Read The Wu Ming Foundation! (or, Why Every Man Must Be the First Man...)

I am eagerly awaiting Wu Ming’s latest novel L’Armata dei Sonnambuli (“The Army of Sleepwalkers”) a historical romp of the French Revolution, to be released on April 8 2014.  In anticipation, and to save some time, I have written a “pre-review” below, containing an analysis of the group’s previous historical collaborations. It’s pretty fair to say along with Pierre Bayard that one hardly needs to know a book in order to review it – I would add that one can certainly review most of it beforehand, even if one intends to insert some actual details from it later on.  I will simply paste in the appropriate comments about L’Armata itself when I finally get the chance to read it.

The English-speaking world needs to read Wu Ming. Their works, like the activist Ismail, float like vapor above History, to rain life on ancient rebellions. They are the Altai falcon, scanning the earth, reading its true connections, aware of signs us bloodhounds with our noses are not equipped to pick-up. Signs that are only understandable from the perspective of a raptor on the hunt. Of the tenets of their school the supreme one is deep subjectivization. They demand before all else eschewal of the distant “post-modern” ironic narrator, to put in his place the absolute necessity of personal commitment. Wu Ming’s stories are martyr’s tales, a Golden Legend, allegories for all the converts in the highways and the hedges.

It is “The Author of Waverley” who proves to be a curious antecedent for Wu Ming. The man himself may have been the tory Sir Walter Scott, but he too preferred to write his popular works in Anonymity. His novels, like those of Wu Ming, insist on drawing and intensifying lines of tension wherever and whenever they occur -  from his initial interest in re-fanning the flames of the Jacobite rebellion “sixty years since”, to his brutally executed exploration of Presbyterian radicalism in the masterwork Old Mortality. 

The Author, much like Wu Ming, draws lines in the sand, sets left hand against right and then lets force prevail. He cranks up the tension between class and region, perhaps even beyond historical actuality, and has no qualms about it, no matter if he is writing about the Scotland he knew, or the distant past. His insistence on using figures of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood as bearers of the more significant class conflict between aristocratic Norman and oppressed peasant Saxon strikes a pretty Wu-Mingish tone.

Where Wu Ming has refined the art from The Waverley novels is part political consciousness and part narrative innovation. The gaze in a Waverley novel is still that of a middleman. The Waverley character par excellence is the Enlightened young gentleman of means who is sympathetic to both sides of an extremist conflict – one who refuses to take absolute sides, who comes out with the girl in the end and the respect of both parties, and who in a Wu Ming story would most certainly have had his throat cut before chapter 3.

A Wu Ming novel drops the necessity for this convention. No patronizing charitable gaze is needed for the portrayal of the radical left and right – we get the “skewed perspective” rugged and raw, the first person present of a "chaotic good" Anabaptist madman named Gert o’ the Well and the epistolary and journalistic past of a “lawful evil” catholic spy named Q.

Nonetheless The Author of Waverley, like the workers of the New Italian Epic, does not engage in an ironical or distant tone - his is often the sympathetic third person, and occasionally the first. There is a frisson in depicting the “devil’s own party” that stretches back to Milton and beyond. But in his novels we see the joy of the revolutionary subject, the ecstasy of what is inevitably always in the end an extremist martyrdom and a narrative time, even if only for a few chapters, of the satisfying side of Terror. 

One can see in The Tales of My Landlord, and particularly the introduction of Old Mortality for a chapter that deals with the revolutionary father figure or "the old man". It might have come straight out of an unwritten bridge piece between Q and Manituana:

…As I approached, I was agreeably undeceived. An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized the murderers with corresponding violence. 

Although I had never seen the old man before, yet from the singularity of his employment, and the style of his equipage, I had no difficulty in recognising a religious itinerant whom I had often heard talked of, and who was known in various parts of Scotland by the title of Old Mortality… 

During this long pilgrimage, the pious enthusiast regulated his circuit so as annually to visit the graves of the unfortunate Covenanters, who suffered by the sword, or by the executioner, during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the Stewart line. These are most numerous in the western districts of Ayr, Galloway, and Dumfries; but they are also to be found in other parts of Scotland, wherever the fugitives had fought, or fallen, or suffered by military or civil execution. Their tombs are often apart from all human habitation, in the remote moors and wilds to which the wanderers had fled for concealment. But wherever they existed, Old Mortality was sure to visit them when his annual round brought them within his reach. In the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moor-fowl shooter has been often surprised to find him busied in cleaning the moss from the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of death with which these simple monuments are usually adorned. Motives of the most sincere, though fanciful devotion, induced the old man to dedicate so many years of existence to perform this tribute to the memory of the deceased warriors of the church. He considered himself as fulfilling a sacred duty, while renewing to the eyes of posterity the decaying emblems of the zeal and sufferings of their forefathers, and thereby trimming, as it were, the beacon-light, which was to warn future generations to defend their religion even unto blood.

This trope is one that has already been acknowledged as a key theme in the New Italian Epic: 

...The ‘death of the founder’: many books in the ‘nebula’ describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendants to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia ‘the old man’. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase.

This figure of Old Mortality, of the rebel Ismail, Gert of the Well, Thomas Müntzer’s disciple, the Party members of The Measures Taken, the Good Soldier Svejk -  all of them hidden, anonymous, members 1 to 5, fighting the same battle. Each one premature, each one too late, each one kicking the epoch in the ass for the sake of “the promised blessings of Futurity” – as Brecht says, “All begin together. Every man must be the first man! Sink down in the filth. Embrace the butcher. But change the world: it needs it!”

