2277 – The Mysterious Secrets Of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium (podcast 2016 series)

spacetime coordinates: an alternate imaginary British Empire – called “The Gravy Islands” and an Imaginary Indo-Pacific called “Boiling Ocean”

LISTEN HERE to the whole 1st season for free (but make it quick cose Sticher is going to scrap all content in August!)

Soundcloud sample

Offical

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.

Thoroughly and utterly delightful!

2101 – So Close 夕陽天使 (2002 movie)

spacetime coordinates: close to the year 2000 HK

I am indebted to seeing this movie in a particular context – as part of the Fatal & Fallen – program curated by Jade Barget and Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee at the Bi’bak/Sinema Transtopia in Berlin cinema hosted at the House of Statistics. It was followed by a very funny intervention presentation by Mie Hiramoto (Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at National University of Singapore.)

Fatal & Fallen was first presented at Singapore’s Asian Film Archive in the context of their Re:frame series from September – to October 2021. Here I will post some of their framing of the selection featuring movies from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong.

So Close is directed by Corey Yuen and starring Shu Qi, Zhao Wei and Karen Mok.

“When a gang of assassins murders their parents, two sisters inherit the family business – a state-of-the-art computer surveillance system. Armed with new skills, the sisters become the most accomplished assassins in Hong Kong. But after killing a wealthy magnate, an undercover detective is suddenly hot on their tail. Loyalties are tested, alliances are questioned and survival becomes the most extreme sport of all. As part of the second wave of the Girls with Guns subgenre, So Close is an updated version of the 1980s films that were built on strong, female leads portrayed with ostensible power. However, the film masquerades female empowerment under the guise of a highly sexualising male gaze. Expressed in definitive Y2K stylisation and featuring quintessential early-2000 gadgets, fashion, and special effects, So Close captures the new millennium’s techno-optimism.” (Sinema Transtopia program page)

What can I add to that? I was a total surprise with the distance of the years to watch this movie. It feels both incredibly cheeky, cringe and fucked up and really dated in many ways (at the time when sexual harassment has been outed as endemic to the very bureau corporate environments the movie is set in), yet still a fun watch. I like how the technological absences play out, and how everything is so gadgety – close to Sianne Ngai’s “Theory of the gimmick”. If we associate gadgets with a Macguyver gendered action cinema here is a welcome reversal. The hackers are Asian and female (and the male US white expert is incredibly clunky and cartoonish), physically and technologically able to stand their own.

The gimmick is everywhere, it has escaped the stores & stalls or the visible Apple or Microsoft brands and it seems to solve almost everything in order to even out the odds in a very unequal world. So Close is a fabulous, sexy (sexist or cisgenger one might say but there is a few surprises at the end), unapologetic movie from the Y2K era in HK (as Elizabeth G Lee mentioned in her intro). After reunification with China, one can feel this whole mad energy and explosive expansive mood. As mentioned by Hie Miramoto, girls with guns are really more than ur usual – wuxia heroine – that still felt a need for a male’s martial arts counterpart Confucian acceptance or inclusion

The movie is brim-full with forgotten gadgets, and imaginary interfaces, including the famous 90s and 2000s electronic dictionaries that were so popular at the time (I also happen to have one) and influenced so much of the later ‘Galapagos effect’ of Chinese homebrewed tech. For me, it puts every Mission Impossible or James Bond to shame. It sometimes feels like it’s just about tech stalls and (soon to be extinct but still exciting) devices fresh off the assembly line anywhere around the world (be it Bucharest Red Dragon or Hong Kong). Please check the fantastic Chaoyang trap substack post intro to that technological wonder in what they call “The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary: 1995-2005. As Emily point out in her quick, electronic dictionaries offered a lot of transgressive possibilities under the guise of ‘educational’ tech.

GIF adapted from this 
Bilibili look back at the Electronic Dictionary era. (from Chaoyang article)

Finally, another great thing is the way the ‘camera shot’ travels the entire length of the net – the way one has the POW of the impulse or the message or data. Surveillance is not an issue and the more CCTV cameras the better. It also feels an incredible mix of advertising and music video. Every hair swoop and bubble bath shot seems lifted out of an industry ad, yet it all makes sense. You get a the sense these electronic dictionary universe is both an anticipation of the smartphone environment – and an alternative to it.

The Choreography is just amazing, superb as expected. Computers are already at the forefront of cyber attacks – you can ghost yourself or replicate or simulate yourself in the feed. We always have to remember that So Close is far from the current ‘deep fake’ craze yet it anticipates it by a long shot. The satellite communication – ‘eye in the sky’ is both clunky & physical, and always reminds us how dependable we are on this infrastructure that is always present and somehow invisible. There is an interesting alliance (even sexual innuendo) btw the forces of the state (police) and female sister crackers against mostly male corporate transnational structures. All the drama and action makes the men (except of the sexy yet still hapless BF) feel caricatural, bogged down, really superfluous. Even the (man) villains feel overpowered, not really expecting to confront such apt adversaries.

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