Someone recently asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?" 

"Why do people hate prog rock? Because it epitomized the worst of its time, that post-60s desert of stale ideas, idiotic new trends and catchphrases, where bad tv commercials were the great art form of the epoch. It was pretentious, claiming the world while gazing at its own navel. It was pleased with itself. It had no conviction and no doubt. It was able to vanish as if it had never been, because it hadn’t.  

Of course there was Can."

Just throwing this to the wolves.... 

I will say though that I have never ever seen a musician more pleased with himself than Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz

 

Green Gartside, Smash Hits, June 1982.

 ... what Wyndham Lewis calls ‘the Time-mind’ or ‘the Time-view’. The adherents of this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism... The principal villain however is Bergson... The charismatic metaphysics of Bergson, as Lewis must have remembered from his lectures, described human identity, at its most primal and non-intellectual, as the creature of a numinous time deeper than the mere succession of the clock... Lewis... understood Bergson to be advocating a rampant subjectivism, dissolving into pure consciousness objects that one might have otherwise naively assumed to exist independently of one’s experience of them. Repelled by Bergsonian flux, Lewis proposes as an alternative ‘a philosophy of the eye’, a celebration of ‘the concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’... The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.​ 

Lewis repeatedly champions here ‘the beautiful objective, material world of common sense’ over ‘the “organic” world of chronological mentalism’ and remarks at one point that ‘my case is an overwhelmingly good one.’ But whether his argument amounts to much is another matter. This is the sort of thing he says, a comparison of our experience of a statue, existing in space, and a piece of music, existing in time, the upshot of which is meant to be that we have a strong ‘space’ sense which the prevailing Time-mind ignores or denies: ‘You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you, whereas the piece of music moves through you, as it were. The difference in the two arts is evident at once, and the different faculties that come into play in the one and the other.’

- Seamus Perry in the LRB

 'pop songs celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate ... they measure the depth and originality of their emotions by reference to their inability to find words for them'. 

Simon Frith, Sound Effects, 1983

‘I cannot play that, my dear lady! I am your most devoted servant but I cannot. That is not music – believe me! ... this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it.’

Edmund Pfühl, organist in Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, refusing to play Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. 

 The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption that if you remove all constraints from people, they will behave in some especially inspired manner. This doesn’t seem to me to be true in any sense at all — not socially, and certainly not artistically. The point is that the typical jazz or even rock concept of improvisation is based on the theory of the individual breaking loose of something. The African version is based on the idea of the individual making an important, timely contribution to a social event. Talking Heads is an ideal example of that kind of communion: their whole style involves sociorhythmic interconnectedness

Brian Eno, 1981, via 

 Audio musicam ergo sum

Music supplies us with a first clue. What part of me hears music when I listen to it? My body trembles, dances, kicks up its heels, perhaps jumps with joy; music innervates and stretches  the  muscles,  accelerates  the  pulse,  moves  the  stomach and stimulates the genitals. My intellect counts, unconsciously, admiring the harmonic composition and construction of counterpoint. My hearing, in its delight, floods the whole sensory system with musical waves; inner rhythms and tempos keep time with the same metronome. My feelings move me to tears and fill me with happiness—all these bonds, suddenly global, construct my unity. No part of me is unaffected by the mute ecstasy that listening to music induces. Music seizes me, holds me spell-bound, passes through me, possesses me, makes me all its own, causes some unknown federative and existential function to operate in me, unifying the integral of what I am, like an immense embrace—this intense ecstasy that is called existence. I listen to music, therefore I am.

Michel Serres, Religion

(via Matt Moore)

RIP Gary Indiana

 Gary with a waspish portrait of Susan Sontag - someone he admired / liked !

Interviewed Gary for Rip It Up on account of his involvement in the NY scene circa No Wave and Mutant Disco, connections to Mudd Club, polymath artistic activities on many fronts...  Very entertaining, gossipy.... maybe I'll dig it up and run the whole thing... One of those rare people who spoke like he wrote, in perfect, elegant sentences

Here's a good read: "Bless You, Toxic Dwarf: An Appreciation of Gary Indiana By One of His Many Estranged Friends" - written by Ira Silverberg, my onetime US agent. 

One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability.  The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degrees of repetition (absolute blanket radio coverage causing you to get temporarily get sick of a song).   A great song is that seemingly contradictory thing: the repeatable surprise. The classic pop single as a radio drama that never wears out.

