This week Justin Webb – the BBC north America correspondent who covered the Presidential Election with erudite sharpshooting – is returning to the UK. He gives credit to the fequently lauded American trait that if one is willing to gamble on their grits they can make it big or go to hell.

Great American comedy gives little sense of the great toil it resulted from- Buster Keaton’s broken back whist balletic in The General, the tactical inter plays of  Marx Bros films- such scenes that could only result from long nationwide Vaudville tours, the tradition for massive 15 episode, 9 season sitcoms and the daily head to head late night chat shows.

The great ‘Outlier’ of comedy, Jerry Seinfeld, talks of early in his standup career watching a group of builders leaving work in New York and wanting to treat being a comedian like a 9 to 5 working stiff, he went on to work clubs for four years going as long as 18 months straight, two shows a night without a day off.

The train station scene from Marx Bros Go West.

A sitcom that inspired the office and gives insight into the tough world of the late nights’ is celebrated Larry Sanders Show, here’s a clip with Larry and Hank ‘Hey Now’ Kingsley.

Bill Mahers Real Time on HBO is one of the best shows on American politics, hosting a panel of guests from all sides of the political spectrum the show is debate driven interspersed with segments such as ‘New Rules’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f85Z63JB0_8

Justin Webb’s final American Correspondence, a big yearning ode to that East of Eden, West of excess, as the founder of Saks Fith Avenue put it, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ltl6s/From_Our_Own_Correspondent_01_08_2009/

An actress friend had to play a black South African woman in a voiceover recently.
“I’m a bit worried, really.”  She told me beforehand.  “They’ve got a white South African for the white South African role.  We’ll be recording and she’ll be giving me all these sceptical looks.”  So we did what we always do in these situations, i.e. YouTube research.  We’ve spent many a Saturday night in this manner – watching video clips from documentaries about shoplifters in Leeds, or farmers in Jamaica.  But the only thing is, when you type in the words “South African women” to YouTube, all you get is stories about corrective rape.  It’s just corrective rape after corrective rape after corrective rape.
“It’s a bit bloody depressing isn’t it,” said my friend after the fourteenth clip.  “It must be really shit to be a South African woman, when just watching videos about them on YouTube is so exhausting.”

Okay, so what is corrective rape?  Well, basically, it’s when lesbians get targeted and subjected to gang rape and severe violence  – by men trying to cure them of  homosexuality.  We Europeans might find the idea alone exhausting, but for girls and women living in South African it’s part of daily reality.
Gay women are living in fear of brutal assaults by male gangs.  Some might get raped and beaten but left to live. Some, like Eudy Simelane, who played for South Africa’s national football team, are raped, beaten and then murdered.  Simelane was a high-profile  campaigner for women’s rights and one of the first women to come out as a lesbian in Kwa Thema, her district of Johannesburg.
Human rights activists say that due to an extremely macho culture of impunity, the government isn’t doing enough, and that corrective rape should be re-classified as a hate crime in order to force the police to take more action.

“How can they do that, those men?”  I asked my friend after we’d turned the PC off.
“There’s always been an element of punishment to rape, hasn’t there?”  She said.

And there has, hasn’t there?  That’s what rape is really – a punishment.  When I was sixteen, I used to go clubbing with two friends every Friday – Jayne and Sara.  It was one of those clubs that has so many minors in it’s really more of a youth club than a night club.  Sara and I were short brunettes – we were barely five foot – and Jayne was a tall, blonde.  Sara and I, we thought we were the attractive ones – but Jayne and the boys in the club didn’t agree.
“Don’t you think Jayne’s a slag, how she flirts with all the bouncers?”  Sara asked me in the toilets, and I agreed readily.
“Yeah, she’s a right slag,” I said.  “She just loves attention.”
“You know what That Tony told me?  That fat, old one?  He said they’re gonna take her out in a car to Hainault Forest and rape her.”
“What,” I said.
“That’s what he says they’re gonna do,” said Sara.
“She won’t go,” I said.  “She won’t go off with all those lads in a car.”
“Well, if she does, it’ll serve her right,” said Sara, with satisfaction.  “It’ll teach her not to be such a slag, anyhow.”
I really wasn’t that much of a feminist at sixteen – I’m not just saying it, I really wasn’t – but Jayne was our best friend, and, despite a couple of BJs here and there, officially a virgin.
“But we have to warn her,” I said.  “We have to tell her not to go, we have to tell her what they’re gonna do.”
Sara sighed, defiantly, sceptically, resignedly.  You know how good working-class women can sigh sometimes.
“We can’t do anything, Jacinta,” she said.  “She’s such a slag, she won’t listen.  She’s got it coming to her.”

