Returning to repairmen POMPEL&PILT (dir. Ebbe Ording), we made some investigations into whether this fine piece of TV entertainment, in the form of puppeteering 1960s style is available to young and eager minds of today. And lo and behold. NRK, the Norwegian State Broadcaster is now publishing the series as a DVD for the meager price of NKR 199 (USD 28.7123 according to http://www.xe.com/ucc/). From the web jacket:

Puppet show in black and white, with figures that were always contained in a large hall, without walls or ceiling, but equipped with doors leading nowhere. They argued incessantly, and lived in perennial fear of Gorgon the Custodian and his ravenous son. http://butikken.nrk.no/butikk/product246.html

POMPEL&PILT was first aired on NRK in 1969, and then re-broadcast several times. In around 1985 the pressure from pedagogical quarters on NRK that the series had anti-pedagogical content made the broadcaster submit that it was not "fit for children." In 1994 they caved in to contrary pressure, however, and transmitted it one more time. The current head of programming for youth and children in NRK, Kalle Fürst, calls it a "classic of cultural history." It was "pioneering and surrealist. I can't fathom how NRK in 1969 dared to put resourses into a series as peculiar as this, completely absurd in form and content." However, it is not of "sufficient quality" for children of today, even if Fürst promises to consider broadcasting it to an "adult audience, at night." He doesn't shy away from recommending the DVD on sale from his employer's sidekick on-line store, though. And hence and in all ways demonstrates his loyalty to Employer and Provider. Well done, Kalle. (http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=38456.)

Anyway, this post was supposed to introduce the series. Bjørg and Arne Mykle wrote the script and made the dolls. There's photographs with them and the dolls at http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=38462. If you look closely you'll see that Pompel (the older chap with the tired eyes) and Pilt (younger and with more hair) don't have mouths.

There's another photo, in black and white, at http://home.powertech.no/shoiem/turidg/pp/reparatorene.html with Pompel to the left, Pilt to the right, and Gorgon the Custodian in the center. It's kinda difficult to explain the story line, if there is one. Child psychologist Thore Langfeldt describes the mood of POMPEL&PILT as "chilling, funny and surprising" at the same time. Professor of Media Sociology Eva Bakøy explains that it made a radical break with the norm of children's television of the 1960s and 70s.

"It has no happy ending, doesn't offer a sense of that 'everything will be OK', and it communcates a chaotic and incomprehensible world," she says, adding that, first and foremost, "it was FUNNY" (http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=38460). There's more on Bakøy's research at http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2002/juni/1022772677 (in Norwegian).

We have managed to ascertain that there is at least five episodes of POMPEL&PILT available, and that there might be a sixth episode made. The titles of the first five parts are:
1. The repairmen are coming
2. The repairmen are returning
3. The repairmen are coming and coming
4. The repairmen are coming again
5. The repairmen are returning again

The disputed sixth episode is probably entitled "The revenge of the repairmen."

The music was performed by Arild Boman on organ, Helge Hurum, flute, and Espen Rud, drum sponge and percussion. The drum sponge was made on the basis of an old matress, onto which a number of bells and other objects were attached. When the repairmen walked around in their vast, open spaces, the sound from the drum sponge would evoke a sense of uncertainty and polyphony.

As repairmen Pompel and Pilt move around in this building, or whatever it is, trying to negotiate their way past door that lead nowhere, or back into the same room as they had just left, they meet several characters, some friendly, some not. Gorgon the Custodian appears to be the one who has comissioned Pompel and Pilt to repair something. This observation is based on that every time they encounter him, they ask if he has anything that needs repair. Upon hearing the question, Gorgon goes off on a long harangue consisting of words that resemble or sound like "repair," like a grown-up lost in her or his own long, incomprehensible sentences. When Gorgon enters into this kind of trance, Pompel and Pilt seize on the opportunity to run away, but always ends up in more difficult and mysterious situations.