It was Lukács who first re-claimed Sir Walter, along with his equally conservative contemporary Balzac, for the radical left, as proto-workers in the field of socialist realism. If this is the case and there is a comradeship between the two, then there is still a distinction to be made between the theoretical, Althusserian fascination of a work by Balzac, by and large in the same vein as Capital, that is, spinning out endless analytical classifications and truths, the lesson of the superstructures as they relate to the theoretical infrastructure, and the more evental works of  The Author, Maoist-Leninist works, to which school I also append Stendhal and Wu Ming. If the work of Balzac or Zola, like the “theoretical” Marx of Capital, are more concerned with the precise structural depiction of the system, the works of Wu Ming fall on the other hand into those which work to some extent within the frames of “ideology”, designed to motivate the animal spirits and incite revolutionary fervour – the Marx of the Manifesto. This is the literary language of the revolutionary internationalist who insists on the revolutionary event as a subjective experience in the sense of Alain Badiou. It is Badiou who defines the “subject language” of the prophets of the Event – madness to outsiders, but honeyed truth to initiates.

Often these subject-language novels go through the cycles of the event and its response as outlined by Badiou. Badiou’s is an archetypal sequence of responses to his mighty “events”: The responses to the Marxism-Event are: (1) fidelity (Communism, Leninism); (2) reactive re-integration (Social Democracy); (3) outright denial of the evental status (liberalism, Furet); (4) catastrophic total counter-attack in the guise of a pseudo-Event (Fascism); (5) total enforcing of the Event, which ends up in an "obscure disaster" (Stalinism, Khmer Rouge); (6) renewal of Marxism (Lenin, Mao...)

In Old Mortality, likewise, the responses to the Covenanter Event are: (1) fidelity (Covenanters, Presbyterians); (2) reactive re-integration (Henry Morton, Lord Evendale); (3) outright denial of the evental status (Bellenden); (4) catastrophic total counter-attack in the guise of a pseudo-Event (Bothwell, Claversee); (5) total enforcing of the Event, which ends up in an "obscure disaster" (Cameronians); (6) renewal of the event (1689 Rebellions etc…French Revolution…The “idea” of Communism).

A similar pattern of evental fidelity and the chain-reactions it sets off can be felt in all the historical works of Wu Ming. In Q, the event of the Peasant Rebellion and its total enforcement in Münster. In 54, the aspirations of the partisans lost in the post-war complicity of a world where Cary Grant and Tito are comrades and the truly faithful have to raise sheep and sell drugs. In Manituana, the piecemeal betrayal and dissolution of the event of the Six Nations and the Great Longhouse of Sir William. And in Altai, the pseudo-Event of the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, the lesson of the means that effect the ends beyond recognition. Every Wu Ming novel, no matter how baroque in plot nor how many characters, always revolves around a vortex, a zero point that structures the universe with its reactions – the Event.

There is a point at which one must recognize the work of Wu Ming to be intentionally pulpy, populist, and pathetic in the classical sense. They do very much depend on the relation between the reader and the main heroes, and they emphatically toss out the Narrator. Is this a negation of the Brechtian principle, the intention “to create a new relation between the audience and the play performed: a critical and active relation”? 

But I think it is in the over-identification with our heroes in the novels that we achieve the true core of what Brecht also strove for.  Althusser points to the true greatness of Brecht’s plays; their ultimate depiction of:

the coexistence without any explicit relation of a dialectical temporality and a non-dialectical temporality, is the basis for a true critique of the illusions of consciousness (which always believes itself to be dialectical and treats itself as dialectical), the basis for a true critique of the false dialectic (conflict, tragedy, etc.) by the disconcerting reality which is its basis and which is waiting for recognition.

 That is to say, in a Wu Ming novel, when the hero loses, it is tragic, yes, but it is always still tragic in opposition to “the disconcerting reality”. The character does not swallow the narrative into himself. His fall does not become the fall of the story or of the universe – he is always merely one of many – “The individual has two eyes. The Party has a thousand eyes.”

In Manituana, for instance, history makes tragic heroes left and right – but those heroes are only minutely tragic, to themselves. Our pity for them does not take over the show. Joseph Brant becomes a monster, but his transformation is never a purely moral mistake – we are far too informed about the colonial process, the historical tensions long since put in place, to chastise his failing as the cause of the downfall of the Iroquoian Thebes.  

Wu Ming do not solve anything with their novels – history is never wrapped up in a package to be delivered after the death of its heroes. Tensions are drawn, contradictions remain immanent, and we leave it at that. Precisely because the resolution is avoided, and the tension is, after the story arc is well over, still left in the lap of the reader, I consider the work of Wu Ming to be orthodox to Brechtian innovation – they deviate only in means after all, the measures taken, but the ends are the same. The last moment still leaves the reader with the burden of the struggle.

In this way Wu Ming and the tendencies of the New Italian Epic are re-arming the once dangerous but now tamed genre historical fiction, and its transmorgified cousin, the fantasy novel. The historical novel has always been an outsider in the Western Canon precisely due to the ideological trauma points it tends to touch – it is interesting to note that American ideologists as opposed as Gore Vidal and Newt Gingrich have both written historical novels, though largely on the fringes of the literary establishment. Among professors it seems the bias usually slants towards accounts “contemporary” authenticity – Sir Walter is overtaken by Jane Austen etc.

That historical fiction is a less recognized genre than even Fantasy is largely a result of the deterritorialization of historical personality from the realm of Great Man History into an “imaginary” pseudo-reality that can accept it. In some ways we cannot allow for history to enter into the “reality” of our fiction.  Most historical fiction, such as the Sharpe novels of Bernard Cornwell, follow far more fantastical conventions than contemporary fantasy – A Song of Ice and Fire contains the sequencing of historical development in a way that Sharpe’s Eagle with all of its mythological tropes does not. In the vein of Fantasy, Wu Ming will speak often of their tendency towards “world building” in their novels – a conceit usually saved for describing the value of Tolkien’s writing. It is not incidental that Wu Ming 4 has recently published a book on Tolkien called Difendere la Terra di Mezza.