Jayne never got raped by a bunch of bouncers in the end.  But it was no thanks to us,  was it.  Solidarity was a foreign word for us, it was.  Maybe you think moving away from Essex made things better.  But you know something?  The kids I hung out with in Exeter and  the kids I hung out with in Essex – their accents were different, but their attitudes to rape were pretty much the same.

It wasn’t like rape didn’t happen, though.  I knew a lot of girls who’d been raped, but who didn’t report it.  There was no point, was there – it was always date-rape, even if we didn’t go on dates much.
“You know Katie says she got raped?”  I told a friend, Rebecca.  “From that Mark.  He was sleeping in her bed.”
“Oh, fucking hell,” Rebecca said.  “It’s not rape if you let them sleep in your bed.”
“Yeah,” I said.  “But he did force her, you know.  He came inside her and everything.  But I told her not to go to the police.  I mean, she didn’t want to.”
“Course she didn’t.”
“They slept together, ages ago, three months or something.  And she’d snogged him in the club, and he’d paid for the taxi.  So I told her not to go.”
Thing is, you have to understand, she was so little, Katie.  I took her to get the morning-after pill, but I was too scared to take her to the police station.  And she didn’t want to anyway.  But I kept on thinking about it, afterwards, feeling guilty, feeling worried.  I knew I’d done a cowardly thing.  I was worried I’d done a cowardly thing.
“There was no point,” I said.
“Of course there was no point,” snapped Rebecca peevishly.  “She was a fucking prick-tease.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fucking prick-teases.  She got what was coming to her.”

There’s an element of punishment to all rape – maybe you’re teaching a woman to be a woman, maybe you’re teaching her not to be a slag.  Maybe, like the men who raped Mukhtar Mai, you’re punishing her for something someone else did.  In 2002 Mukhtar’s teenage brother was accused of having an affair with a girl from another tribe -  a tribe with higher social standing. When the traditional village court ordered that Mukhtar should be gang-raped as punishment, four men dragged her into a barn and raped her.

In Pakistan, the shame associated with this kind of rape means that many women and girls punished in this manner end up committing suicide. But Mukhtar didn’t – instead she took her attackers to court and was awarded around $8,000 compensation, which she used to start a school.  Her actions have helped to start shattering the stigma attached to rape-victims in Pakistan.  A few years ago, the BBC ran an interview with her on the world service.  I wrote down a quote of hers and sent it to myself in a text message.  It was a bit of a tacky quote, really.  It was the kind of quote you could get on a postcard or something.  It went:
“Human beings are very weak, but when they are supported, they can be very strong.”

We should never forget that, I guess.  Human beings are very weak, but when they are supported, they can be very strong.  Human beings are very weak, but when we are supported, we can be very strong.  You know? And so, that means, we have to support each other.  We have to have solidarity.  Solidarity with those poor girls in South Africa.  Solidarity with girls in Pakistan.  But also, you know, solidarity with your girlfriends in school and Halls.  There’s an element of punishment to rape.  But let’s not participate.

He fits a description shortly after 9/11 and was hauled through the window of his car and dressed down by the Berlin police for a solid twenty-four hours. That he could verify his identity by a number of documents, that he could prove his employment, his address, the legality of his health and car insurance, and could describe a network of details that the best-prepared terrorist would not have bothered inventing, did not help him out of the humiliation. The police were convinced, for a day and a night, that they had caught a pawn of al-Qaida.

I can see why. Peter was a backed-up man. He was in his early forties, and his hair was curved into a neat, unfashionable style; his nostrils were permanently flared, and stringed with little red veins that heightened the impression of constant strain; he wore white trainers with either of his pairs of shapeless blue or black cloth trousers. His bearing and short, bow-legged gait tilted forward and focussed on his forehead, which he kept lowered and ahead of him. Many frustrations were knotted tight in that brow, which he beat against the world. The rage he bore against his own insecurity marked him more than the insecurity itself.

Theatre is mainly a state funded enterprise in Germany. Even the private theatres like mine was get public money. The smallest towns keep ensembles of actors on a standard wage performing multiple plays in repertory. For the actors trapped there, it’s a sapping grind like any other. But a temporary contract in one dying state-subsidised institution is hardly better than a permanent contract in another. My theatre was embarrassingly out of touch. Its audiences stagnating, it was just entering an underwhelming endgame of conservative theatre and would close four years later. But it was doubly untested ground for Peter – he was a free-lancer and he was in the bourgeois heart of the former West.