This degree of repeatability is not unheard of in other forms, but is much rarer. There are a few films that can be watched over and over; a few books, likewise. But wherever plot as such is involved, the ability to repeat-view or repeat-read is severely diminished. Whereas the pop song is plotless, it offers drama without narrative. 

(Okay there are some story-songs but most pop songs do not involve a punchline or pay-off or resolution; they don't "go" anywhere; they capture a state or a moment; or there is a movement back and forth between two states, two modes of action / feeling - verse to chorus, tension and release, buildup to climax).  Rather than narratives, pop songs are dramas of energy. 

 

 

Charles Baudelaire 

There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line

"It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will."

That's a much more interesting headswerve  - the idea that you could get intoxicated with virtue

Perhaps it's even possible to be intoxicated with sobriety, or the idea of sobriety as society-salvation, a cause, the single solution to everything wrong  (the fanatical anti-drink campaigners of the temperance movement)

Born again former drug users, addicted to AA meetings, clutching little positivist mantras to one's bosom

(R. Meltzer quite scathing on how a cleaned-up Lester Bangs got into this whole humanist trip, 'bring back emotions, they are threatened in this society', reeling out maxims and homilies of the kind he would once have mercilessly scorned and mocked)

 [fragments from a prototype book review much different from what made it into print...]

Few would claim that we’re living through a golden age for music. But there does seem to be an emerging consensus that this is something of a golden age for music books. Early in 2011, U.K. magazine The Wire staged Off The Page, a two-day festival dedicated to music writing that was so well-received it’s now set to be an annual event, while American alternative-music webzine Pitchfork recently launched Paper Trail, a series of interviews with music authors. As remarkable as the quality of the work that’s been coming out is the diversity of subject and approach, ranging from sweeping historical overviews (Rob Young’s British folk opus Electric Eden) to zoom-lens studies (David Browne’s Fire and Rain documents the single year 1970), and from associative drifts such as David Toop’s Sinister Resonance to monographs focused on individual artists (Owen Hatherley’s Pulp micro-tome Uncommon People) or specific albums (Continuum’s often superb 33 1/3 series). These highpoints stand out amid a constant torrent of less distinguished biographies, oral histories, and lavishly designed and largely pictorial retrospectives.

It seems significant that virtually none of these books, major or minor, deal with contemporary music or artists who rose to prominence in the 21st Century. The past, and usually the relatively remote past—the Sixties and Seventies above all—appears to offer more for authors to chew on than post-Internet music. Partly that’s because music back then felt more connected to social and political currents, and thus seems more consequential. So much of the really thought-provoking and enjoyable music of the last decade has been meta-music that plays witty games with esoteric sources drawn from pop’s ever-accumulating archive. Yet it’s precisely because the popcult past inundates us with its instant-access availability and materiality (reissues and fileshares, YouTube’s TV clips and live footage, reunion tours and memorabilia exhibitions) that book-length analysis feels more essential than ever. Longform writing supplies a crucial element of abstraction, cutting through retro culture’s bombardment of senseless sense-impressions and allowing the clear signal of truth to emerge from the welter of fact.

What could be truer than a photograph? In Bob Gruen’s Rock Seen (Abrams Books), there are many iconic images from across his four-decade career as a legendary lensman: John Lennon posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, Yoko Ono deplaning into a pit of paparazzi, Bob Dylan’s wizened strangeness, and shot after classic shot from punk’s early days, when Gruen first made his name photographing bands like The New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, and Blondie. But ultimately what Rock Seen reveals is that even the most compelling rockpic is a mute witness. I don’t just mean that the dimension of sound is necessarily absent (one exception here is a short exposure shot of Tina Turner onstage under strobe light, an erotic-kinetic whirl of light-smeared multiple images you can almost hear as paroxysmic rhythm). Ultimately these pictures don’t really tell you anything. I’m biased, naturally, being a text-worker, but I think that pictures are rarely worth a thousand words. The best rock writers, operating at full-strength, can catch more of the music’s essence in a couple of sentences than all the carefully posed or fly-on-the-wall shots in deluxe photobooks. Rock photography requires an eye but not a point of view. Its raison d’etre is radically different to criticism. The photographer’s job is to make the musicians look good, or at least “cool” (which can mean inelegant or grotesque by conventional standards). They don’t have to ask difficult questions or judge the artist’s latest work. The flat inanity of Gruen’s captions--“David Bowie is the ultimate performer”, “the New York Dolls shocked people with their androgynous look”, “[the Pistols]had a reputation for being very shocking, but they offered me a cup of tea and seemed normal enough”—show that he chose shrewdly when he picked up an Olympus rather than an Olivetti.

