The somnolence of a Sunday in Ajaccio. A heavy drowsiness permeates your bones, muscles, brain, willing you to sleep, sleep.
Now, in the evening, a breeze blows in from the sea, and people come alive again, the ‘second’ wind. The heat pushes you to stop in the afternoon, but relents at dusk and invites you back out to play. People rejoice in the reprieve like death-row pardonees.
The buildings are age worn, peeling paint in faint shades of dirty white, sad yellow, betrayed pink, dying pale green. All with shutters of canary-egg blue.
I’m sitting at “Le 1er Consul”, 2 Rue Bonaparte, drinking a Pietra, a Corsican beer. I can hear the fountains, cars honking, motorcycles, the drifting voices in French, tumbling over each other like waves on the shore. Pigeon’s wings flapping behind me, cooing.
The sky is completely cloudless and blue to match the window shutters.
I love listening to people speak French. They always sound like they are sulking about something. It sounds French if you pout and say any string of noises with the vowel sounds “oo” and “oh” and “on”. “Foo on coh soo”. And the “monsieur” at the end, the drawn out “ssss” always sounds like an insult. “Foo on coh soo too mo boo, mohsssssyoooor.”
The cheese I bought at the market today was hard and crumbly and oily and eating it felt like committing an act of child rape, something of the utmost carnality and sordidness. It was heavy and indolent and arrogant in its almost lack of flavour. It almost dared you to enjoy it. It was a 20-year life sentence in a closet-sized cell that tasted of urine and stale blood. It was a peasant’s cheese, a cheese to eat out of desperation when the cupboard was bare and your ribs were poking out and you had already eaten the scraps out of the garbage. It was the last straw cheese, the end of the world cheese, the back against the wall cornered rat cheese. A cheese you wouldn’t bring home to mother, a cheese that had spent its life inside a tomb, no light or air for 10,000 years, a cheese that contained all of the curses of all of the mummies, the mold behind the closet in the house that the old, old, impossibly old woman died in six months ago and they only found her when the neighbours noticed the smell cheese.
I’ll admit that, until now, I’ve never wondered much about where money comes from. However, after watching this video, I am totally fascinated by the concepts it explores. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the content or how it applies in Australia, but nevertheless, it’s a terrific video that everyone should watch.
The basic premise of the video is that the monetary system we have in the West is a complete fraud and totally unstable as it is built on the foundation that money is created by the banking system through issuing debt. When they agree to loan you (or a corporation or a government) money, they literally create that money out of nowhere. Watch and learn more. I’ll no doubt be talking about this during next week’s live show which will feature @brad_fidler talking about the origins of – and possible alternatives to – capitalism.
Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy. He is the CEO of the Blackspot Anticorporation. For 20 years, Kalle has been trying to buy space on TV networks around the world to show Adbusters’ anti-consumerism commercials such as these:
He is continually rejected by the networks who refuse to take his money and show his ads on the ground that it will offend their larger advertisers. So Kalle has been fighting them in the courts to try to get equal access to the airwaves and, after 20 years of the cases being dismissed by the courts, he’s finally had a win. He joined me recently to talk about it.
On 19 April, 2009, rebel Catholic priest Peter Kennedy said his last mass at St Mary’s Church in Brisbane, then he and his congregation stood up, marched out of the church, down the street, and into their new premises, where they are calling themselves “St Mary’s In Exile”.
Tomorrow night on the live show I will have Steve McDonald ( @stevemc1) as my guest. Steve runs a company called Transendence which specializes in using the techniques of Spiral Dynamics to create organisational and social change. I was introduced to Spiral Dynamics and to the work done by Steve by @rosshill when he was staying with me a couple of weeks ago. I’m still trying to get my head around it and Steve will be coming on to explain it to us.
As usual, I’ll be pulling out the old guitar and playing some songs before and after the show. Plan to stick around for the after party, where I’ll also be talking about:
– Why I Believe Women Run The World
– I’ll talk a bit about the interview I did with Kalle Lasn this morning and why the Internet is bad for you
– My plan for the TPN 500
– Why Ashton Kutcher is a douche… or maybe the greatest genius of our time