Wu Ming bring the dynamic propagandism of a Jacobin printing press, the unresolvable, tension-snapping suspense of a Sir Walter Scott novel, an insider perspective of the Badiouian event, the Brechtian relation between “true” and “false” dialectics, and the historical conception of reality characteristic of “world building” fantasy. They re-introduce the ego and the subject into revolutionary story-telling in a way that is neither humanistic nor condescendingly moderate. They bring theory and excitement together; a week spent reading a Wu Ming novel is a kind of literary baptism of fire and at the same time an adventure of the highest order – one is given the opportunity to join a militia, to see what it means to fight (and probably lose), not for the cheap post-ideological idea of “a cause” or “your cause”, but for the totalitarian notion of “the cause” – and the accompanying frisson of the revolutionary carnival.

High School Music-Drama

Hey-ho lumberjacks! Réjean Pinard High is looking for ideas for this year’s musical! If you have an idea, fill out the following form below and submit it to Mr. Spigot, Ms. Frontenac or any student on the Réjean Pinard High Musical committee.

Submitted by (Name, Grade, Homeroom):

Francis List, 11^th Grade, Home Room 7A

My Idea for the 2014 Musical Is:

Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.

The Duration of My Musical is:

14-16 Hours, depending on the style of our conductor. Lacking the genius of a Furtwängler or a von Karajan, I will settle for whatever rice-crispy fueled interpretation Ms. Frontenac is capable of producing.

I Think The Students, Faculty, Teachers and Their Families Would Love This Musical Because:

Let me preface this justification by saying that what I think you are doing is fabelhaft. Too long has art in this institution suffered at decadent whims of the fine arts faculty. By asking the students of Réjean Pinard High to submit their own ideas for this year’s musical, you have finally struck upon the core of art as such in the high school, namely, the will of the homerooms.

The hallways are a-buzz with excitement. Revolution is in the air. Barricades are being built with stacks of Houghton-Mifflin textbooks. No longer are the students afraid to step out of the bounds of Messrs. Rogers, Hammerstein, Walt, and Disney. I have already heard Stephanie Young promoting her feminist production of The Second Shepherd’s Play, and likewise have been told Aziz Al-Bukhari is planning a submission of the Threepenny Opera intent on satirizing his demotion to a nameless beggar during last year’s Oliver Twist show.

These are steps in the right direction, but in my opinion they do not go far enough. I learned in Ancient Civ last week that the Greeks fused drama and music together, not as a means to raise money for corrupt student council elections or to send the lacrosse team to Brampton, but as a catharsis of the ceremonial guilt for the community in toto.

The Story of My Musical Is:

Like much of high school, The Ring is a story of Greed, Power, Fear, Destruction, and Redemption through Love. Let me describe it for you as it must open. Das Rheingold, first of the tetralogy. The banks of the Rhine. Four giant kiddie pools. As the paper- mâché mist clears, three figures are apparent, LOLing in the innocence of nature. These are the Rhinemaidens, their braces glinting in the sunlight. Out of the caves of Nibelheim a nasty dwarf assaults them…I am thinking that nerd in 9^th grade, Kevin Sakomoto, you know, with the calculator watch? Dragging his rolling back-pack onstage, he is rejected, steals the precious Rhinegold (I have a whole box of Ferrero Rocher from last Christmas we can use) and renounces love for the malicious power of the gold. And from there, the Particle Board Walls of Walhall rise in the background…Wotan, Head Boy of the Gods, and his Head Girl, Fricka, begin the high tragedy…

My Staging Requirements Are:

As you can imagine, a drama of such magnitude will simply not be possible to put on in our humble cafetorium. We must have a new theater free from the smell of fries; an outdoor amphitheater on the majestic banks of Crayfish Creek. I have petitioned the fine arts classes and all agree that the rugby field is an appropriate site for construction. Please see the plans on the graph paper stapled after page 2. We must not mind the backlash from the Prussian rugby team, their Bismarck of a coach, or any other enemies of true High School kultur.

Some Fund Raising Ideas I Have Are:

Of course the funding is another question. You realize that no production of the Ring cycle since its premiere in 1876 has ever broken even. Extra funds will definitely need to be provided. I propose that all proceeds from the various bake sales and organic coffee drives be diverted from their usual channels into the high arts. It may also be necessary to cancel dances, “The Prom”, and other imported customs in order to maintain the sacred aura of our institution – this is no mere musical, after all. We are trying to found a Festival. Réjean Pinard High must rival Bayreuth. This is my vision for us – stand with me! For the Twilight of the Jocks is upon us.

The Measurements Taken

Hello Designers!

Welcome to East Berlin. There are now just seven of you – I want to congratulate all of you on making it this far. Lenin said “the Party can take the lead only by being always absolutely pure itself.” I encourage you to think of the other designers who have fallen on the wayside these past few weeks…Ok? Ok. Now forget them. Forget them forever. Forget whom? Exactly, designers. Exactly.

This week’s challenge takes us straight to the heart of the industrial immiseration of the proletariat. For the first part, you must negotiate the length of the working day such that you maintain an acceptable rate of exploitation (remembering R = ^S/_V) while ensuring the upkeep of a qualitative use-value with regards to your fashion commodity. The piece must be both work-ready and at the same representative of the Party’s values. You will have the entire length of the working day minus the fixed amount of the value of labor as calculated by the Factory Act of your choosing. I encourage you to take inspiration from the various GDR Denkmäler and Ostalgie-laden tourist shops that remain the sole testament of a once ideologically pure communist paradise.