An increasingly popular mode for presenting the rock past, oral history has the exact opposite liability to the photo-book: it makes nearly everyone look bad, invariably de-heroicizing the protagonists until they seem smaller than life. Oral historians seem particularly drawn to punk rock: there’s been a raft of books documenting city-based scenes for Seventies punk or Eighties hardcore, a trend that can be traced back to Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s 1997 book Please Kill Me, which billed itself as about punk as a whole but was almost entirely focused on New York....and which unfolds as one long litany of baseness, egomania, and drug squalor (history as junk, just one sordid thing after another).... unputdownable on a certain level but leaves the reader feeling vaguely degraded, like you’ve been mindlessly bingeing on reality TV.

The graft and craft involved in oral history is actually similar to reality TV’s production process: copious documentation followed by judicious editing and sequencing... What keeps the genre from rising to the level of full-blown rock literature is the absence of a synthesizing authorial voice.

Real rock history navigates a path between the unpretty facts and the instant myths that spring up around the music....

One way to recover a sense of how music was received in its original moment is through the rock journalism collection. There’s been a bumper crop this season, with volumes by Ellen Willis, Neil Strauss, Byron Coley, Chuck Eddy, and Paul Nelson....

The problem is that which music is going to matter, to become a meaningful phenomenon through mass or cult popularity, is rarely apparent at the time of a record’s release

disagreeing with Jameson (RIP old chap)

 “Rather, a genuine political literature would aim at the politicization of everything hitherto considered to be nonpolitical, of private life and psychology, perception and the emotions; it would imply an expansion of form and a refinement of the artistic fluoroscope such that the political character of the most remote and specialized areas of the experience stands revealed to the naked eye.  Works like those of Brecht, or, more recently, of Godard, yield a glimpse of what such a fully political and fully conscious literature might be.” – Fredric Jameson

(via Jim Dooley)

I don't actually agree with this, for two reasons:

1/ I don't believe that every single aspect of existence is political. It can be politicized - anything can be. But it's not the case that every single aspect of an individual's existence, or indeed Existence with a capital E - E for Everything - is inherently political. Many things - conceivably most things - are apolitical, unpolitical, prepolitical, infrapolitical...  

2/ Second disagreement is a question of strategy, the allocation of mental resources.  What would be the political efficacy of exploring the micro-politics of this or that or the other? Does it really count as a political contribution? Well, you can see it play out all across the academy -  critique as a displacement activity. 

 

love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern"

and I think there is something to understand, usually, because these are generally Proper Composers, steeped in the tradition, inheritors of Beethoven or whoever - and most of them feel like they are contributing to that tradition - even if the recital hall middlebrow public doesn't agree with them - there's a lot of lofty themes and references to classical literature and so forth - or the nature of time... philosophical, spiritual, religious notions.... 

it might sounds psychedelic to us but I don't think many of these dudes were thinking "I'm going to make some good noises to get stoned to or trip to". They went about it with a sobriety and seriousness. 

feel like I can tell when it's done really well, and tell when it's done really badly, but there's a LOT in between that is kind of "well that was pretty cool, but why listen to that one again, and not this other one out of 1000s of other examples"

a lot of the best stuff feels like you are entering a non-naturalistic space, or perhaps a space that is part of the natural world but is very different in its acoustics and perspectives to the plane on which we normally exist

so there's one particular piece by Parmegiani that always makes me think of a speleological expedition - like you're going into a disorienting cavern system

the writing about it in serious books, or the liner notes of records is fairly useless  - tells you a lot about the technical ways in which the sounds were achieved, or the lofty intent behind the project, what it's official themes and meanings are - but it is pretty dry stuff - the books especially are almost entirely about the technology side and nothing about how it feels as sensations or as a moodscape or whatever

one thing that has struck me that is analogous with the musique concrete tape-snip stuff is animation as technique in the analogue era - like an arrangement of heterogenous audio objects brought into the same space and given eerie life - dreams built by ear and hand, as opposed to dreams built by eye and hand

this one always make me think of The Clangers 

even though it doesn't sound much like the actual (and delightful) music in The Clangers by Vernon Elliott

 “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.”

