seeker of repurposed, remade, salvaged neo-worlds, of the joy of invention and imaginative play that is always risky stuff, whenever and wherever we imagine various pasts, or whenever one in order to have a tradition invents it. This also implies courage as well as response- ability (as D Haraway said). No idea is innocent and what was once invented might seem eternal, or gets enshrined as national tradition under strict gatekeeping. So how the past or how ‘nativism’ gets to to be roleplayed now, commercialized, weaponized or how folklore gets radicalized counts.
This post is not to debunk or ridicule the dreamy, fairy (elvish), fantasy invented- worlds that abound online and offline nowadays, or their dedicated publics, history buffs or LARPing fans, nor is it an attempt to bury the neo-medieval. In fact the Middle Ages have transformed our understanding of the past and in turn we have been transforming our understanding of this period regarded and banished as dark-side, obscurantist, superstitious intermediary btw Antiquity and Renaissance. All what followed, all what was inherited from the antiquity has been already imprinted and further elaborated during those subsequent medieval times. The Middle Ages are being constantly revolutionized (enough to check the Medieval Twitter!). Games, novels, tatoos, and even Middle Age lifestyle gatherings make it something eerily alive and very active in the weirdest places and corners of the net. Still, under current circumstance this practice also includes toxic manifestos extolling neo-medieval glorious pasts (as in Breivik’s case and others) as well as organized nationalist tribalism (as in Jacob Mikanovski’s survey of the Great Kurultáj) or the ethnopolics of Romanian neo Dacian White Wolves – thus making it mportant to delineate a certain strain and specificity that has defined this reconstruction of the past since 1900 under certain artistic and historical circumstances. This peculiar dream of a lost countryside, of happy peasants dancing their dances, obedient to their good, fair and noble overlords is a very modern (middle class) hackneyed back-to-country pastoral Middle Age idyll. It starts to animate the oeuvre (operas, literature, ethnological research) and arts of an English (and probably globally Westernized – if we consider the German, Slavic and Romanian neo- Medieval volkish movements roughly parallel with it) middle classes. It coincides with the whole white fear eugenics & demographic panic (Sax Rohmer, Madison Grant etc) the whole Twilight of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler). This European medievalist trend has been growing in contrast with and as a reaction/retreat in the face of the rapid impact of industrialization, colonialism overseas (immigration at home), humiliation by non – European armed forces (Russo-Japanese War) and of changing power relations in the wake of tremendous productive forces being unleashed, the rise of robber baron monopolies as well as the collapse of the British Imperialism. Retreating to the countryside has had an appeal for those who could afford to retreat in comfort and not face the horrors of city life, industrial squalor as well as the growing bargaining power of the worker (mostly miner) masses.
In response there has been an incredible growth of a idealized Middle Ages with its aesthetics be it in literature (yes J R R Tolkein is also part of it), in music – and part of it was also the Glanstonbury Festival (1914-1925) inspired in part by Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth example altough the history is more complicated and winded then an episode’s mention can deal with. Adam Curtis makes the central claim that a lot of intellectuals and prominent archaeologists involved in the formation of the state of Iraq (state nationhood) have constructed and supported the same type of tribal mythology in the context of the Gulf States and the Near East. So archaeologists (among them Getrude Bell as mentioned by Adam Curtis) have been attracted by this romantic image of the Orientalist view of tribal traditional leaders (what they saw as the local tribal aristocratic version of their – “The Lordly Ones”), encouraging and establishing the power of local authoritarian oil sheikhs of the future. This was done against those very populations that had to be ruled & perforce suffer the ill effects of this rule. This romantic nativism & exalted tribalism had quite destructive effects on the local secular and already developing middle classes of Iraq, Syria and other former parts of the Turkish Ottoman Empire that where on their way towards modernization.
The West has been active in seeding somehow and sustaining this purified & cleaned-up image of an oldskool entitled ‘noble aristocracy’ – something completely at odds with the situation on the ground. The aristocratic neo feudal turn is also visible in popular pulps. Tarzan is a new type of hero: written by an American, its about the physical feats of a lost white male heir of the Lord Graystoke fortune. A (via his stay in the African jungle) rewilded British scion raised by apes combining the ‘noble savage’ with a good lordly pedigree. With the waning of fhe British Empire, a kind of neo- medieval return to hallowed hierarchies – was taking root in the States as well around 1900 – for example considering the habits, Christian Crosses, pires, rituals, cultural bricolage and costumes portrayed in the viciously racist neo-Templar knight proto-KKK version of US history, especially as portrayed in D W Griffiths movie The Birth of a Nation. In fact the whole knightly made-up cosplay (‘klan’ Highland -clan) look from this movie was copied by actual klan-members later on, was being inspired by an earlier literary description from the Romantic adventure novels of Walter Scott – itself an invented version of the Middle Ages in tune with the new Romantic ideals. In Romania itself the protochronist movement has embellished a particularly ethocentric version of the past and its purportedly socialist dictators have identified(helped by historians) themselves with particular rulers, built monuments and have been depicted (even in paintings) as kings of yore & fathers of the land. It is this kind of hauntological truth that comes to haunt us, a past that we have otherwise actively cosplayed, contructed, or reconstructed. It is important to think and revisit not just to cynically trash the whole revival mood – but enable a more diverse, dirty, grotesque, multifarious and complicated Middle Ages, one where we may even find empowering (that do not give in to the lure of exceptionalism nor purism) and cherish the core of ‘progressive’ elements (even if it sounds anachronistic) therein as an insistence of possibilities (in Isabelle Stengers words).