This week’s judges include Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, Lupe Fiasco, and a special guest appearance from Sputnik, Menswear icon-cum-Australian Cattle Dog. Remember that up to three of you can be sent away this week to Corrective Labour. Alright designers? Let’s get sketching!

…

I just feel like Patrizia is a bit lacking in class consciousness. She is falling into humanist revisionism and that’s a tricky place to be in with regards to the Nomenklatura.

…

Simona, I’m going to be honest here, those bright red contrast pockets? I know you think it screams Godard, but to me it just screams ACHTUNG. Hold off, comrade.

…

I am really going for that Stasi feel with this leather jacket. It’s a bit risky, I know everybody is expecting me to stay in my usually comfort zone, but I am going to show I am not just all about Mao Suits and the cultural revolution. I’m going all out.

...

I don't care if they hate my pockets. I am doing this. It's my voice that counts in the end, I'm the designer here.

…

Diego is an excellent organizer of labour, but if he doesn’t recognize the difference between superstructural labour relations and true class conflict it’s going to hold him back.

…

I’ve always been a fan of Brecht, so this piece is kind of an homage to Mother Courage. It’s a formal gown made out of this wonderful grey rag I found in the dumpster – you can dress it up, you can dress it down. Just hope this v-neck isn’t too revealing on the model.

…

Diego, I love the overalls, I love the wrench, but it still feels a bit “1930s gulag”. In other words it feels safe. I was expecting more from you and I think you really need to push yourself and find the voice of the people in the next challenge.

…

Simona, those contrast pockets? What were you thinking? My god! This is something I wouldn’t even send someone out in at the 2^nd International. The fit is wrong, the colours are wrong, and so on and so on. The whole thing is just so far from Socialist Realism. It’s just, just –

It’s formalist.

Exactly, that’s what I was going to say. Formalism at its most decadent.

Simona, as Lenin said, "intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good". We tried to help you with the pockets but you just would not listen. I know you want to showcase you as a designer, but you have to remember that an individual designer has 1 style, the Party has 1ooo styles. An individual designer leaps on trends, but the party dictates the lives of the trendsetters. Your piece is made for this evening and seems dated after the gala; the party's piece is designed for tomorrow, and remains timeless. 

Simona sweetheart, the Party has spoken. It is not granted to us not to send failures home. I’m afraid we’re going to have to say goodbye to you…Well, not goodbye. More like, “you never existed”. Yes. Simona, I feel you have a lot of potential, and a lot of growth to do, and hopefully Corrective Labour will allow you to flourish. We love you Simona, and we all wish you a hearty "you never existed".

...

Party Official 1: What? Simona totally didn't deserve that! They ganged up on her. She just had an off-week. She was totally the most stylish designer they had.

Party Official 2: Pffft. If she really was that stylish, she deserved all the more to be sent home.

The Discerning Gentlemanifesto

Thank you all for supporting Discerning Gentiluomo in our first 6 months as the freshest menswear and lifestyle blog in the game. Now that we’ve put our foot in the door, we believe the time is ripe to expound our principles explicitly, and put it in our mouth.

We at the Discerning Gentiluomo believe in the man’s man. We long for the days when a man could sport jaunty a cravat, fritter a mid-morning away rambling through the Arcades of Paris, engage in a lusty afternoon session of canne de combat, swindle an Iroquois of his pelt, cockeye a rival during whist, purchase a railroad share and still come home to a nice glass of brandy and a hearty, home-cooked wife beating.

What has happened to men’s style? It has simply become men’s fashion. We at DG lament the fall of the “dapper” in favour of the “cool”, “trill” or “dope”.  We believe it is time for man to once again step-off from effeminizing influences - especially that of females. For lack of a better term for this burgeoning era of male domination, we have decided to call our ideal a Masculocracy. With the following four we are looking to put the “man” back into “manifesto”. Boys, stay home and play hopscotch.

Article the First – Real Gents Dress Like Luggage.

 If you are a man and do not wear browns, grays, and blacks, if you do not have a cobbler, blacksmith and haberdasher, if you do not stink of leather, if your toilet paper is not made of suede, well, then you are simply, as a drunken ringmaster once called me, a boobie. A realman can camouflage himself in an estate sale and, if necessary, pass himself off as a Louis Vuitton trunk-set to avoid detection by bigger, stronger jocks looking to stretch some long jonathans.

Article the Second – Real Gents Use Straight Razors.

Style starts in the bathroom, Johnny! Do you want to be caught in the wash-closet one day by your girl, hacking away at your hairy upper-lip with a cheap plastic razor like some Croatian transvestite? Or would you rather have her walk into a scene straight from the Five Points, 1860? She’ll see you, a foamy, masculine figure in nothing but overalls and chest-hair, brandishing a sharp blade and whistling a cheerful Irish murder ballad. That is, if she isn’t knocked-out cold by the various pomades, lotions, and flesh preserving formalin solutions that make up the proper gent’s toilette. Sprezzatura? Gesundheit.

Article the Third – Real Gents Smoke.

Now this is a controversial one, we know. And we’ve all heard about the dangers of smoking, the tragedy of so many youth hooked onto this overpriced poison that decimated an entire generation of men and women just because it “looks cool”. But… Don’t your 1950s sex idols, your Sir Alec Guinness’s and your Peter Lorre’s, just seem so naturale when they are hacking a dart? People talk a lot of humbug about peer pressure, but in this case, we believe it really can make a difference. But whatever you do, don’t smoke cheap. If you take up cigars, rolled cigarettes, pipes, hookahs etc. then cancer is like, way less likely to strike, because stylish people can go right to the doctor and explain the whole situation; it may sound judgmental but most doctors will just totally uncancer you if you are cool.