Even though we were already over a decade into the unified federal Germany, these were, effectively, Peter’s first months of capitalism. And he had already learned to define himself by his profession. And it was professional vulnerability that got him sacked. Beset with anxiety about trying to contain his leading role, he pissed everyone off. He was so self-conscious that every off-hand comment affected him, and his clumsy, self-asserting responses were always taken badly. That would not have been a big enough reason, but he also corrected the director’s directions. He had a habit of muttering his own interpretations out loud – “No, I think you mean …”

The director was choleric, and was working for the first time a few months after having four bypasses installed in his heart. Once or twice Peter had demanded to speak to him in private and left the room without waiting for an answer. Other awkward power games ensued, until it ended with an eruptive sacking.  The director delivered a resounding monologue that lasted minutes. It included a lot of released bile – “The atmosphere you bring in here!” – some stinging irony – “I’m also the theatre manager, so I can either sack myself or sack you” – and a tense pause while he asked for a glass of water, which I brought him. As it always is in the theatre, the climax of the sacking was the accusation of amateurism.

But you never look professional when you’re sacking someone. It happened quickly and openly – one argument too many and one hysterical moment, and then there is a deadly hole in the air that no nervous joke can fill. Eventually talk does fill it though, and it lasts until everyone is sure that the sacked person was an amateur.

Then Peter got his coat and left, bemused, at a loss, and thoroughly cowed. When he reached the door, the director did his best to restore dignity by getting up and saying, “Will you shake my hand?”

But even our intimidating, authoritative director took part in the subsequent talk that masked the tension and changed opinions. It was decided that Peter had tipped it onto his own head. Everyone’s memory suddenly sharpened, but cut things differently. Every uncommented action Peter had performed in the last four weeks was suddenly recalled and revealed as unprofessional, even though he had practised acting as a grim job for years. Peter’s colleagues seized the cold prerogative of professionalism and carried on working without him. It was the only thing they could do, but they used their professionalism as a fig-leaf. Two weeks later I had a cup of tea with Peter and like a coward I never mentioned it. “I still don’t know what happened,” he said.

So professionalism has become a suspect virtue to me. How bitter it is for the exuberant amateur entering the real world to find out that professionalism, in the end, is all about fear. It means constantly hedging your options to avoid an audience’s offence, misgivings, misunderstanding. In the end professionalism just means compromise.

Only in the media and the arts is professionalism preached and protested by every desperate, feeble, timid hack trying to earn a living. It is the last refuge of the coward and the idiot. In theatre, the dilettante is the worst pariah, but when most artists sacrifice their naivety, they’re probably sacrificing their only asset. No-one talks about work more than actors, performers, writers and directors, but work is the last thing they’re doing.

Professionalism is no virtue, it’s a poison, a coward’s fig-leaf, an artificial passion, an unworthy ersatz for dead enthusiasm. It is discipline conjured for its own hollow sake.

Yellow card.

Dorothy Feaver

Oi! red card.

Dorothy Feaver

The naughty chair.

Alice Feaver

The naughty wall.

Dorothy Feaver

Sloppy soldiering.

Alice Feaver

RIP Humpty.

Alice Feaver

As a lot of the content this issue suggests, theatre offers a useful framework for thinking about discipline. Jen’s experience of the thespianisation process brings us around to the (suitably melodramatic) conclusion that discipline’s a kind of haunting or possession, albeit a sometimes beneficial, Freaky Friday-type one.

As always, the discussion’s punctuated and oriented by music. A slew of (more or less tangentially) discipline-related tracks, some of which we discuss, is up on the right. There’s Nike-funded inducements to shape up, Japanese chants, 2-step avowals of addiction and Gothic ballads. Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Discipline of Revenge’ didn’t make the cut though.

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Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Black Devil Disco Club-Coach Me
• M.J. Cole feat. Digga – Gotta Have It (M.J.’s Funky Dubb)
• P.J. Harvey – The Piano
• The Siths – Barbarism Begins at Home
• Autechre – LCC
• Throbbing Gristle – Discipline
• LCD Sounsystem – 45:33
• OOIOO – UMA
• Mercston feat. Plaguelero – Weighty

I ran into an old schoolmate the other day who, it transpires, is now part of a breakaway Islamic sect based in Norwich, and is working to reinstate gold and silver coin in an attempt to throw a spanner in the works of the usurious Masonic/Jewish conspiracy that is paper money. Fascinated (if perturbed), I tried various ways of drawing him out while demonstrating what an enlightened guy I am: adopting a Derridean approach, I asked whether gold’s got, like, any inherent value; taking a feminist tack, I engaged him in a whole “so… women: fully human?” discussion; raising an eyebrow, I enquired as to whether he’d entertained the possibility that people, for the most part, weren’t the dupes of a hegemonic conspiracy but, just, like, fancied a bit more money, a bit more pleasure, a bit less guilt and responsibility than they had?

