The Portuguese colonial incursion in Orissa began around 1514, and Malaka port was a key trading link. Centuries later, they had the temerity to put the Jagannath shrine on the back of their one rupee and 2 1/2 rupee notes, from the 1920s.
The images below are from: Tripati, Sila. 2003. Depiction Of Jagannath Temple of Puri on The Portuguese Paper Currency Studies in History and Culture, 8(1–2): 83–90 (article also included).
I don’t think Robinson had any like the same sort of commitment to the revolution… This, then, is the standard story, but there is much more to it, especially on the importance of theory and practice (whereas Robinson seems mostly to talk to parrots).
“Johnno” (1975) was an important first book. I will reread it a third (or fourth time) because it is two decades since the last time, and it was important to remember it then, and I remember that its important now even if the only bit I truly remember is where he is being told by his father that each cell in your body is renewed within each seven years. So eventually you are new. Of course I would not want to pass this off as fact, nor can I be sure that I remember this correctly – did his father or a mate say it, and was that after., sort of a retrospective reason for writing? I guess fathers do say stuff that sticks. But I’d need to reread it to be sure how distorting memory can be. Nevertheless, RIP David Malouf.
On “Cringe” and philosophy. You might know that some people consider Martin Heidegger the greatest philosopher (not me, I prefer Tran Duc Thao, and Marx) but Heidegger is nevertheless great on technology. And so sometimes I will read his other works, or listen to people talk about them. Imagine my surprise when this discussion of Heidegger’s early work on Being (and time, etc). ended up a discussion of the feeling of “cringe”! It has philosophical ballast. I don’t know if anyone has addressed this seriously, but if they have, and if they are good, please do send me the things I need to read.
ps. who carved Che [or is it Chef] in Heidegger’s bench?
pps. I am very tempted to include “cringe” moments in scholarship alongside gripes as a file. Add your favourites in the coments – and I’ll elevate the best ones.
Another one today read in a review of the Gab RockStar controversy:
‘a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief’
Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 41.
ppss. of course being a Nazi, or today a genocide apologist, is much worse than cringe.
Twenty years is incomprehensible.
Recycling this now extraordinarily old post below (its not her birthday today, but 20 years since we lost Imogen Bunting).
Double Injustice: Media Racism
Imogen
Portrait of President Ho Chi Minh by Vu Cao Dam 1946 – Original in plaster or terracotta, cast in Bronze by his daughter.
2008. “Martin Heidegger Goes to the Movies.” In, Cultural Politics in a Global Age (112–119). Oxford: One World.
Was never really satisfied that I had understood Heidegger in 1996 when I wrote about him in The Rumour of Calcutta (1996, reissued 2023) and now that’s 30 years ago, I looked back to see. Well, better than some I think, and, really pertinent to where we are now in the face of informational thinking, calculative tinkering, assemblage of AI, PDF aggregator, deep search, algorithmic accumulation – as if accumulation was not ongoing all through, and Heidegger got it, reading Marx in a hut (also see his Letter on Humanism, mixed messaging but something there).
So it still is an unfinished question whether questioning technology can be tuned to combat the relentless digital stupification of thinking now: where readers read but we do not; friends are many, but none are friendly; people go to meet, but do not meet; profiles that are fake; faces that are two-faced; messages have no message; delete delight; a book that is anti-book; always asking ‘whats on your mind’ but really only interested in ‘whats in your wallet’.
Recommendation: take time out to watch Battle of Algiers again.
2008. “Martin Heidegger Goes to the Movies.” In, Cultural Politics in a Global Age (112–119). Oxford: One World.
Martin Heidegger Goes to the MoviesDownload
I do not have all of it in a nice neat single package – there should be 9 hours of love (what I do have is 9 hours with English subs, with about an hour long section which refuses to be loaded to WordPress. I do have a link to that part, its the interview with Sloterdijk and should come at the start of part 2 [its possibly this] – so I have inserted the link below as well, or, not ideal, you can skip PS, and go straight on as the next bit overlaps [Those who are better informed or who have a full version with subs, please say so and I will adjust])
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The start of part 2 would come next, and I think its here on this link, which includes an interview with Soterdijk, so click this, as it won’t load to wordpress for some reason.