Article the Fourth – Real Gents Believe in Timeless Style Over Trends.

This is the big one. It is so easy for guys to get caught up in the whirligig of specific trends, of completely tangential historical period pieces instead of the timeless, eternal style of the true gent. Why bother with camo hoodies or Js when you could be sporting the outfit in which God sent Adam from the Garden of Eden? I mean of course the navy blazer, the selvage denim, the brown shoes and the “crisp, clean white shirt”. Note that the shirt must be “crisp, clean white” – if it is wrinkly, soiled, or egg-shell, you are already into the mode of historical contingency. Take a look at history’s greatest - how was Napoleon dressed a Waterloo? That’s right: navy blazer, denim jeans, “crisp, clean white shirt”. Wear nothing else, gent.

A Guide to City Life #2.5 - Digitization

Welcome to the Guide to City Life # 2.5 - "Digitization". In this module, you will learn how everything in the Universe is made up of matter, and how this matter has a ghost, called the Digital World.

A great God-King of old has had his name and deeds inscribed, via much slave-artisan labour, onto a might rockface. His glory shall last forever. We, petty, inscribe our girlish whimpers and cholics onto an ethereal medium, more fragile than a butterfly's wing, and we will be largely forgotten within the year.

Are you on the internet right now? If so, you are a nerd.

A book, common receptacle for tales of high adventure and cooking advice alike, can be "digitized". This means that it is opened, scanned or transcribed by a sweaty intern, quality checked by an even sweatier, fatter intern, and then placed onto a website or internet piracy den for distribution to the masses, where it will sit, unread, on hard drives and portable computers for as along as the fad for "literacy" is still a thing. We do not think this weird trend, a mere 3000 years old, will last much longer.

A word on optical character recognition, or OCR. OCR is a spell that checks the orthography of scanned images, transcribing coffee-stained pages of 18th century table-talk into hyperlinked text with random numbers and formatted so erratically as to please any Russian futurist.

What is Big Data? A single datum is a small cannibalistic tribesman that lives in your monitor. When a datum eats another datum, it becomes a data. When it has eaten enough, it becomes the Big Data of the tribe. The Big Data is not the same thing as the Chief Data or the Shaman Data.

If you spill water on your computer or laptop, it will die. Furthermore, you will forfeit your chance to pass into "digital limbo", a space created by the computer gods to capture and upload mortal consciousnesses when they die and save them on a massive Shared Drive underneath a folder marked "Lost Souls". It is a kind of Elysian field for memories, but better than absolute annihilation. Murdering a computer or laptop with water ensures you will never come here.

If you visit a digital thing often, you should bookmark it. Bookmarking is a means of taming a digital spirit. It will learn, through perseverance and treats, to come at your call, to recognize your scent, and to protect you from other, more hostile digital ghosts.

Don't click on spam email. Don't click on emails from your friends with suspicious taglines. Maybe it is spam. Or maybe your friends have gone insane, and have all of a sudden decided that "You need to click on this deal" is their only way of communicating the horror of their everyday existence to you.

Shopping online? Wear a cross.

This has been the Guide to City Life module # 2.5 - "Digitization". We hope, but we do not expect. If you feel up to it, our next module is not very expensive, nor very time consuming, but will make you feel like you are improving yourself. Check it out: #32291, "City Gutters - What to Eat, What not to Eat."

A Guide to City Life # 11111 - The Country

Welcome to the Guide to City Life #11111 - "The Country". In this module, you will sigh with bucolic longing for the dying ways of your forefathers as their sons and daughters are pulled to the city and forced to labour long days and nights on the loom - the last refrain of a half-forgotten folksong caught in their throat as the whirr of industrial progress drowns out their world-weary dialect.

The country is a place that has no skyscrapers. It barely has any buildings at all, and most of those are filled with livestock, harvested produce, or equipment - rusty, bone-like things with dulled teeth and a nameless smear.

The country is eerie. In it, men have less teeth, and women are interchangeable with tree-stumps. Country-folk, or as they are known to themselves, "us of the patch", have totally different traditions and methods than city dwellers. Unlike you or I or anyone clean, country folk live off the land. They pay homage to the dirt that controls their lives. Sometimes they make out with it.

Country dwellers emerged from rocks about 50,000 years ago. They have gone through a lot. They have been: cave men, neolithic farmers, slaves of the Pharaoh, free yeoman, serfs, peasants, kulaks, industrial farmers, smarmy grandsons of industrial farmers, and smarmy great-grandsons of industrial farmers who decide to buy an organic farm on the side.

Why do city dwellers need to know about the country at all? Unfortunately, the country is where food is made. This is a huge disadvantage for all of us, because it means the food we get is usually pretty dirty and needs to be washed. Or at least rubbed. If you've ever been to a Farmer's Market, you will notice boxes of dirty tubers and leaves. These are actually what vegetables look like when they come from the country. It takes a lot of spa treatment to get them fit for the grocery store or processed ramen soup mix.

In the country it is illegal to smart-mouth a scarecrow.

If your car breaks down in the country, I'm sure someone will be along shortly. Wasn't there a gas station a few miles back? Oh great. It's raining. Just fucking great. This is totally worth seeing your crazy family for.

Music in the country is known as "country", "bluegrass", "folk" or "hoot'en'tootenany". Music plays a large part in country life, because they have a lot to get out of their system. Country music can consist of ancient ballads or tunes that have been passed down from generation to generation, or, alternatively, cheap knock-offs of top 40 hits. The common thread is that all country music must be played on a raggedy string-bereft fiddle, spoons, jugs, washboards, tractor parts, or bags of teeth.