They also meet Gorgon's wife and his rapacious son, Gorgon the Custodian's Assistant. Then there's also the Moffedill, who gets by on eating keys, and the numerous Migrants, who look somewhat like bicycle pumps with funny rasta hair and necks that keep extending and contracting, while they whistle. They are always busy and confusing.

Pompel and Pilt never really get to repair anything. Their world is not only confusing and absurd. It is also beyond repair.

You can download some soundbites to get a further sense of the atmosphere in the series. Each episode contains a scene where Pompel reminds Pilt that now he should surely understand that it is better with two repairmen than with no repairmen: http://home.powertech.no/shoiem/turidg/lyd/bedre.wav.

Gorgon the Custodian goes into his strange trance-like state here: http://home.powertech.no/shoiem/turidg/lyd/gorgon.wav.

A makeshift translation of the first part of the first episode is available from Utopos: http://home.no.net/torgfje/utopos/pandp.html.

It is now slightly updated, with some stage directions added, and some wording changed here and there.

On 6 Apr 2004 at 17:15, Michael Geary wrote on lit-ideas:

Do you like my subject line (gigawatt chivalrous inflammatory handyman drainage)? All life['s] a random event. So it's randomness we must order into meaning. Here is a perfect phrase to practice on, say I. I suggest a contest to determine what that subject line is all about.

Dear Mr Geary and Judge(s)

We here at the Utopos Office of Spam Encryption (UOSE) would like to submit the following entry in your contest. It was devised by taking advantage of author Diderik Humble Jr.s self-devised Encryption Routine, programmed in Pascal, to produce the following:

gigawatt, proper name, possibly a symbolic representation of a distant relative of President Megawati, who is up for elections. here it serves as interpellative, as in

* gigawatt, i want you to do something for me, and here comes what it is...

which renders the proper transcription thus:

1. "Gigawatt, [perform the] 'chivalrous, inflammatory handyman drainage' [now, please]"

which makes it obvious that the implied narrator instructs Gigawatt to operate a particular KIND OF handyman drainage. These considerations leads us to the question of what the "chivalrous [and] inflammatory" type of handyman drainage would be. On this the Routine remains silent.

On behalf of UOSE,
phatic
[sign]
editor

WITTERS_LOOP.BAS

10 GOTO 10

Five indications that you might have spent too much time on-line

1. You double click the remote
2. You tilt your head when smiling
3. You turn on your computer on your way from bed to take your morning shower
4. You get up at 3am to use the toilet, and just have to check your mail
5. Your on-line affair has lasted longer than any other affair you've had

Darwin P. Johnson
president

PS!!!!

i only get four out of five. (i watch streaming video.)

Adapted from Jørgen at http://www.humor911.com/femting/

Researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering
the music industry's central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying
file sharing has little impact on CD sales.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62871,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

I received a letter from Diderik Humble jr. the other day. He's arrived in Uqbar now, and the mysterious story of the life and adventures of hisself, his erstwhile "companion" Sinsemilla, Managing Director Stimos of the TRU Corporation, and Inta, delegate to the Intra-Paracelcist biannual convention at Hotel Rio Grande do Sul downtown Uqbar, will continue. Perhaps we will be offered answers to significant questions like who is Mundt? Is he, indeed, the Master of the Mansion? etc. As I have been swarmed with enthusiastic, and occasionally lewd, mails from devoted readers, urging me to continue the tale of our friends in Uqbar, I have had little time to actually write down the story as its writ. Hence and therefore and without further ado, let me cede the floor to Diderik Humble jr., by way of aforementioned letter.

*

Umfuweto, phatic,

I hope all is well back in The Specter of Kabool, and that you're managing in your bungalow on the Bagdad Banks. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations, and Sinsemilla sends her regards as well.

Uqbar isn't much like it's rumoured to be. The old buildings are still here, sure, but there's a certain barrenness about them. It's like returning to a future that somehow got lost in the past.

