Never On A Sunday

I should explain the reference to ‘prostitutes’ below. Was I hasty or dismissive? Perhaps ‘strippers’ is kinder? At any rate, the actuality is neither, as the girls are alone in front of a camera. Two of the immediate signs of gharbazdegi as it manifests itself in Catholic, Roman alphabetized, occidental, post-Communist Poland are a) luxury commodities such as coffee, once parsimoniously eked out half-spoon by half-spoon, are now liberally (sic) shoveled into the cup and b) the former glories of three State run TV channels are now the euro-glories of 999 cable channels. The father-in-law recently had this service installed. Never mind that 600 of the channels are radio stations from Zagreb and Tirane, after about channel 20 they are all premium pay channels like HBO, Fox, Canal+ and so on. But as one scrolls through the higher numbers late at night, with the sound down, there are clusters of odd grouped thematics. 343 to 370 is dial-up interactive telephone porn. (Go above channel 370, however, and you get into the really bizarre: small audience random religious broadcasts. The objective is the same, however: to obtain your Mastercard number. Now that’s really scary. Where’s our Martin Luther of the irreligious ether?) The below-mentioned holding pages are rather PG: girls on sofas, or Betty Page type poses. OK, PG-13. Of course, if you possess the secret code (a credit card) you can go beyond these guardians. The women look bored. Some of them scratch their arses, or fall off the sofa while trying to gracefully turn round. Some have the remote control themselves (is this a cottage industry?) and zoom in and out randomly. I assume they are alone in a basement somewhere (Italy, apparently) and have been told not to be too provocative until people start paying. Though there are some young things cavorting in bikinis, most of the ladies seem to be in their 40s, pastured out from the harder slog of actually doing porn, and shoved over into the less strenuous task of just looking porny. I sincerely hope so, for their sakes. The younger girls look as though they think they have one over on the punters. They don’t, of course, and will be 40 too, one day. And although Lenin did not (as far as we know) have 999 ‘hot’ cable channels, he did nevertheless predict that late capitalism would be forced into many odd corners, appropriating all aspects of our so-called private lives, and inserting as many middlemen as possible between ourselves and the end objects of our desires, be those desires apples, tractor parts or ladies of the night. Lacan, I believe, went further, and insisted that new surplus ‘desires’ would have to be created, then profit wrung from them. Curiously, by investing the ‘object’ with precisely its own lack. In other words, coffee can be made more expensive and profitable by removing the caffeine and selling premium high cost decaf; sweetness can be abstracted, repackaged and resold as aspartamine; and sex can be reduced to commerce, then made virtual, and finally buried behind a curtain of keystrokes. Remembering also that fragmentation is not a simple quantitative division, but a qualitative change of state, and that the former saving grace of television, namely that its very lack of choice unified the viewers into a small number of open-ended camps with a commonly shared set of (pop)cultural references, has now morphed into a shattered set of isolated mini-groups whose mutual knowledge and interest asymptotically approaches zero. There’s even a new word for it, ‘narrowcast’, as opposed to ‘broadcast’. And ‘niche channels’ which, frankly, when you are scanning the 370s sounds like a gynecological term. Hmm. And I got that (more or less) from the former head of Canal + France, now a Socialist Mayor in Cap d’Ag, near Nice. So there. (He also told me to spend more time with my baby son than on building a career, his main regret vis-à-vis his own children, so he has a lot to answer for/be thanked for)
As Elias Canetti said, ”the most sinister movement of the 20th century was the avoidance of the concrete.” And he said that long before the internet.
Perhaps the project for the 21st century should be to locate and celebrate the concrete? What do you say?
Another more close-to-home quote, from Green of Scritti Politti (the pop group whose fansite is up at the top of this page). When asked how he felt about the ‘insults’ of ‘pretentious’ and ‘intellectual’ once thrown at him, he said he could think of worse, for example – ‘unpretentious and pig-ignorant’. I couldn’t agree more.