- Toni Morrison

via this fascinating article at Los Angeles Review of Books, about the archive of her rejection letters - not ones she received, ones she wrote when she worked as an editor at Random House 

Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book

I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latter were based in NYC and playing on a weekly basis.  

It was kind of a battle of cools - but also between great music and shit music, the well and the ill conceived. 

 

 

C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis 

Or as David Crosby put it (twice on the same album)

 

Germaine Greer on Jimi Hendrix, Oz #30, 1970

Greer appears in this 1973 doc about Hendrix - about 59 mins in and sporadically after.

Snippets

 

George Orwell

 

 

J.G. Ballard, from High-Rise 

(via Claire Penis)

 "This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed ... they do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language .... What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves ... They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight ... ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium .... They make the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."

- Gilles Deleuze, 'He Stuttered'

 not really thinkige, but a story about a thinker... 

 

Patricia Highsmith, from the diaries

It goes without saying that miserabilism, an apparition which may be held to be one of the specific phenomena of these last few years, miserabilism, this plague against which the moment has come to take energetic measures, permits of as many variations in art as there are categories of misery: physiological misery, psychological misery, moral misery, etc. The time has come to study it clinically.

Miserabilism cannot pass for having raged in France in an endemic manner. The Middle Ages, as elsewhere, were exempt from the contagion. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries turned their backs on it, in so doing braving the already deliquescent Italy of the popes. Against its infiltrations the nineteenth century, for which the Beast had taken the name academicism, reacted in heroic manner (Hugo, Nerval, Géricault, Corot, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Seurat, Henri Rousseau). Behind them, the great bridge whose first spans were laid by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade, the French Revolution.

Today, miserabilism, in this very country, is the offspring of the perfect coupling of those two vermin, hitlerite fascism and stalinism, as thick as thieves in their attempt to apply the death sentence to artists by injecting them with their poison. It also produces deferred results, since we are still saddled with the nauseating aspect of existentialism, Léger’s repulsive Eves in air-chambers, and Buffet’s clown-Christs fashioned from ribs of an umbrella blown inside out – a bankrupts’ stock exchange quoted at a million apiece or more.

There should be no need to emphasize that quarrels between rival factions play no part whatsoever in this. The whole question and the only question is that of ‘sacred language’. ‘Can one,’ asked Eugène Soldi already in 1897, ‘separate a concrete fact from a generalized idea, from an abstract thought? Can one give an idea of the ideal without exalting the sense of a reality? Can the human brain conceive a thing lacking attachment to the real? No’. The case is overwhelming. But the depreciation of reality in place of its exaltation  - there we have miserabilism, there is the crime.

ANDRÉ BRETON, "Away with Miserabilism!"(1956)

(translated by Simon Watson Taylor) 

Any idea what Andre's on about here?

It seems like possibly a rather local and very topical response to something-or-other.

 “And you have absolute power, absolute control, over everything in those worlds. Pigs can fly, forests can walk. The river can sing and flow uphill. At your command the world could blow itself to ice and dust.”

Oliver Postgate on worldbuilding, Seeing Things

(via Rob Chapman)

 

Mark E. Smith, New Musical Express, November 14 1981

from the album Middle Class Revolt

personally I think the contribution of the bourgeoisie to the history of rock etc is underestimated

 “Branca had me shaking . . . I found myself responding in ways that brought me back to my ego. My feelings were disturbed.... I found in myself the willingness to connect the music with evil — with power. I don’t want such a power in my life

"I felt negatively about what seemed to me to be the political implications. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, in which someone would be requiring other people to do such an intense thing together … The Branca is an example of sheer determination, of one person to be followed by the others. Even if you couldn’t hear you could see the situation, that is not a shepherd taking care of the sheep, but of a leader insisting that people agree with him, giving them no freedom whatsoever. The only breath of fresh air that comes is when the technology collapses. The amplifier broke, that was the one moment of freedom from the intention.

“I don’t think though that the image of that power and intention and determination would make a society that I would want to continue living in,” 

"“One of the things I dislike most about European music is the presence of climaxes, and what I see in Branca as in Wagner is a sustained climax. It also suggests that what is not it, is not climactic.”