Anyway, the other day I attended a lecture on "The Mirror of Sport, or Couching the Performer" at the Uqbar Institute of Titting and Tatting. I just missed one Prof McEnroy's paper on "Once you Pop you can't Stop: How Nike Changed my Life and Other(ed) Observations." The conference was obviously a success, and, amid the pools of plastic glasses filled with champagne and mini-sandwiches, I managed to lodge myself in Auditorium Terminus, just as one Prof Kingfisher took the podium in elegant strides, his coat whirling about him like the flaps of a bat-costume, briefly disguising his limp. As he turned to face the audience, I realized that he was a rather oldish professor, possibly emeritus, I figured, but with a distinct and forceful voice. Professor Kingfisher wore dark, slim sunglasses, matching his silver-gray mane and black suit. I'll copy some of my lecture notes here. I hope you find some use of them, or not.

Diderik Humble jr's lecture notes

Lacan's Mirror Stage: Alienating armour of identity. To locate identity ("thou art that!") only first step, before journey even begins. What is the world like before mirror stage? No way of knowing, since our knowing is always mediated. No social, shared knowledge without communication, mediation. Could there be knowledge outside the social, shared? We couldn't know: If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, would it still make a sound? We can't know. We can guess. But no way of determining or knowing it. It is a kind of speculative knowledge we're reduced to when trying to speak about the world before communication. It is when we start communicating that we enter into the world of communicating beings, into society. But entering into society also means entering into a structure, a rule-governed practice, and these rules we learn only slowly and through much pain and misunderstanding.

In a sense we could say that the very premise of us communicating is that I can distinguish between myself and others. So the sense of I/other is cruical for it to be communication what so ever. But what is this I? What am I? Today we usually understand this question as a question of identity. What am I becomes "what is my identity". But let's consider some possible identities: Woman, man, racial, classed (poor/rich or worker/capitalist), sportsman, student, Britney Spears fan, YAP, etc. The point is that these classifications and their attendant identities (practices, appearances, technologies, methodologies) are all given. If I want to be a Britney Spears fan there are certain rules I must adher to in order to be recognized as one. And these rules are made before us. So identifying with these identities don't makes us individual, as they may have promised. We thought, somewhere along the line, that we needed some identity that would distinguish us from out parents, friends,
school mates, rivals, etc., and it turns out that we are simply moving from one kind of social constraint to another.

In fact, going "overboard" in a quest for singularity could be one possible characteristic of the obsessional. Perhaps we could say that the obsessional has figured out precisely the logic of individualization: She desires the supreme, total and absolute individuality, but by the same token acquires nothing but confirming the logic of individualism. Confronted with the total scope of individualist isolation, the obsessive could be said to engage in an attempt to subvert it by over-identifying with it.

Let's consider the joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian for a second. "You are all individuals." The crowd repeats in one voice, "We are all individuals." Except one fella who declares: "I'm not." The gist is of course that us being called upon to be different individuals can only lead to that everybody become more of the same, and the only means through which to subvert it is by denying that one is different. It is a paradoxical conclusion, but apparently necessary to the game of "individual identity".

This sense we get, then, of this identity which is not me, is the point of Jacques Lacan's The Mirror Stage. Our call to "identify ourselves" is perhaps precisely one of those requirements we meet when we are engaged in the world of social communication, the game of distinguishing self (friend) from other (foe). The attendant alienation from our selves is a characteristic effect of our passing through the Mirror Stage of childhood development. I will now go through some of the central points in Lacan's argument, and will return in the end with some notes of how we may use these notions to interrogate the meaning and purpose of sport.

- inchoate, disparate, pre-symbolic, fragmented body, imaginary

- indications: dreams, paintings of Bosch, jokes

- stages: hysteria, obsession, paranoiac alienation

- fiction of I (fortress), phantasies, entrance into symbolic order

- primordial jealousy: someone else has something I want (projection, repression, mediated desire of the other, Oedipus)

- imaginary servitude

Sport: symbolizing activity par excellance, symbolizing violence, incoherence, ordering it

- imaginary servitude: Hand of god shows possibility of breaking symbolization, but still not unmediated?