All country music must be run passed Satan before it is allowed to be played in the country.

Here is a list of famous country songs:

• Rock
• Stick
• Beethoven's 6th Symphony "The Pastoral"
• Tube
• The hucky munkin grammophone blues
• Cigarette butt
• Diesel

I bet you didn't realize some of your favourite bangers were actually long-treasured yokel bonfire tunes.

The country...Whispers. The country...Secrets. The country...The old, homey, bonified...The...

Thank you for tolerating the Guide to City Life # 11111 - "The Country". We won't have to deal with it for long, but until we can get the Great Concrete Age fully rolled-out, we'll have to at least try. Please hold your breath until the release of our next module, #4 - "World Cheeses, Local Cheeses, Warlords".

Wolf-Dog, Son of the Wolf and the Dog

The sled toppled over in the snow, but the wolf-dog Mario Hernandez leapt free of the chaos to face the foe before him. A lynx! In a flash he was at the beast’s throat, examining for dry skin. The other mutts cowered like dogs. Not for nothing was the great Sibero-Alaskan wolf-breed prized by Indians, Sourdoughs, and Pita Breads alike. Fierce, loyal, cunning, a little schmutzig, but you know, generally pretty agreeable - as all things, men and beast, are, in the shadow of the Arctic Circle.

“Get ‘im Mario!” cried Mandible Pierre. “Get ‘im in de face, colisse!”

Mario gazed intently at the savage beast. The beast gazed intently at Mario. Then started a round of Devil Sticks. Such is life in the North.

“Oh franchement!” cried Mandible Pierre as he kicked an empty can of erstwhile beans at his smarmy companion of the Gravy Curd.

Long weeks had the team been trailing – from Edmonton they set out, 16 men mushing a team of 21 sled-dogs. By the time they reached the Great Slave Lake those figures had mysteriously reversed - 21 dogs driving a doubtful team of 16 sled-men. In the Yukon country the figures had righted themselves once more and a decent 2 men were warily driving 8 dogs, of which Mario Hernandez was the undisputed Director of Communications.

Proud, cunning, fierce, and staggeringly large – none of these things were Mario Hernandez. A different breed of wolf-dog, Mario had inherited more atavisms and less chromosomes than the average arctic saltlick. Clearly he had that special, semi-retarded breed of Arctic Goonwolf in his pedigree. His head was massive and droopy. His eyes, red and hilariously wandering. His snout was as large as his legs were squat, and his moustache – so rare a “thing” in the dog world – was prominently bushy and usually pretty well maintained with some weird dog-brand of pomade.

“Mario Hernandez!” his first owner had named him, the Indian band-leader called Collectible Figurine. “For the beast looks like a Mario – what a moustache! Clearly the winner of our tribal Movember competition. No contest.”

After a bitter half hour of struggle – a lynx got hands at dem sticks – Mario Hernandez trotted up to his Poutine-stained owner, half a sandwich in his mouth and a bag of Alaskan-themed temporary tattoos tied to his bushy tail.

Such were the tallies on the great Excel Sheet of the Aurora Borealis. A promise made was a debt-unpaid – a debt of death, cold, harsh, or, if unavailable, at least a debt of severe frostbite in the posterior.

The team continued until nightfall, where they set up camp by the lone firelight, the dogs round in a ring howling their “oy veys!” to the nameless snows. Tucked in their furs, Mandible Pierre and his companion Brownie LeBrun discussed the life of the gold seeker and part-time stand-up comedian.

“C’est fucking nuts la. Cold as de tits.”

Mandible Pierre took a long draw from his pipe and frowned.

“’Bernac oui”.

As they were nodding off, they stared dreamily at the hungry eyes glowering at them from the fringes of the forest, beyond the reach of the firelight. Either they were being hounded by wolves, or these trees and bushes had, like, eyes.

Wolf-dog Mario Hernandez did not sleep that night. With droopy vigilance he stared down the pack of hungry wolves, tempting them with all his wolfish blood to just fucking try it. One time a daring silver she-wolf went to make a pass at him – in an instant Mario threw up the doggy gang sign of choice, and was troubled no more that night by silver wolves. One of the other dogs, however, was lured out of the camp to check out this really cool new lamb taco place for wolves – something something camino? I dunno, it got really good reviews so…But actually it was just a ploy, and the wolves totally ate that dog.

At dawn the men swore as they drank their morning coffee from the portable Keurig machine. Then they gathered their spirits, which were mostly marshmallow. They set-off on the sled, stopping at every really big hill for a good slide. Brownie LeBrun would occasionally bust out the GT-Racer for really radical slopes, while Mario Hernandez held up the signed poster of Brett Hull for encouragement.

Eventually the night fell once more, and the dreaded eyes returned. A wary Mario Hernandez started digging trenches. The two Frenchies however decided that there was nothing to fear but fear itself. They were so tired like, it was just a really long day. They were having none of it from some stupid hungry wolves, they are basically all the same anyway, they call at like 8 p.m. on a WEDNESDAY and don’t even know how to pronounce your name properly and just ugh. Not having it.

Another dog got ate that night lol.

When the dawn broke this time, the eyes did not dissipate. Not only that, they definitely had wolves attached to them. Bold wolves. Wolves with striped shirts and well formatted, single-page resumes. Wolves that weren’t afraid to neg a chick if they needed to. Mario Hernandez bristled. The Frenchmen shivered. The other dogs just flipped out. All the while, the wolves stared, licking their chops, tucking serviettes around their necks and banging rudely carved knives and forks against each other.

