WHAT: "World's Fair Use Day," a series of micro-lectures (mine is 10 minutes, at the presenters' request), panels, and film screenings about Fair Use "and its importance to innovators and creators," brought to you by "Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group that works on issues relating to intellectual property, Internet protocol and information policy."
Record-cover mashup by Christian Marclay, all rights reserved; reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.
WHEN:
Tuesday January 12, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
WHERE:
The Newseum, which is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW (walking distance from the Judiciary Square Red Line Metro). Enter the Newseum using the entrance on 6th Street. Upon entering, look for the WFUD signs.
I'm speaking sometime between 2:50 and 4 P.M. on the stipulated subject of the Copyfight and "the repurposing of existing and/or copyrighted works in the world of culture jamming," part of "a 'speed panel,' which will consist of short presentations from other panelists.'"
Also on the bill are Mark Hosler of Negativland and Chris Burke of This Spartan Life.
DETAILS HERE, AT OFFICIAL WEBSITE.
Record-cover mashup by Christian Marclay, all rights reserved; reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.
The vast Santanic conspiracy: Is St. Nick the tool of a plot too monstrous to mention?
Illustration by Scott Ramsoomair, copyright Scott Ramsoomair.
The Las Vegas Weekly just published my Santa-and-Satan: separated-at-birth? essay, the seed DNA for the lecture I'll be delivering at Observatory in Brooklyn in mid-January.
Nut Graf:
Christian soldiers, marching as to war in the pitched battle for the meaning of Christmas, worry that Santa is a tool of the vast Satanic conspiracy. To be sure, the similarity of their names, identical but for one transposed letter, is provocative. Didn't Mia Farrow use a Scrabble board, in Rosemary's Baby, to expose her grandfatherly neighbor with the flyaway eyebrows for the warlock he was, shuffling the letters of his name to reveal his true identity? Could the Religious Wrong be right, just this once? Is Santa the Deceiver's way of hijacking the Christ child's birthday? Kriss Kringle is a corruption of the German dialectal Christkindl, "little Christ child." Were Satan and Santa separated at birth?
If this sounds like yet more secular-humanist hatin' on Christmas, don't take my word for it. Outing Santa as a Manchurian Candidate for the Satanist agenda is a cottage industry among hardline evangelicals like the folks over at CuttingEdge.org ("Spiritual Insights into the New World Order so Startling You'll Never Look at the News the Same Way Again!"). Dearly Beloved, they're just wall-eyed with fear at the thought of the Boy Scouts' hidden ties to Freemasonry and the "encroaching mind-control of the Illuminati" and---oh, dear god, it's almost too mind-shrivelingly monstrous to mention---the "genetic scientists" who are "creating a super hybrid man/beast, eradicating death so man can live eternally without a savior!!" They know the Awful Truth about Santa, too, and they're exposing this "counterfeit Jesus" for the Satanic sham he is: "Together with the numerous other signs of the End of the Age," says a page on the ministry's website, "this love of the Pagan (Druidic) Santa Claus is just one more clear sign of the end." America, awake!
Found on the Web.
More about the Red Menace HERE.
Illustration: Toby Thane Neighbors. Copyright Toby Thane Neighbors.
My essay springboarding off Mark Spitz's new Bowie biography---called, for some incalculable reason, Bowie: A Biography---is live at the Las Vegas Weekly.
Attention Conservation Synopsis: Ideas discussed include boomer Bowiemania, The David's effect on male-boomer notions of the heteronormative, the Death of the '60s/Birth of the '70s, Why Glam Rock is Not Only More Profound Than You Know But More Profound Than You Can Know, and, crucially,
How did a snaggletoothed twink with a larval pallor, the physique of a stick insect and shaved eyebrows (for that transgendered mantid effect) became the improbable object of one-handed fantasies for millions of "boys and girls and everything in between," as Ziggy photographer Mick Rock puts it?
Nut Graf:
What makes Bowie's story fascinating is the dissonances between the plastic idol and the mousy-haired earthling who plays him. As the Thin White Duke of his 1976 Station to Station tour, Bowie was the brilliantined, clench-jawed embodiment of Weimar nightcrawler cool, a curlicue of smoke wisping off his ever-present Gitane. But the same man, in his earlier days, worshipped the leprously uncool Anthony Newley, a fixation immortalized in "The Laughing Gnome," a chipmunk-voiced novelty song calculated to make even the staunchest Bowiephile cringe. The same Bowie who pushed the envelope of pop by using William S. Burroughs's cut-up method of collage composition to generate lyrics like "you're dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy" ("We are the Dead," Diamond Dogs) would pass the schmaltz on Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas, dueting with Der Bingle on "Little Drummer Boy."
