[Listening : Choking Victim. Cheers Evan]
BadLit > Diving Into MUFF done some kinda pingtrackbackthing. It lead me to Esoteric Rabbit. On the Festival : “The informality of the setup really added to opening night’s already prevalent air of alternativeness (Lloyd Kaufman was in attendance, screening a couple of scenes from his upcoming Poultrygeist), not to mention the festival’s in general, which is one of the best things it has going for it.” On Wolstencroft : “…to the extent that his entire project is about not making concessions to anyone, at any level or on any issue, his lack of decorum, so to speak, is both completely in character and politically loaded.” Speaking of character, Toby the Punk Poofy Cat assassinates Wolstencroft’s in this entry, unloading both barrels (metaphorically speaking). A sample of Toby’s invective :
I’m always amazed by how much people kid themselves, that is, believe their own bullshit eg. John Howard, George Bush, Kim Ill Jung [or even Kim Jong-Il], all the powermongering fuckwits earnestly believe the guff they ladle out, especially when it’s to do with their own prowess and activities. A case in point is Richard [Wolstencroft], the “director” of MUFF, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. In his brochure for this year’s crap-fest he writes, so badly it’s almost unreadable, that he’s a true-blue supporter of the grass-roots Auz Film Industry, that the govt. funders are a bunch of tokenistic, mean Philistines and that he and his gang are revolutionaries, eschewing money and fame for cinematic bean sprouts and tee-pees in Utopia, or somesuch nonsense, all the time quoting Heidegger, promoting German expressionism and squawking anarchism. Who does he think he’s kidding? 14 year old Hollywood wannabes?
This jumble of contradictory sensibilities hid the nature of fascisms as “revolutionary” regimes, whose rejection of liberal and democratic modernity aimed not for a return to a bygone era but to the establishment of a new order, hierarchical, authoritarian, non-egalitarian, nationalistic, even racial, but not backward-looking: fascist mysticism is biologized, its cult of technology aesthetisized, its scorn for democracy founded on the mobilization of the masses, and its rejection of individualism proclaimed in the name of a “community of the people,” sealed by war.