I'm sorry if some of these notes may turn out incoherent. After the lecture I tried to approach Prof Kingfisher for a discussion on the Oedipus complex, but as he was immediately swarmed by young teenage girls aching for an autograph on some explicit limb, I ended up breaching my ideas to one of the conferees, a young lecturer from Ireland.

I asked him if he had ever taught Oedipus Rex in class, and he assured me he did, at least once a year, and we exchanged notes on student responses to various approaches to the play. I inquired about if he'd ever made use of audio-visual material, such as a videogram, and he suggested Guthrie's famous 1954 version.

I didn't want to tell him that I hadn't seen it, or never even heard about it.

"What about Fellini's version?" I proposed.

He asked me how it had worked, and I had to admit that it was less than satisfactory. Students tended to focus on the graphic violence, amplified by Fellini in that he lets Oedipus kill the sphinx. I mean, isn't there a difference between shaving and decapitating, now? Also, while instructive, the framing narrative wasn't really that helpful for our purpose, ie. in that particular class.

"Try Guthrie," the Irishman said, breaking out in a big smile, and slapping me on the back like there was no tomorrow.

Conferences, huh.

Stay well, brother.

Diderik Humble jr.

(sign)

OK, so I gotta update this blog. Went to listen to Manuel Castells' lecture on "Politics and Power in the Network Society" at London School of Economics yesterday. A lot could be said. The most profound flabbergastation was derived from audience watching. LSE students aren't nearly as outer-worldly as us of the provinces sometimes fancy. Or, uhh, well, they are, kinda. Anyway, this paragraph isn't leading anywhere.

Highlights:

• There is a CRISIS OF POLITICAL LEGITIMACY!!! Big news from Castells here. He's referring to party politics in the parliamentary form, but "forgot" to mention that caveat. Oh, and he knows his Poulanzas. During the Q&A Castells was courting the Angry Young Marxists to Step Forward so he could Baffle them with his knowledge of Marxist History and why it Failed. Great.


• The Arnold-vote was NOT a vote to the right but "a vote to terminate the political class." Snappy line, but, again, Castells scores on conflating "politics" with "professional party politicians operating under liberal democratic institutions." So it's a protest vote to him. Besides patronizing the electorate (interpellated as "citizens" in Castells' discourse), it also situates the speaker in the comfortable center. The angry ones, those who don't understand grown-ups' politics, they are extremists! Boo!


• Interesting quantitative tid-bit: In Inglehart's World Values Survey we may extrapolate that regional identification figured more prominently in Southern Europe, while national identification was more pronounced in Northern Europe. FWIW.


• Castells conflates the theatrical aspect of contemporary mediated politics with the unreliable. He claims the electorate doesn't trust politicians anymore. But what's new about this? Did the serf ever trust that the landlord had the serf's best interest in mind? Should politicians and the political system be regarded as some kind of god we should respond dutifully to when asked to sacrifice our children? Hey, Castells, go kill me a son.


• The rest of the talk was actually about Power in Social Networks. Far more Foucauldian and hence interesting. Problem is he wants it both ways. He wants to maintain a notion of agency ("social actors") and at the same time claim that if you're outside the network you're powerless. It's a tricky one. Would it be possible to be in/outside except in a sense of individual connectivity? (Besides, does it really hold? There are linkages to the WWW even for those not actually online?)

There's more to be said. Perhaps I'll return to Castells' theory of domination and resistance in networks. He ended his lecture by mentioning how the demonstrations in Spain last Saturday had been organized by way of SMS, WiFi and other networked technologies. The participation of young voters increased dramatically from last election. (So there is hope? So Castells is a spokesperson for liberal parliamentarism, no?)