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Cast:
The Modern has seen better days. Astronomical sums would buy it. Raju is caretaking, but, well, unlike most of Kolkata which has a certain sheen of relevance and commerce, this old and maybe now totally forgotten former glory has not done as well.
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This was the location of almost three years of ‘fieldwork’ (faffing about, mostly reading political pamphlets from the M-Ls in my ‘tent’) for the research that became “The Rumour of Calcutta” book (1996, rereleased 2023). It was 8 rupees a night back then, 1987-91, and did not move much with the times, killed by airbnb and the likes. And yet. It had its afterlives…. (see old pic in the repost at the bottom)
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The chapter:
Chapter 2 of The rumour of Calcutta tourism, charity and the poverty of representation (John Hutnyk) (Z-Library)DownloadHere is the chapter on the modern from the Rumour book. It was chapter 2. Yes, I had Bruno Latour’s title in mind – we have never been modern – but I was not a fan of his writing, so alluded/stole shamelessly. There are lots of things I appropriated, with due acknowledgement, that still seem on topic. Just one, for example:
“In an expensive large-format hard-cover two-volume publication called Calcutta: the Living City)’ coinciding with the 300th anniversary celebrations of Calcutta, Sukanta Chaudhuri writes: ‘Few modern cities have bred so many myths as Calcutta. By “myths” I do not mean falsehoods, but myths in the social or anthropological sense’ (Chaudhuri 199p: .xv).”
and some things became even more meaningful later – i.e., when Viktor Alneng made me a red t-shirt with this quote fro the chatpter as the caption under a big torso-covering hammer&sickle:
“‘So, you’re a communist then?’ (Nigel)
‘Aren’t you?’ (John)”
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I still have the shirt – thanks Viktor. Its admittedly in an old box alongside other trinkets that need to be sorted, its not like I wear such things every day, though its been out a bit of late. But for time, the many other relics that belong to Rumour – the off register postcards of Vic Memorial, pics of vols, the residue of old notebooks, a box of letters, and one of artefacts, fireworks boxes, racing timetables, Tolly golf card – I had carried unopened for decades (Australia-England-Vietnam) – all await the time of a more leisurely accounting.
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Alas, the modern does not have time for that leisure.
Timepass: having sat four days under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya and watched in procession:
– an ant struggling to go the wrong way as hundreds of devotees perambulate around the tree/shrine – it was eventually crushed flat
– literally thousands of feet passed as I watched – people’s feet are so varied in India, rings on toes, twisted toenails, variety of socks (its winter)
– a red carpet was laid out, before some dignitary came an was shown the shrine
– Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian, and occasionally European monks
– groups of 30 spiritual tourists and tour guide sitting and chanting in 15 minute blocks (there must be a schedule)
– a scramble for a fallen Bodhi leaf (one had fell on me while sitting with the meditators in 1989 – I did not realise its meaning, but could see the devotees looking at me and wondering why someone who had come for just 15 minutes was lucky enough to get a leaf – I gave it to one of them
– a glossy-bearded well-groomed clean/wealthy US american 35 year old explaining everything about the temple, from the Lonely Planet web guide, to a younger female, loudly, during the monks chanting, and quite annoying (sent to test my patience I think).
– the Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian monks accepting gifts of money and gold jewellery from 30-something Korean, Japanese women visitors dressed in elegant salwar kameez
– older white women doing full exotica
– crazed Indian sadhu types that speak fluent English hippy
– eastern European women and Indian men about 25 doing full length body prayer, pranam crouch, sit up, yoga type perambulations round the shrine (there is a name for this that I’ve not looked up in google brain).
– 65 year old Australian guy watching all this with his Vietnamese friend who sneaks snacks from her bag (strictly buddhist!). This guy takes occasional notes in a notebook
– a spider web spun among the Bodhi tree leaves
– bodhi tree leaf sellers, a jewell embedded in the leaf, vacuum sealed in a plastic cover
– armed police, male and female, and a ruckus started nearby, they join with enthusiasm and lathi sticks
– different nationalities with organised meditation spots – the Vietnam one usually vacant after the first saturday
– non-la (vietnamese conical bamboo hat) is more evident here than in HCMC.
– Indian female army troop in a fabulous blue and white camouflage pattern uniform – you would not be able to find them in… an aquarium.
