Contact

The only reason this blog still exists is because you can put a google latitude thing here, which shows my current physical location at all times  ---->

otherwise you can find me at my Log, tone

You can find me on fb, chamber, twitter.

Look up my projects at specious.us

as always, call me on 0414 26 7881 62 (that's +61426788162 for those of you OS)

or at benjamin.george.griffin@gmail.com

B

The Death of A Violinist

Multās per gentēs et multa per aequora vectus
adveniō hās miserās, frāter, ad īnferiās,
ut tē postrēmō dōnārem mūnere mortis
et mūtam nēquīquam alloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortūna mihī tētē abstulit ipsum.
heu miser indignē frāter adēmpte mihi,
nunc tamen intereā haec, prīscō quae mōre parentum
trādita sunt trīstī mūnere ad īnferiās,
accipe frāternō multum mānantia flētū,
atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē.

Catulus 101

A note died in my ear here at your ... funeral.


I need to call it that, even if the program here says celebration.


A note died in my ear today. My left ear. A tone hummed to a singular pitch.


This note held itself there sharp and clear with a direct line to my brain, then died, as that tiny hair in my cochlear sang its last song, and hummed out forever.


A note died in my ear today, while I cried through that recording of your Orchestral performance.


Here while I cried while H intones, tearful but clear, and with entendre to spare, that he cannot imagine his life without you... and I cried.


A note died in my ear. A single hair, a tone, and I hear the celebrant say "that his music spoke for him" as a way of explaining your few words.... I remember your small mouth. H and I had so many for that whole trip, I was positively bursting with them every time we stopped for some Harak and a taste of the local thing. A small mouth and few words.


I regret that you took to the back seat of the car, that you weren't there with H in the passenger seat next to him. I promise I'll be a great friend to him in your absence. I promise you that. I also promise to live up to the memory of the love that S described in her letter. Those heroic qualities that I barely saw in you -- that you "loved enough to forgive." I will do this in memory of you because a note died in my ear this day.


---The ocean! Oh, the Ocean. I didn't even know that we shared that. The great silences of the ocean. I will remember you in the ocean. I will remember it for you. I will be there with it, and i will see my own soul and yours in its passions and its silences. And I will cry salty tears into it for you.


I will regret thinking you cheap, rather than frugal. I will try to do this of others too, and not let my generosity be a lever for my anger and resentment. I will be better to people in this way, in memory of you.


A note died in my ear today. I will never hear that tone again, but i will do all these things in memory of you.

frāter, avē atque valē.

DEATH FOR FLATSCREENS!

Forgive the drama-title.

I've spent the afternoon here in a delightful Berlin restaurant fending off ignorance, personal abuse and some of the most vile and abusive sentiments that I've heard since I left Beruit last month. All up it's charmed, but it hurts the heart.


While thoughtful fellow-travellers have been making sense of the debate between pundits, I've been slumming it on facebook with the ordinary folk whose wild statements might have made a fascist blush 70 years ago. I suppose a Proper Fascist would probably have been organising some brownshirts to sort out the rabble. We can probably expect that tomorrow, fools will be eating their words or retreating into denial. 


My response to the utter rot that i've read has been to post this, with mirthful enthusiasm:

DEATH FOR TRAINERS! DEATH FOR FLATSCREENS! BRING IN THE ARMY DAVID CAMERON! SAVE OUR STUFF FROM THESE YOUUUUUTHS!!!!1!!!one!!!!
(the second post here will likely earn me a dreaded facebook friend delete from a fool I barely knew I had)

Since arriving from Lebanon, Palestine and Israel via Turkey three weeks ago, I've been wondering how to write about the Arab Spring. How to write, even just to think, about this 'historical moment' where youth are falling over themselves to hit the streets around the world because they've been at the butt end of things. How to even get people to pay attention. It appears that a bunch of angry black kids have done it for me. But. They've also changed my mind about the nature of the beast ...


My attention was first drawn by Tunisia, then Egypt. And up until today I've been thinking of it (and arguing whenever the opportunity presented itself) that this was all a wonderful thing, and that the sceptics should be looking to 1848 Paris more than their cryptoracist fears of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.


And I stand by all of that, of course, but now that the wave of unrest has started crashing in the west ... or (to be fair, and to offer something against thee moral panic that I've been tormented by all morning) now that this wave of unrest has started lapping against the shore of the west, I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't all a little more like 1968 Paris.


That even your articulate old lefty sounds a bit weak, even at their stunning primetime best, and I found more in this almost satirical piece of comment quite uncomfortable to read.


'll quote at comfortable length from a wonderful piece by Mark Bahnisch, who had a generous supply of good scotch at hand while we strategised about what to do with John Howard in Sydney some years ago, while Mark lamented the 'Labor' party that was to replace the even more lamentable man.

"Strangely, other than the repeated mantra that there is "no excuse" for looting, I've been surprised by how guarded the political classes have been on this occasion. I assumed that moralistic rhetoric would be raining down by now, focused on absent fathers, bringing back the birch, national service and banning computer games. But no. Could it be that the absence of politics, of sociological rationale, and of socialist ambition in these events means that they are, from a Rightwing perspective, comparatively safe? While they are, at least 'for themselves', acts of egoistic, hedonistic, moral transgressions, there is no need for Tory MPs to take to the airwaves and describe them as such. By acting as if there is 'no such thing as society', the rioters are already doing this for them."

Do read him at length. Aside from the fact that i have a scotch debt to repay, and I owe the praise, it is also both an excellent and provocative piece of thought.


It certainlty made me rethink things.


Because it's true what these reactionary voices keep shouting, and being pandered to by David Cameron and The Sun. They're my natural political enemies, but they're right: These kids aren't political. They are criminal. It's just that human being in their right mind should punish a crime against property with death.


And that's what They are calling for.


Should one speculate on whether we will have Death for Flatscreens?


If you want a cogent piece from the Marxist left that robustly answers the witty (?) criticism of Mark, then I heartilly recommend this wsws article. I've my own problems with them, but that says nothing about the brilliance and coherance of their perspective and their jarring prose. Try this, which, being a cogent well constructed article, it does not leap straight into ...

"Moreover, long-simmering discontent over worsening social conditions and police brutality is being completely passed over by the official political parties and the media. Manifestly, police killings are acceptable to these layers, but any response to it is to be met with the full force of the state."