A good anti-humanist, I resisted the urge to read familiar traits or expressions as evidence of the ‘real’ person peeping out from under the programming. He, in turn, was very personable despite my parlous situation soulwise. Each of us was polite if slightly patronising, and we found we both had beef with consumerism and social atomism and our era’s ideological rudderlessness. He’d obviously been working out, and explicitly and repeatedly referred to his project of becoming a man - wise, strong, multi-spoused, the emir of his own household. He’d follow this sort of statement of intent with little under-the-breath Arabic formulae, presumably like when my mum’s mum’s Catholic mum would put ‘D.V.’ (Deo Volente – God willing) after such statements in letters. Tariqah Islam had given him discipline.

The encounter kind of shook me up, as did belatedly hearing, around the same time, about the death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,  godmother of queer theory and author of classics like ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ Sedgwick’s stuff falls nicely under the rubric of ‘discipline,’ both because of her early preoccupation with performativity (the rules governing how we ‘do’ identity) and her concern, towards the end of her writing career, with paranoid modes of understanding – something she associates with conspiracy theorists (hello there, godly schoolmate) but also with avowedly ‘interdisciplinary’ cultural theorists (hello there, me getting all pseudo-academic on my godly schoolmate). If my mate’s now trained to pin everything on infidels and Masons and Jews,* my own education has taught me to see phallogocentricism and liberal humanism and the machinations of Power and capital etc. wherever I turn. And while I’d like to think my finger-pointing tends to be a little less rabidly ignorant, there’s definitely a case to be made that we’re both being paranoid, employing handy but ultimately insufficient systems for understanding the world ‘really’ works.

Bentham’s paranoia-inducing panoptical prison, bygone Tariqah bigwig Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, Eddo Stern’s ‘Waco Resurrection’

Sedgwick’s been central to my recent thinking about videogames.  Because they train you to succeed at playing them** games are peculiarly well-suited to tackling control, obedience, indoctrination and detection – i.e. all the stuff Michel Foucault harps on in Discipline and Punish, the compelling but problematically reductive text (rough synopsis: society’s a prison and we’re all marionettes subject to the sway of impersonal and  inexorable forces) which is still a cornerstone of the academic culture Sedgwick worried had become paranoid, rote and impotent.

This is true of commercial titles like Forbidden Siren (a horror game which – displaying very Japanese preoccupation with how institutions condition behaviour – tasks players with negotiating schools, hospitals and factories patrolled by zombiefied cultists, and has you play as nursery school teachers and 50-something farmers and surgeons) or the Hiroshima-born Hideo Kojima’s (kinda self-important) games about what it is to become soldier. It’s also true of game-based art like Eddo Stern’s. Stern has worked with various collaborators on pieces likeWaco Resurrection – which  puts you in the shoes of David Koresh during the Waco siege – and Tekken Torture Tournament, a modified version of a mass-market beat-‘em-up which deals electrical shocks to players when they mess up in-game. Some critics have suggested videogames are themselves a sophisticated vehicle for social conditioning,*** but these works demonstrate their capacity to explore and critique ideas about discipline, control and conspiracy, to suggest  - by dramatising and literalising them - how appealing but also how limited worldviews like my Norwich-based mate’s are.

Academic ‘interdisciplinarity’ often means little more than importing the language and practices of cultural theory into new contexts. The study of interactive media, though, represents an area where the humanities can follow up on Sedgwick’s hunch that a meaningful engagement with mathematics and cybernetics and systems theory might open up ways out of theory’s paranoid cul de sac. Maybe then we can find ways to discuss and address the inequality and anomie and societal waywardness my ex-schoolmate couldn’t hack and the iffy cocktail of dogmas, hatreds and suspicions he’s taken to cultivating as a response.

*While trying to sell me on how cultured and humane the founder of his sect is, he straightfacedly informed me the guy’s a Wagner fan, which after I’d uncreased myself and stopped cackling I suggested it might be a P.R. misstep to reveal. This didn’t seem to have occurred to him. Incidentally, the founder in question’s pretty interesting, and shares with Nico (another notorious anti-Semite) the distinction of having had a cameo in a Fellinni movie (the link’s to Nico’s cameo because she at least had nice hair and put out one of the 20th century’s best LPs, which you’d think this guy might’ve had the decency to balance out his Jew-hate by doing, but no).

**Videos made by obsessional players reveal that they’re playing against the code itself, exploiting glitches and idiosyncracies programmers failed to catch – i.e. to beat the game you have to think like it does. Such ‘to catch a thief’ second-guessing is, of course, classically paranoid (look where it got Rumsfeld)

*** e.g. It’s been argued ‘survival horror’ games like Forbidden Siren, with their emphasis on scavenging, resource management and kill-or-be-killed combat, should be read as allegorising/endorsing capitalist dog-eat-dog self-interest.