Jerking to a grinding salvo...

I've been awake and up since 4.38 am this morning. It's been raining steadily all night and still gently falling. I've opened the windows and front door to let in the cool after yesterday's 35C degree heat. Every now and then I hear cicadas chirp, though I've never heard them make their mating sounds so early in the day. Perhaps too, they are relishing the crisp air. Ah! 5.42 am and the first Magpie call. Soon they will be demanding their daily bread. I wonder what it means if you have a dream of insects? I woke in the early hours to such a dream. Last night I watched This Is It a documentary-concert film of Michael Jackson's rehearsal and preparations for a concert series that never happened because he died on 25 June 2009. The dance sequences were absolutely amazing and Jackson both energetic and robotic with his hand on his crotch, pelvis jerk and his hand rising and falling from  adjusting an in-ear style voice amplifier, a leader in front of those wanting to be lead. It may be because I'm reading Michael Mann's book Fascists, that I read the film sequence for the song They Don't Care about Us (using CGI) in which eleven dancers were reproduced over and over again, to resemble an immense powerful and regimented army of 1100 soldiers one that mirrored the entourage of people (creatives and otherwise) that surrounded the Michael Jackson machine, but was more likely Jackson's comment on authoritarian governments and injustice.  

Beat me, hate me
You can never break me
Will me, thrill me
You can never kill me
Jew me, sue me
Everybody do me
Kick me, kike me
Don't you black or white me.

However, that aside, the sequence I enjoyed was for Smooth Criminal in which Jackson was sewn-into footage from 1940's black and white films such as Gilda to appear as if he was starring alongside Rita Hayworth, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. I can't say that I was a fan of  all of Jackson's music, but you can't argue with his immense talent and I was saddened after watching this documentary that his life & creativity ended so abruptly. 6.27 am and the rain has eased. The sky behind the trees is white-washed in ashen tint. It's daylight, but clouds obscure the sun. Dragonflies are darting about and a Wattle bird is calling to its mate. Repetition and pattern, repetition and pattern - step, step, tramp, tread.

As they faced the vast, empty, rain-drenched square and played for occasional passersby, all these Nazi boys (some of them were blonde, with doll-like faces) seemed, in their sticklike stiffness, to be possessed by some cataclysmic exultation. In front of then, their leader - a degenerately skinny kid with the sulky face of a fish - kept time with a long drum major's stick. He held this stick obscenely erect, with the knob at his crotch, it then looked like a monstrous monkey's penis that had been decorated with braids of colored cord. Like a dirty little brute, he would then jerk the stick level with his mouth; from crotch to mouth, from mouth to crotch, each rise and falling jerking to a grinding salvo from the drums.

(George Bataille, Blue of Noon, Marion Boyars, 1978: 151)