- John Cage on Glenn Branca performance at New Music America festival, Chicago, 1982

"Rather than the will, rather than the elan vital, Imagination is the true source of psychic production. Psychically, we are created by our reverie - created and limited by our reverie - for it is the reverie which delineates the furthest limits of our mind. Imagination works at the summit of the mind like a flame, and it is to the region of the metaphor of metaphor, to the Dadaist region where the dream, as Tristan Tzara has seen, gives a new form to the experience, when reverie transforms forms that have previously been transformed, that we must look for the secret of the mutant forces.”

- Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

 

 “There is actually no such thing as atheism. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

--  David Foster Wallace 

Art as conjuror of the dead.— Art also fulfils the task of preservation and even of brightening up extinguished and faded memories; when it accomplishes this task it weaves a rope round the ages and causes their spirits to return. It is, certainly, only a phantom-life that results therefrom, as out of graves, or like the return in dreams of our beloved dead, but for some moments, at least, the old sensation lives again and the heart beats to an almost forgotten time. Hence, for the sake of the general usefulness of art, the artist himself must be excused if he does not stand in the front rank of the enlightenment and progressive civilisation of humanity; all his life long he has remained a child or a youth, and has stood still at the point where he was overcome by his artistic impulse; the feelings of the first years of life, however, are acknowledged to be nearer to those of earlier times than to those of the present century. Unconsciously it becomes his mission to make mankind more childlike; this is his glory and his limitation.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human

(via Stylo) 

 "During the 60s people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again." 

- Andy Warhol

“Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is caried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body….

"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

"For a piece of criticism, many magazines want you to have a thesis statement in neon lights, and that is something I’ve been trying to actively avoid doing. I think it’s just really unrealistic—both in terms of the craft of writing and in terms of how unwieldy the world actually is—and often not very fun to read. A good essay will have many arguments in it. The arguments in the essays I write accrue—they’re almost narrative, in that you start in one place and end up somewhere else. With a thesis statement, you have nowhere to go, or you start at the end and go in a circle. "                                                  

 - Lauren Oyler, interviewed for The Paris Review by Sheila Heti

Getting savaged in reviews for her new collection No Judgment ( a freakily forensic going-over here - breaking down the Wiki sources, including Wiki footnotes, behind one essay).... still, Oyler's observation above struck me as interesting thinkige.... the best blogging operates according to this logic... it has no obligation to pick up the thread, return to its starting point. Its starting point may not even be at the start. 

 The preservation of music in records reminds one of canned food. —Theodor W. Adorno

“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason.... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music to the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mastering efficacy goes forth from it, of which, however, no man is able to give an account. Religious worship therefore cannot do without music. It is one the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel.” 

Goethe in dialogue with Eckermann  - Gesprache mit Goethe

- Luis Bunuel

 

 

Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops at the bent spray's edge. That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! Robert Browning, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

future thinkige

 "Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches" 

- Italo Calvino

"He, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace, so that his future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present" 

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

“Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future” 

-  Robert Hughes

“There’s no such thing as the future. There is always now. I can’t be anywhere else but now" 

- Nona Hendryx 

 

 "When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening & said, “Everything I have done is now outdated.” I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. It’s a very important film in film history."

- Ingmar Bergman

 Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks — the seeking — out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban. Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable, of the causes which hitherto have led to men’s moralizing and idealizing…

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

 

“If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. ”

― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space

“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

 "When you observe yourself within, you see moving images, a world of images, generally known as fantasies, yet these fantasies are facts. It is a fact that a man has such and such a fantasy, and it is such a tangible fact, for instance, that when a man has a certain fantasy, another man may lose his life… Everything was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality, that is not to be forgotten. Fantasy is not nothing, it is of course not a tangible object, but it is a fact nevertheless… Psychical events are facts, are realities, and when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within” 

–  Carl Jung, from The World Within: C.G. Jung In His Own Words, a documentary

 

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

—Charles Bukowski

" Spasms of wonder, of discovery"

Virginia Woolf, on James Joyce's Ulysses

Style is to genius what genre is to scenius

Style is a relative inflexibility, a patterning, a degree of predictability – the habits of a mind, a unconscious (or willed) decrease in variety and freedom

Style is invariance, self-conformity

When you read a new piece by a writer whose style is familiar to you and who you enjoy

your pleasure is basically saying “that’s exactly what X would think, exactly how X would say it - and they did”

The naturalness of style is an illusion that occurs when the will involved in writing doesn’t make itself felt, otherwise style becomes “mannered”, tries too hard – 

Style feels effortless

Arriving at style is the onset of the ability to be parodied

Any artist or performer who has achieved distinction is one who becomes amenable to parody

Same applies to genre – the sign that a genre has achieved definition is when it is capable of being parodied or pastiched

Versatility and eclecticism are the enemies of style

Equally, the problem for any artist or performer is to achieve style but not become penned in by it - -a style that retains the capacity for growth, for being stretched, while still being itself

Same goes for genres

Truth is that most artists, and most genres, only have so much room in them before they must repeat themselves –

Either that or it starts doing other things - and ceases to be itself. 