I want to make a note in saying Adam Curtis mentions in his documentary this brooding opera by Rutland Boughton (1878-1960) called The Immortal Hour (1914) in connection with the Celtic revival, the neo-pagan movement of Europe, of rediscovered traditional dances, of inventing and introducing dark and eerie forces (of anti-modernity?) that where in fact very modern. Neo-paganism has always had these National-Socialist and anti-semitic undertones (or at least bulk anti- Judeo-Christian) which have deeply tainted its follow-up. At the same time it is important to recognize that Rutland B. was considered a socialist and his work’s reception suffered because of his communist leanings (he was member of the communist party). Nothing is simple or easy to categorize. The Middle Ages was not a terrain just for imagining oppressive, hierarchical racial fantasies – in fact a prominent utopian thinker, socialist activist, designer, William Morris and a major figure of the British Arts & Crafts movement was involved in the Middle Ages revival. In a footnote to their Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer adopt the critic of Disenchantment voiced by such neo-pagan animists as Ludwig Klages but stop short of his embrace of the primordial magical communion with nature. The fragment quoted by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm (in his Myth of Disenchantment) is worth citing in full in regard to the increasing commercialization of a pure, more ecological “dark geen” Middle Ages as well as the taunted union with a Gaian healing power that rings more truer than ever (see wellness industry or greenwashing fossil fuel extractive industries):
“Klages [and company] recognized the nameless stupidity which is the result of progress. But they drew the wrong conclusion… The rejection of mechanization became an embellishment of industrial mass culture, which cannot do without the noble gesture. Against their will, artists reworked the lost image of the unity of body and mind for the advertising industry.”
Glastonbury in the sprawling & interminable Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys reads more like the attempt to muster all these diverse alternative (alternate) and incompossible temporal perspectives into a comprehensive anarchist- Jacobin-Marxists miner- pilgrimage/Middle Age eco-commune at an intersection of ley lines. In solidarity with the miners General Strike, Boughton the composer produced his Bethlehem nativity opera with Jesus born in a miner’s cottage and King Herod as a top-hatted capitalist and roman soldiers in police uniforms and duly lost his funding (not sure yet how this avoids the current anti- elitist populism and anti-semitic discourse or keeps converging towards it). There’s much to be said about dormancy – and residual feelings and a past that is not past. The residual has been always inviting us to search for traces (Ernst Bloch) of the future in the present (and also without proto chronist bias in the past) and unassimilated and unassuming remnants might always lie around as well as giving rise to new emergent cultural forms that go unnoticed. Sven Lütticken quotes Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams and his 1970s remarks on why we should not treat “feudal culture” or “bourgeois culture” as monolithic blocs by focusing only on their dominant features – and this comes to the fore especially in regard to a continously forming and emerging Middle Ages. There’s a sense that at key historical moments (and Raymond Williams has a truly procesual understanding of his examples) wherever and whenever new and emerging cultural forms, experiences, values get generated “there is always other social being and consciousness which is neglected and excluded: alternative perceptions of others, in immediate relationships; new perceptions and practices of the material world.” At the same time we are reminded how different is the dawn of a newly dominant computational emergentism and ‘other pasts’ during 1970s or 1980s neoliberalism (an important reference period for both Adam Curtis as well as Raymond Williams) in regard to ’emergentism’ as understood under the auspices of 1920s by someone like Whitehead or Powys.
Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex.
In English, the film is often informally referred to as Planet of the Storms, Planet of Storms, Planet of Tempests, Planeta Burg, and Storm Planet, though it was never actually released in the US in its original form until the 1990s, via home video. It is better known to American audiences via two American television movies which featured special effects and most of the primary footage from it: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. (wiki)
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is a 2018 American animated steampunk superhero film produced by Warner Bros. Animation and distributed by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, featuring an alternate version of the DC Comics character Batman. It is the thirtieth film in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. It is directed and produced by Sam Liu and written by James Krieg, loosely based on the one-shot graphic novel of the same name by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. (wiki)
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, originally published in 1989, is considered to be DC Comics’ first Elseworlds story. “In ELSEWORLDS, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places–some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist.” – DC editorial copy.
Sun-Higginson, a documentary filmmaker from New York City, began work on GTFO in early 2012 and ultimately funded it as a Kickstarter project. She was initially inspired to create the film after watching a clip from live-stream gaming competition Cross Assault in which a player repeatedly sexually harassed his teammate. Sun-Higginson then “decided to take a step back and explore what it means to be a woman in gaming in general, both the positive and the negative.”
The movie compiles interviews from gamers, developers, journalists to show how pervasive sexist behavior is in the gaming world.
The film’s premiere at South by Southwest was met with primarily favorable reviews, with critic Dennis Harvey commenting: “Several other documentaries are currently in the works on the same subject, and many will no doubt be a lot slicker than ‘GTFO.’ But the rough edges of Sun-Higginson’s Kickstarter-funded feature lend it an ingratiating, unpretentious modesty, and its lack of rancor on a topic that might’ve easily supported a more sensationalist approach can only be a plus in reaching male gamers most in need of its wake-up call.”(wiki)
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, originally published in 1989, is considered to be DC Comics’ first Elseworlds story. “In ELSEWORLDS, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places–some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist.” – DC editorial copy.
TimeSpace Warps 