Mario Hernandez – wolf dog – had had enough. Every fibre in his body was attuned to the wild Salsa rhythms of the forest. His very blood was howling syncopated spasms of carnage and tacos. He was done. Breaking out of the protective ring of the fire, he trotted right up to the biggest, boldest, most aggro wolf in the pack. Mario Hernandez – wolf dog, son of wolf and dog. The big wolf started down at him, laughing weirdly.

And then Mario Hernandez did what he was born to do, what his father was born to do before him, and all the patriarchs of the Northern Wild – Mario Hernandez did that one act that defines a Northerner soul and heart from all other creatures. Growling maw to maw with the wolf, he opened his jaw and said in doggy argot:

“Fuckin’ cold eh? C’est frette icitte!”

Bitching about the weather unites all creatures under the frozen stare of the Midnight Sun. 

A Guide to City Life # ٣٩ - "City Wisdom"

Welcome to the Guide to City Life # CHARNOTRECOGNIZED! "City Wisdom". In this module, you will learn some of the basic chunks of speakwisdom that will serve as your urban astrolabe. They will help you navigate the steel and concrete sea, avoiding pitfalls, pitbulls, pity parties, and pizzicato murder.

What is wisdom? Wisdom can be defined as a gumball machine for proverbs. What is a gumball machine? A gumball machine was an archaic form of sugar infection that involved the exchange of coins for treated rubber.

A proverb is a punchline for the cosmic joke of inevitable failure. Wisdom is an artform that originated in the desert. In the desert, death was dealt out quickly and harshly to nomadic peoples. When some kind, hoary-bearded patriarch was bitten by an ape spider, his dark bearded relatives would, instead of seeking help or praying to the Lord Johobo, reply with a quick punchline or proverb. Thus the prevalence of proverbs in books of desert divinity:

There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Oh snap.

Although wisdom has helped to irritate men for all of history, many of its proverbs have grown irrelevant, if not outright baffling. The city man can hardly expect to relate to the old Arabic proverb الثروة تأتي كالسلحفاة وتذهب كالغزال  because he probably cannot understand old Arabic. If he could, he would  be faced with a new problem of interpretation: what is a turtle? Why a gazelle? Did I run out of staples again?

The city has, happily, grown its own pod of proverbs for the modern proletarian. Here are a few of the better ones, with a commentary to explain their significance.

Kill mosquitoes.
Commentary: Mosquitoes are awful and deserve death.

I've never even seen a goddamn Moose.
Commentary: Less frequently seen than one might suppose, the Moose is a creature of note.

Don't order the beef shawarma are you nuts? That meat has been there for like, 3 days.
Commentary: Vegetarians are usually vindicated through patience and observation.

I like Solange better anyway.
Commentary: In the city, the fine arts are judged by both aesthetic merit, and aesthetic anti-merit (or hype).

Wait, the purple bus tickets expired already? 
Commentary: In the city, "public transportation" is a by-word for death by strangulation.

A fool and his money are easily awesome.
Commentary: No one is impressive by city standards until they make money for spending money.

A stitch in time is a sci-fi novel.
Commentary: Literacy, a common form of improv theatre.

Eat around the Bananas dad, they are just empty calories.
Commentary: This is derived from an old Berlin poem that ends with the lines "girth equals mirth".

Prep your materials and marinate the night before.
Commentary: That which is juicy, is kingly.

Thank you for putting up with A Guide to City Life # CHARNOTRECOGNIZED! "City Wisdom". If this module has been helpful to you, we know a Nigerian prince that could make you quite wealthy. To proceed to the next module, simply think happy thoughts, and then crow.

Sergei Eisenstein's Vine

Recently discovered under a pile of soot under a pile of rubble under a pile of V for Vendetta masks, fragments of a screenplay for Sergei Eisenstein’s lost masterpiece Vine. A multi-second cinematic project, Vine was intended to capture the rhizomatic and variegated forms of human depravity under the economic regime of capital. Eisenstein’s montage technique would have been deployed here to its fullest effect, showing a Bakhtanian eruption of 20^th century man’s most proletarian bodily functions. Although never completed due a complicated ménage of censorship, bureaucratic red-tape, Stalinist politics and significant bowel trouble, the film’s tattered screenplay stands as a testament to its projected grandeur and theoretical import. Here we present the first publication of this fascinating piece of cinematic “fuck your goddamn film thesis”, not seen by human eyes for over 70 years.

Vine, Or, Ten Vids That Shook The World

  

PART 1: THE ODESSA SMACK CAM (Одесса шлепок камеры)

In Odessa, the townspeople stand around the harbour steps bumpin they jams.

Title: In those memorable days, the town of Odessa lived in peace with the rebellious jerks of the Battleship Versace.

An Imperial guard is standing on the steps, minding his own business. Meanwhile off to the side, a sailor fills his hand with rotten caviar and creeps up behind him, arm poised for a devastating smack to the back of the sailor’s head.

Title: SMACK CAM!

The sailor smacks the guard, who falls backward down the steps, knocking over townsfolk left and right. He sets into a downward plunge a perilous baby pram, which does three forward flips before landing upright and flinging the baby into a basketball net.

Cue Music: IF PIRUS AND CRIPS ALL GOT ALONG

PART 2: TERIO, CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION (Истры Дитя революции)

The child emerges from the pram and is noticeably overweight. He stares into the camera and starts to gyrate, before beginning a full-on Twerk.

Title: Within the hearing of the Tsarist Boosie N*ggas, brotherly cheers sound across the water.

Close up shots of the people of Odessa with tears in their eyes, cheering for the glory of the worker’s revolution.