More here.
TONIGHT'S LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE RE-SCHEDULED FOR EARLY JANUARY. Reports of the Mother of All Blizzards, which is predicted to dump up to 20 inches of snow across the Northeast, have dissuaded me from braving gale-force winds and man-eating snowdrifts. Somehow, the thought of fishtailing all over the Garden State Parkway or, alternately, marooned in Grand Central doesn't appeal. Nor would I wish that on any attendee devout enough to risk such hazards. Let's try again in early January, shall we?
But if you are in the area and easily able to attend the Observatory's Krampus party, please do! Host Joanna Ebenstein writes to say that the "Observatory Krampus-Themed Holiday Party, inspired by our favorite Christmas character, Krampus, St. Nicholas' mischievous/evil Eastern-European sidekick," still very much ON. "We had planned to begin the party at the end of Dery's lecture, but will now begin at 8:00 PM, to amuse the disgruntled masses who did not recieve this cancellation alert. The party is free of charge, and will feature live-music (Krampus-Carols!) by Ruprecht and the Birch Switches, holiday gifts, birch-switch-beatings, treats, rusty chains, lolling tongues, and, of course, booze. Entrance to the party is free, but do bring cash for buying drinks, treats, & holiday gifts!"
"How the Lord of Misrule became a Bourgeois Tool (And Still Managed to Enrage the Religious Right)"
DETAILS:
LOCATION: OBSERVATORY, BROOKLYN. DIRECTIONS HERE.
Date: Saturday, December 19th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $7
WHAT: An illustrated lecture, followed by a Festivus---er, Observatory Holiday party, "complete with lovely alcoholic beverages, themed snacks, and live music as performed by Brooklyn's own Ruprecht and The Birch Switches, who will perform your favorite Krumpus Carols."
Few Americans know that Santa descends from the mock king who held court at Saturnalia, the Roman festival celebrating the winter solstice. Or that he shares cultural DNA with the Lord of Misrule who presided over the yuletide Feast of Fools in the Middle Ages---lewd, blasphemous revels that gave vent to underclass hostility toward feudal lords and the all-powerful church.
By the late 19th century, Christmas in Manhattan was an excuse for the rabble to go wilding from door to door in upper-class neighborhoods, demanding booze and cash from terrified householders in exchange for an off-key (and sometimes off-color) yuletide song. In desperation, Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore, and other members of New York's cultural elite invented Santa Claus---and Christmas as we know it---as a means of domesticating the drunken revels of the dangerous classes. Their bourgeois myth was designed to channel lumpen unrest into a more acceptable outlet: a domestic ritual consecrated to home, hearth, and conspicuous consumption.
In "Satan and Santa: Separated at Birth?," Dery, a cultural critic and book author, takes a look at the Jolly Old Elf's little-known role as poster boy for officially sanctioned eruptions of social chaos, as well as his current status as a flashpoint in "the Christmas Wars"---cultural battles between evangelicals, atheists, conservatives, and anti-consumerists over the "true" meaning of Christmas. Along the way, Dery considers New Age theories that Santa is a repressed memory of an ancient Celtic cult revolving around red-capped psychedelic mushrooms; Nazi attempts to re-imagine Christmas---a holiday consecrated to a Jewish baby, for Christ's sake---as a pre-Christian invention of tree-worshipping German tribes, in some misty, Wagnerian past; and the suspicious similarities between Satan and Santa, connections that have fueled a cottage industry of conspiracy theories on the religious right.
He sees you when you're sleeping/ He knows when you're awake/ He knows when you've been bad or good/ So be good..for goodness' sake!
French public-service announcement, counseling safe sex in the age of AIDS. Found on the Web.
Who knew that whip-tailed scorpion boy from Aldebaran would morph, in flagrante, into the real thing? Must've been that bug powder we'd both been sniffing...
WHAT: The Las Vegas Weekly, an alternative newspaper, has just published my essay on the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch .
TIME-CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:
If Finnegans Wake crystallized the collage consciousness of industrial modernity, Naked Lunch presages the multitasking, mashed-up sensibility of our remix culture, where we always have at least a half-dozen windows open in our minds: "This book spills off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises ..." In a laconic, corner-of-the-mouth drawl that crosses the St. Louis upper class into which he was born with the underworld whose brutal honesty was always more congenial to his cast of mind, Burroughs channels the comic-strip unconscious of American society in all its nightmare hilarity.
GRAF YOU SHOULDN'T BE READING WHEN YOUR BOSS WALKS PAST YOUR CUBICLE:
Fifty years on, Naked Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.
UPDATE: LINK LOVE FROM DAVID PESCOVITZ AT BOING BOING. (Thanks, David!)