– 50 year old californian walking super slow, mindful of each step, in everyone’s way nevertheless
– stray dogs
– monk feeding female stray (so ‘not’ stray) metres from the holiest of holies
– crows, apparently dying but because rubbish is cleared too quickly now and they are starving, evident here also (as in Kolkata)
– all mosquitoes matter
– cleaning staff work 5 hour shifts, while devotees offer a few minutes cleaning as votive penance, murmuring gatha or parithas.
– other parts of the bodhisattva’s journey not emphasised in Bodhgaya, as if he landed for those 7 weeks from outer space – sci fi buddha
– still peace, much heavily robed, cloth selling, fashion-conscious, peace (tailor stores doing well near the main market)
Much more of this…World keeps on being interesting I guess. I am not ready to renounce…
This article, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, is about heritage restoration according to old colonial protocols and myopias. Contesting entrepreneur-developers facing funder imperatives, the article works through meanings, assumptions and differences of interest and purpose for variously invested groups (remember this time, that time, this heritage, that heritage). The article assesses an ‘initiative’ of the National Museum of Denmark, completed some years ago for Serampore, West Bengal. With an eye on the police, it does this within the lived context of coloniser apologetics, enthusiasms, time-restricted memorialisms (this heritage that heritage) to evaluate selective historical recall. Memory, subjective at best, manifests in different ways when …
On Adorno and Wagner for the journal Kaabigan:
With Michael Roland F. Hernandez’s intro:
“John Hutnyk’s meditation on Zukunftsmusik—Richard Wagner’s “music of the future”—provides a powerful point of departure. Wagner imagined an art that would anticipate and shape a transformed society. Yet, as Hutnyk reminds us through Adorno and Marx, the future promised by cultural production is often already compromised by the conditions of its manufacture. The immense accumulation of commentary around Wagner exemplifies what Adorno famously called the culture industry: a system in which art, critique, and even dissent are absorbed into circuits of commodification”.
So check out the entire issue (and indeed, contribute to their next – a welcome initiative):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w_TgzOUCbsckwbNeYtRAMezGUfObxqgW/view
1Hutnyk_January2026 (1)Download
A best yet marston mat helicopter landing pad from the stranded bunnies section of Apocalypse Now Redux (2001 edition). Not in any of the other editions, for reasons you can guess if you’ve seen it, but this is the classic example:
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For the Redux premiere in London, I got the last returned comp ticket and was sat next to Tim Page, one of the models for Dennis Hopper’s unhinged photojournalist.* On the next seat over a woman attending to page woke the sleeping celebrity just for the Hopper sequence. He had slept soundly through the rest of the film (*Hopper says he was also channelling Sean Flynn, son of Errol, lost in Cambodia).
And of course, there is a corpse in the room in the sequence with camouflage–make–up–enthusiast and surfer–boy Lance, as he and the strung out playmate get down to it. Mr Clean comes to the window to perfectly fit Coppola’s stereotype – that director got issues.
Follow the Marston Mats – they will lead, well, everywhere:
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On January 3 2026, after the strike on Venezuela, Trump called up what I assume is now his second most favourite programme Fox and Freinds to say: “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show”.
Well well. Did you also watch the Cubans being killed? Snuff film fan you. Not that there are no precedents for this sort of thing, to be fair. But at Jeffrey’s old club? sheesh. Are we gonna see a photo of you watching this tv? Anyways, here is a little of the history of US snuff film fandom below:
First of all, buy the signed picture (search it, who knows if its legit – they did release it as a publicity shot). Apparently all proceeds of the site I found this on go to veterans (which ones?)… Later on Prez Obama wrote that the strike was “the first and only time as president that I’d watch a military operation unfold”, and he called the day of the strike “the most important single day of my presidency.”
%%%
And here is a narration of all that snuff, for, erm, context – its an excerpt from Global South Asia on Screen, Bloomsbury 2019:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/global-south-asia-on-screen-9781501324956/
pages 36-39 of Global South Asia on ScreenDownload
Just to add to the frenzy; RIP (take MLP with you).
see original at (h/t Neil D): https://youtu.be/ai2As4XFZDY?si=g3zLRAGS_yumwvyl
See also:
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One more on Marston Mats (perhaps my favourite so far because of the Melbourne Demons’ Keith “Bluey” Truscott link)
Marston Mats Tank Mats 1945 Mats Matty Mats
Mưa đỏ: Still more Marston Mats