PART 3: DON’T DROP THAT GUNH-GUNH-GUNH (Не бросайте этот пистолет пистолет пистолет)

A shot of the great architectural wonders of Happy Moscow. The camera flits back and forth between the rapid pace of workers in a foundry to the glory of the Red Square, to the cameraman’s unwavering eye.

A gunshot.

The cameraman drops his camera, and starts running.

Title: Can’t even take no vine in Moscow w/o bein’ shot at!!!

PART 4: TWERKERS OF THE WORLD (Туъркинг мира)

Title: Twerkers of the world can’t be comparing…Shock Twerker

A big bottomed proletarian woman is rhythmically pulling levers in a factory. Unlike her comrades, however, she does so in syncopated motions, bent over, and squatting to the beat of an Ernst Busch Worker’s song bumpin over a speaker.

Her colleagues look at her skeptically.

PART 5: BOURGEOISIE BE LIKE… (Буржуазия как)

Title: Bourgeois be like…

A shot of a rich Tsarist merchant with a monocle and stovepipe hat, asking with raised pinky the ambassador’s wife “do you have any Grey Poupon?”

Title: Proletarian be like…

A shot of a worker yelling at a factory cafeteria woman “WHERE DE FRENCHS AT YA BISH?”

PART 6: WHEN THE BEAT DROP (Когда бить падает)

A shot of the Red Army marching.

Cue Music: STRANGE FRUIT HANGIN’

Army waits for the drop. When the drop hits, army get TURNT UP

Cue Music: WE COULDA BEEN SOMEBODY

PART 7: FATHERS STAY IN YOUR SONS LIVES! (Отцы, оставаться в жизни вашего сына!)

A shot of the great statue of Tsar Nicholas II surrounded by an enraged mob.

Title: He says he never smokes Turkish opium or eats p*ssy.

The mob begins to pull down the statue.

Title: “I have enough caviar to eat at home!”

The mob successfully pull down the statue. An orgiastic cheer. The citizens of Petrograd storm the Winter Palace and start raiding the wine cellars. Trotsky in Lenin pull up in a truck and start making it rain roubles.

Title: Meanwhile, extreme ratchet behaviour from the Ratchet Mechanic’s Worker’s Council

Mechanics waving ratchets in triumph. Peasants high fiving factory workers. Shouts of “WORLD STAR REVOLUTION!” echo across the land of Russia.

PARTS 8-10 were, unfortunately, eaten by a Stalin for breakfast on November 16 1936.

A Guide to City Life #237 - Sirens, Alarms, Beeps, and Other Warning Signs

Welcome to the Guide to City Life #237 - "Sirens, Alarms, Beeps, and Other Warning Signs". In this module, you will learn about fear.

In the city, men and women are often about their everyday activities: buying milk, slapping bugs, sarcasm, sighing at birds of ill omen, or brewing soup. They do not usually have time to stop to think of the grim beyond. Sirens, alarms, and beeps are institutionalized auditory reminders to us all that, as Dr. Phil once said, "although we none of us like where we are going, we aren't ever going to get there anyway. Fuck."

A siren is a brightly coloured screaming hat for cars. Hearing a siren usually indicates that someone in your immediate vicinity is in danger of living longer than he or she needs to, and that the Universe, cruel and indifferent to individual plaints of injustice, has provided him or her with a means of escape.

If you hear a siren, be sure to think about everything you love with a cheap, super-imposed 3D Pog style skull overtop of it, with a graffiti text spelling out "Satan Rules". Then go back to your game of whist, or your nap, or you precious YouTube one-upmanship. No harm will come to you yet.

There are also alarms. An alarm is a building's way of telling you it doesn't feel so great and that it is probably going to barf. It could just be a toaster burning some toast. It could be a gas attack. In any case, follow the alarm sound to the nearest puzzled office worker and be sure to shrug your shoulders. You must then put on your coat in a leisurely manner, and ask your co-workers if it's worth it to bring your laptop or is this just, like, a drill. Be sure to grumble when the floor fire-person tells you not to bring your scalding hot coffee into the stairwell. Once you are outside and safely away, huddled in a group of sheep-like untermenschen, make light-hearted jokes about the meeting being late, and look into the building for signs of those who did not make it out in time to avoid the grim reaper.

Many people think alarms all sound the same, but to the well-trained ear, an alarm can be as explicit as a news report. To interpret an alarm, count the length of time between each sound wave. The Government has a secret standard code: 13 nanoseconds means you will all be fine. 15 nanoseconds means the alarm may be serious. 23 nanoseconds means your floor was chosen for the "fool's sacrifice" at the spring equinox, and that you should all accept your fate gracefully.

Beeps are also important. When your phone beeps, you have forgotten something important. You have forgotten to rise from slumber; or an important meeting that will affect the rest of your life is passing you by like a grey cloud before the Moon. Beeps are clever but tricky. Learn to respect them.

The ear is not the only means by which the Big Other wants to discipline your fear gland. Although less popular than auditory warnings, "signs" are also extant, and can provide useful information about how we are all going to die. For instance, a hand with flesh and acid peeling off it (WHMIS number 32) clearly indicates that in this area men do not need to wash their hands after going to the johnson. Or take the classic raised index finger pointing to the constellation Vega (WHMIS number Q), which means the Soviets have taken to the stars once again.

Many of our warning signs were originally designed by sad Reformation artists in the 17th century.

This has been A Guide to City Life module #237 - "Sirens, Alarms, Beeps, and Other Warning Signs". If you would like to review this module before the quiz, tick the "I am humble" box at the bottom of your screen. If you are confident that you got everything in this module, no pity will be had.

Click somewhere likely for the next module, number #238 - "Adults With Comically Childish Handwriting".