A Triple-Scoop of Revolution!

Fun Fact: Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman lived in a ménage à trois relationship with other Russian émigré anarchist Alexander Berkman, and a young anarchist artist named Fedya. They all ran an ice-cream parlour together in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1891.

I think this would make for a great sit-com; a nineteenth century ice-cream parlour run by a ménage à trois of Russian anarchists. The scene is set!

It was whilst I was imagining all the japes that could occur in this sit-com (which I'm tempted to title A Triple-Scoop of Revolution!), that I remembered I still have the first volume of Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life, out on loan from the library. A quick scan of my bookshelves and I located it - it is now 15 years overdue! I think we've all got a book like this, never returned to a library we've long since moved away from. On principle, I certainly don't condone this kind of thing, but in my case the book eventually came in handy - 15 years down the track. I'm thinking of ringing Eastern Regional Libraries to ask if I can renew it, as that would clear things up both bureaucratically and ethically. So I found the passage where she describes the ice-cream parlour;

Our savings consisted of fifty dollars. Our landlord, who had suggested the idea, said he would lend us a hundred and fifty dollars. We secured a store, and within a couple of weeks Sasha's (aka Berkman) skill with hammer and saw, Fedya's with his paint and brush, and my own good German housekeeping training succeeded in turning the neglected ramshackle place into an attractive lunch-room. It was spring and not yet warm enough for an ice-cream rush, but the coffee I brewed, our sandwiches and dainty dishes, were beginning to be appreciated, and soon we were kept busy till early morning hours.

In the sit-com, the problem of the weather not being warm enough for ice-cream could be an on-going joke - their inability to sell ice-cream is always explained away by them as being due to the weather.

Battleship

I've been playing Battleship against a friend via email and SMS. We've each got a board at home. I just got an email from said friend, stating that a friend of her housemate moved all her ships around. Idiot! Now we have to start again!

Nechayev and the Black Hand

I finished my essay for the History of War subject, which compared the experiences of Aborigines and Maoris in their conflicts with European settlers. I should receive the results in the next few days. Right now I'm in the thick of an essay on Russian anarchist terrorism of the late nineteenth century - this is for my other current subject; Terrorism: Causes & Consequences. There was something else I was going to write about, but it now escapes me. Last week I picked up Alice Coltrane's Illuminations LP for $5, which was quite a find. Anyway, here's a couple of excerpts I enjoyed from Andrew Sinclair's An Anatomy of Terror: A History of Terrorism... On the shifty Nechayev, the "godfather of nihilism";

Nechayev left Switzerland to bring about a revolution in Russia. He formed a society and a newspaper named The Retribution of the People. He organized groups of conspirators on the principles of the Illuminanti - each cell of five members had a chief who reported to a central committee, which was responsible to Nechayev alone. Defied for his authoritarianism by Ivanov, a member of the committee, Nechayev killed him in a park, where his body was weighted with bricks and thrown into a pond. Nechayev implicated other revolutionaries in a blood brotherhood of the crime.

...and on the Pan-Slavist secret society the Black Hand;

Its initiation ceremonies were ghoulish. The insignia was a clenched hand around a skull and crossbones beside a dagger, a bomb and a phial of poison. The oath was not Christian, but 'by the sun which warms me, by the earth which feeds me, by God and by the blood of my ancestors, by my honour and my life.' The cell pattern of the Illuminanti and the Obladina was reproduced: each recruit had to enlist five new members. These small groups were known as a 'hand' and were led by a 'thumb', the only one in contact with other groups. All were sworn in across a table covered with black cloth, which held a candle and a cross, a poniard and a revolver. Death was the instant answer to any treachery.

More on MySpace

What's the deal with music pages on MySpace? Do people really think they're communicating with the artists? When people leave messages on John Fahey's MySpace page, they surely know that a) he's dead, and b) even if he was alive, he surely wouldn't be checking in on his MySpace page to read the comments left by people (or who knows, maybe he would). And when people leave messages for, say, the Rolling Stones or Madonna or Coldplay or whoever, they surely must know that their message, which simply reads "I love your music", is not going to be read by the artist. Or do they. The whole phenomenon has not yet ceased to mystify me. I'm sure MySpace is the equivalent of the 'blogging revolution' for people with essentially nothing to say.

Aries Apartments

The north-west corner of Nicholson Street and Brunswick Road has, for as long as I recall, been a vacant block littered with scrub, weeds, and rubbish. I've been told by those who've lived in the area longer, that it used to be a petrol station. A billboard was recently erected, announcing that the land will soon become Aries Apartments. This is not an inherently bad thing - unlike some people, I have nothing against apartments at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the advertising campaign is pretty tacky; promoting itself as a slice of European sophistication. Apart from being within walking distance of the excellent Maria's Coffee House, there's nothing particularly 'European' about the area, unless you count the overall Greek influence on Brunswick, although even this has dissolved at the outer edges of Brunswick, which is where these apartments are located.

Then there's this 'artists' impression' of what life will be like at Aries Apartments:

I'm guessing the depiction of public transport in some way alludes to a 'European' lifestyle. The #96 tram heads into the city, and that bus route (#504) runs between Clifton Hill and Moonee Ponds, but I can't imagine people with aspirations of European sophistication actually catching the bus to Clifton Hill.

But what's most puzzling about this picture is that it places the city skyline out where Brunswick West would normally be. If you were looking at the proposed building from that angle, the city would actually be behind you. And the quaint terrace houses framed by lush greenery - is in reality a couple of ugly '80s brick warehouses. At least they have Our Lady Help in the right place.

Incompatibility

I can't log into my old Blogger account, because it's been merged into a Blogger Beta account, and because of this; "Unfortunately, you cannot post a comment on a non-beta blog or claim a mobile blog using your Google Account. These features are coming soon". Lame.

Clausewitz

From John Keegan's A History of Warfare:

In short, it is at the cultural level that Clausewitz's answer to his question, What is war?, is defective. That is not altogether surprising. We all find it difficult to stand far enough outside our own culture to perceive how it makes us, as individuals, what we are. Modern Westerners, with their commitment to the creed of individuality, find the difficulty as acute as others elsewhere have. Clausewitz was a man of his times, a child of the Enlightenment, a contemporary of the German Romantics, an intellectual, a practical reformer, a man of action, a critic of his society and a passionate believer in the necessity for it to change.. He was a keen observer of the present and a devotee of the future. Where he failed was in seeing how deeply rooted he was in his own past, the past of the professional officer class of a centralised European state. Had his mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension - and it was already a very sophisticated mind indeed - he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.