Style is to genius, what genre is to scenius – it is identity, personality,  a set of characteristics

Like a person, a style or a genre can only be X, Y, and Z, if it precludes for itself A,B, and C

It can’t be all values, all attributes, to all people

Indeed the more it takes on and encompasses, the more it risks falling into indistinctness, lack of a defining essence, a core

The more varied, eclectic, adaptable, flexible, versatile – the more you merge into the  undifferentiated array of other stuff around – jack of all trades, master of none – you are providing services that others provide, rather than the unique function

The more rule-bound the genre, the more it establishes itself – it also thereby sets up a pathway, a trajectory of evolution

The pathway is to slough away residues of earlier or other styles,  it's a process of becoming ever more like itself, intensifying its own strictures

Eventually this collapses into exhaustion

(Possible example to counter this argument - David Bowie. Who kept restlessly changing, absorbing, greedily eating up new influences and ideas... But always remained "David Bowie". Then again, the face, and the voice... this becomes the thread of consistency. You can push the voice quite far - the ugliness of the vocals on much of the Scary Monsters album - but it's still one person's voice, their signature) 

"In our youthful years we respect and despise without that art of nuance which constitutes the best thing we gain from life, and, as is only fair, we have to pay dearly for having assailed men, and things which Yes and No in such a fashion. Everything is so regulated that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings and even to venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists do. The anger and reverence characteristic of youth seem to allow themselves no peace until they have falsified men and things in such a way that they can vent themselves on them --- youth as such is something that falsifies and deceives. 

"Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one's feelings; one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one's subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against 'youth'.

 --- A decade later: and one grasps that all this too --- was still youth! "

Friedrich Nietszche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Critics might spoil your breakfast but they should not spoil your lunch" - Kingsley Amis on getting a bad review

 Over time, I seem to have settled into a fairly moronic metric when it comes to music: if I can remember anything about it after playing it, and if I have any desire to hear it again, then it must be good. All the other stuff - interpreting, contextualizing, speculating, poeticizing etc - that goes into writing about music is a separate stage from that crude initial assessment, and as much as all of that enriches and expands the enjoyment, it can never override the basic thoughtless reaction. You can't argue yourself into ecstasy.  This playlist is a bunch of pieces I have played over and over and over, whether it's a recent discovery (as with the Morricone theme, encountered a few months ago when watching A Fistful of Dynamite)  or something beloved from the past that somehow got mislaid along the way, you and it fell out of touch for decades, but then suddenly it's back in your life (as with "My Old Man" and Ian Dury generally). Most of these songs and tracks are things I've never had the opportunity to write about - except maybe a few tossed-off thoughts on a blog accompanying a YouTube clip. There's no real through-line to this motley selection, except that they are all bits of music I became totally fixated on - music that demanded, that still demands, to be played again and again. It's a wondrous sensation, and you can't count on a regular supply of it, so when that happens I've learned to go with it.

Herb Sunday mix here

 Why then should one insist on forcing dreams, texts, words,

and actions to signify? Keep the dream-bursts apart;

let them resound together without filling the intervals

that allow them to coexist in all their richness within

dissonance … Forget meaning and with it the subject.

Repression cannot resist the folly of winds. Beauty will

be amnesiac or it will not be at all."

~ Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs" 

 The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

from  La Prisonnière (The Captive), 1923

via Andrew Parker

 “Where does it come from, this sickliness? For man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminate than any other animal, there is no doubt of that — he is the sick animal: how has that come about? Certainly he has also dared more, done more new things, braved more and challenged fate more than all the other animals put together: he, the great experimenter with himself, discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals, nature, and gods for ultimate domination — he, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace, so that his future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present — how should such a courageous and richly endowed animal not also be the most imperiled, the most chronically and profoundly sick of all sick animals?”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

"My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." “When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside.”

Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky: