Cold Calling

Dropping Off A YouTube Sample

2011-12-03T15:37:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on sampling prompted by this and a brief Twitter exchange with Zone Styx.

Firstly, as far as the YouTube sampling goes, we've done it and been happy with the results - you might realise they're samples but you can't tell what the source is (either YouTube or the film/kitsch 70s US drama etc that the YouTube clips are of) and once played/effected through a sampler they take on a totally new quality in the context of the sounds around them, and they're of a piece with the rest of the sound-picture that they're part of, almost organically so. That's kind of the idea I was referring to in the brief Laika post below, about samples seeming to be coming from the inside out rather than being laid on top - but that's not to say I don't like it when you can hear the 'edges' of samples, that's obviously part of the appeal of samples, these foreign body or elements in the mix, rubbing up against everything else, setting off sparks.

There's a spectrum in sampling, at either end of which there's a kind of seamlessness. At one extreme you've got your virtual 'full track' samples, like Kanye West's 'Stronger', where it's seamless because there are virtually no other musical elements in the track other than the original recording. At the opposite extreme, you've got the seamlessness of a sample chosen or treated in such a way that the listener can no longer tell that they're hearing a sample at all. Between these you've got degrees of 'visibility' or 'hearability' of the sample, how gritty it is (vinyl crackle and so on) how much it juts out and creates - ideally pleasurable, or at least hovering near the pleasure/pain boundary - friction. The 'hearability' also relates to how well known the source of the sample is (how many times has the difference between me liking a rap track or not been down to whether I'm overly familiar with the source material for a key sample or not..?)

At the end where samples are no longer recognisable as such (musical instances of this are harder to recall, naturally!) this is still worthwhile for the producer/musician if it adds something new to the palette. While you're working on a sample, it's still a foreign element, it reacts unpredictably to different treatments, its behaviour under various conditions is not something you can entirely control. So it can be pleasurable (and frustrating) to try and tease a sample into a shape where its useable as an element of your track in a seamless way but you don't get the satisfaction of knowing someone's going to acknowledge and enjoy the cleverness of your steal. On the other hand, if the results sound great, then why worry and, on the plus side, there's definitely no concern about infringement cos you can be damned sure even the original composer won't pick it up.

Specifically on the YouTube thing, I tend to view that as part of the recordability/samplability of pretty much anything around you. With the right means, you can rip something off YouTube, and then turn to your left and hit your desk lamp with a pen and record that and so on. They key thing is how you integrate those elements. In the case of that Drake track, you can hear the YouTube quality of the sample but the recording of the vocal and the beat is far crisper, so you've got a panorama, a perspective, across the different levels of sound quality (and with sampling that can be also be a perspective across different places, times, cultures, registers..). It doesn't have to be that way, mind - there's always someone willing to go all-out cruddy. Whether that succeeds or not is down to their ability to paint in different shades of crud.

My Legendary Garden

2011-11-23T01:12:00.000-08:00

In reference to this

Latest Transmissions

2011-10-10T01:52:00.000-07:00

Couple of band-related items - firstly, and despite the misspelling of the name, Bubblegum Cage III gives a very nice account of 'Grazed Red' from a UK post-rock-y perspective (well, it is Postrocktoberfest). Couple of things worth noting - there is going to be a vinyl release, on a label, and that's not unrelated to the fact that you can no longer freely download the album from Bandcamp. You can however go on there and listen to it as many times as you like.

Also, our involvement in a project where local producers remix local artists has resulted not only in a remix but also this video, featuring members of a Cambridge dance school. Had very little to do with this apart from being filmed miming some of the words (that aspect is slightly embarrassing for me!). It's an entry into a BBC music video competition, anyway. It's an odd little detour for us but I kind of like it. Something for the kids, I think!

On that note, went to Warning on Saturday night, Cambridge's venerable jungle/drum n bass institution. Room1, the big room, was the 'new stuff' - what dnb has become now, while room two was for more the old style, for the older lags or old-headed youngsters. Just ended up in the latter for most of the time - Fabio and a bit of DJ SS who didn't get much of a set (I think maybe Fabio went on for too long). SS even Started with Super Sharp Shooter... Contrast with Hype in the main room, who has clearly stayed alive by embracing the ADD dnb styles. It's not all bad to be honest, and there was a high quality of MC-ing in the main room but the way I was drawn to room 2... it has to be an effect of age, that was the sound I wanted to hear. When SS dropped several old-skool classics in a row I just felt "ahhh (just easing into it like a bath that you've got to just the right temperature) this is what I came for." Just like an old blues purist or something.

Going Postal

2011-09-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

Generally very laudable piece here.

Been relistening to Laika a lot recently, perhaps my favourite band of that 'lost generation', particularly for the first two albums. I think 'Silver Apples of the Moon' pips it, it has more sharp edges, more urgency, but 'Sounds of the Satellites' also, with its wonderfully amniotic textures, and it's musically more of a piece. Some later stuff is decent too, though 'Good Looking Blues' comes over, in places, like Suzanne Vega rapping over 'On The Corner.'

To contrast them with Disco Inferno, whose melding of indie/guitar pop and sampling could sometimes feel a little gauche (perhaps occasionally even gratuitous), I felt that with Laika the samples, synths etc were fully folded in, absorbed, so that they seemed to be coming from the inside out rather than layered on the top. That's something DI attained with 'Lost In Fog' (their best moment for me). Mind you, I like DI's gaucheness as well.

A Limerick

2011-08-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

with help from Ultrafoetus, who contributed via Twitter

There once was a man called Dave Starkey

Who was scared we would all become darkies

He appeared on Newsnight

Started talking bare shite

And got paid for the shameful malarkey

2011-08-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

If someone says "I'm not condoning their actions but I think I understand where this is coming from" and you hear that as "I condone their actions" then that is your intellectual failing. For you, stage-managed images of Boris with broom and calls for water cannons, the 'natural' economic pecking order and the primacy of property restored, and no lessons learned.

There's definitely a problem with the word 'excuses' isn't there - 'oh you're just making excuses for them'. Actually it's things like 'it's just the fault of the parents/the school holidays' etc that sound more like excuses (expedient justifications) as opposed to any deeper reflection on the causes/context.

20/20 Foresight

2011-08-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Baotou to Shanghai

2011-08-02T01:22:00.000-07:00

Video for Kelvox1's Drugsbox by Matt Tompkins, who I last visited out in Shanghai in 2006.

Kelvox 1 - Drugsbox from GreatOne on Vimeo.

He explains a little about the video here

The Real Rupert Murdoch

2011-07-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

A little review I wrote of a Cutting Edge documentary on Rupe around 2004, I think

"By his own standards of character assassination, everyone's favourite Australian media magnate got an easy ride in Tuesday night's Cutting Edge, "The Real Rupert Murdoch."

Newspapers were in the blood (along with gambling and Presbyterianism). His father Keith, a journalist of principle and creator of the Melbourne Herald Group, was delighted to see that his son appeared to be following in his footsteps. Through jaunty sketches, we watched young Rupert progress from employing his sisters as cut-price labour, to sacking his friend Rowan Rivett, heading off Robert Maxwell in London to gain control of The News of the World and eventually relaunching a union broadsheet, The Sun, in 1969 - the end of the idealistic sixties and the dawn of modern tabloid journalism.

The account finally heated up during the Thatcher years, when the one-time socialist found that Maggie's championing of the free market was exactly the excuse he needed to bypass the unions and set up News International HQ in Wapping.

The programme found many advocates for Murdoch's business 'philosophy' and publishing style but any critics - "Guardian readers" Murdoch called them - were noticeably absent. Andrew Knight, ex-chairman of News International, considered him a "facilitator", while others praised his libertarianism and his challenging of the establishment.

In fact, the only person who seemed to have a bad word to say about him was his mother, Dame Elisabeth, who admitted: "I'm not keen on digging into people's personal affairs."

Grazed Red

2011-07-05T02:25:00.000-07:00

Ehem... personal announcement. Kelvox1 has a new recording, 'Grazed Red', which is available in unmastered form as a free download here, along with another newie, 'Drugsbox' which, at around 22 minutes, is the longest single thing we're ever likely to record. It's us in our most 'jam'-y mode - in fact I think it takes that mode about as far as it can go. Good to get these things out of the way.

We're pleased with 'Grazed Red' anyway - it's a significant step on from the first EP. There are lots of reasons for this, not least the fact that we spent four days rather than four hours recording, a process we're getting better at anyway.

Ideally we'd like a properly mastered physical release at some point - any help with that, reviews, blog posts or just (honest but kind) feedback would be greatly appreciated.

As you were.

Structure, Milieu &...

2011-05-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

So this is a good chunk of what I've been feeling/trying to express for quite a while minus one extra level - say we're doing the 'universe-galaxy-solar system-earth' thing, does it go 'Structure-Milieu... phenomenology? phenomenal experience? It's because of the deep structure of the latter that we struggle with the big structure. Anyone with brighter ideas than me please contribute if you stumble over this.

2011-05-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

I was right about that intro to 'Clean' then

(sad, very sad young man)

2011-03-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

Le Quietus

2011-03-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

I've started doing these columns over here. It's my niche, it's an odd one, not because liking French music is strange per se but because it's so broad as a category to 'like'.

But still, music that emanates from France, whether good or bad, is a near-constant source of interest for me. But it’s not because I necessarily think the country’s musical output is in any way superior to that of any other country. (I get the impression, though, that there’s a lot more going on than in Italy, the land of my mother, for example, but I’d love to find out that I’m wrong). But I’ve spent various periods of time living there and, as music is my primary interest, I couldn’t help but explore the musical landscape, and Rockfort is a way of putting the knowledge (and the records) that I have accrued to some use. France is also appealing simply because it’s not England or North America, and so what happens there often hasn’t been picked over, analysed or hyped to death in the UK (or in France for that matter - the French don't really do that in the same way). It doesn’t make me Columbus but, outside academia, informed Anglo commentators on French music are thin on the ground (Mojo's Kieron Tyler being one notable exception). The fact is that my interest can be piqued regardless of the quality of the actual music, just because, even when a record is rubbish, I have some ideas about the context in which it arises, of its place in the culture. Even if I wanted to ignore it, I couldn’t – the subject of French music always sets my antennae twitching. I've come to know the terrain.

Attention to French music on the web tends to be about the fetishisation of certain aspects, kitsch-and-all, of the 60s and 70s (Yé-Yé/girl singers/France Gall, BB and the Gainsbourg girl axis – and Gainsbourg himself, French psych etc), or modern derivations thereof such as the ‘fragile girls, singing in French, making me sigh’ of Guuzbourg’s admirably single-minded ‘Filles Souries’. I say admirable because I have a great deal of respect for that kind of devotion to mining a single seam – or, in Guuzbourg’s case, doing more than that and pretty much willing into being his own genre.

But I can’t follow that approach myself. Firstly because, well, why would I want to, when other people do it perfectly well.

Another reason for this is my own changing tastes. When I was in Paris in 2002 I noted the arrival of New new wave (for there have been others) of chanson artists like Benjamin Biolay (who, natch, writes for lots of breathy girls, including his own sister) and Keren Ann. At the time, I was charmed, it was the perfect complement to my French dream. How perfect that the French had again started making music that sounded like the classic 60s pop of yore! All my Francophile fantasies fulfilled! I could put on Coralie Clement, smoke a cigarette, and instantly be in my own little Truffaut film.

But at the time (and a piece a wrote for Time Out Paris backs that up) I already anticipated that this specific fascination would be relatively short-lived. Fantasy is an essential component of the pop experience but for me it is not enough in itself to sustain my interest in largely insipid music. Again (and maybe I’m being overly defensive here) I want to make it clear that I don’t think every French girl singer, or every nouveau chansonnier is insipid, but certainly that the ratio of inspired to just plain old respired is not so hot. Furthermore, although I understand that the idea of ‘the future’ may have become an irrelevance in pop music (as it has in culture more widely), I can’t accept the total surrender artistic surrender of straight-up pastiche. Yes, chanson (or folky, wafer-light pop in the case of most modern ‘chanson’) is a pillar of French culture, but in 2010 it’s no more a sign of the vitality of that culture than a group doing Beatles and Kinks-y pop or music hall (yes, Britpop basically) would be in Britain.

I can anticipate a counter-argument, and I have some sympathy for it – that it’s at least a properly French mode, a vibe that is particular to the country. I'd always be open to discussing that. I don’t want to shy away from discussing nouvelle chanson (in fact I have just spent the last few paragraphs doing just that) or the way that chanson’s influence might manifest itself in current French music. But, also, let’s take the cases of French Touch, French rap, Cold Wave, Yé-Yé (and all the 60s stuff that gets grouped with Yé-Yé these days) – all examples of a French tendency to refract outside influences in subtly unusual and captivating ways, possibly because of that simultaneous superiority/inferiority complex (particularly relating to Anglo-Saxon culture) that puts French music-makers at more than just a geographical remove from any sources.

Simon Reynolds, mentioned this ‘distance’ a while back in a post called ‘We Are All French Today’:

“It's no secret that France has a bit of a chequered history with la musique roque. There tends to be this twice-removed, distanced aura to that nation's guitarband output. It can be enjoyable for precisely that quality: Plastic Bertrand "Ca Plane Pour Moi" (he was Belgian though right? apparently he didn't even sing on his own records, sez Malcolm McLaren, admiringly), Les Ritas Mitsouko on their one great track whose title escapes me (sounded very T.Rexy though), even things like Metal Urbain and Les Thugs. And of course Daft Punk took that nonreal vibe and turned it into a positive aesthetic strength. But maybe that degree of twice-removed and hyper-selfconsciousness is our common condition today, maybe it's impossible for anyone anywhere to rock in that basic pure from-the-gut unreflecting scare-quote-free way that was available to James Gang or AC/DC or whoever. Maybe we are all French today.”

Some might see as arrogantly Anglo the assumption that French music is only interesting when contending with the influences of UK and US music. I don’t think it’s the only way French music can be interesting, but it is fertile territory: French pop as a distorted mirror held up to UK/US sounds, and (as Simon Reynolds suggests above), of pop at large. The recent obsession among some French artists (M83, Phoenix, Valerie Collective) for the atmospheres and sounds of 80s teen-films/John Hughes is just the latest example.

And things can get more twisty and post-modern than that – take the two very obvious examples of Air and Daft Punk, who are simultaneously French and ‘French’ (aware of, and drawing on, the nebulous associations that for a foreigner might constitute ‘Frenchness’ in music, from ‘sophistication’ to ‘naffness’. It’s not for nothing that their first album bore the legend ‘French Band’).

I guess this is all my way of saying there’s plenty of meat for further discussion and elaboration. In what ways does French music parallel British/UK stuff - or not? Does a French rock group, for example, sound different to an English or American one? If it does, is that just an impression, or is it based on something more tangible? Also, there’s plenty to say because (even though it probably seems as though I’ve been trying my hardest to say the opposite) and there are plenty of French musicians (bands/artists/music-makers…) I want to celebrate too. So yup, going to be doing this on The Quietus for a bit.

Crisis Is the Order of the Day

2011-02-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

Selectors

2011-02-15T01:22:00.000-08:00

This is a lovely companion to the Reggae Britannia programme which, aside from anything else (Linton Kwesi Johnson discussing the dub engineer's art is brilliant), is a timely hour and half counterblast to Cameron's 'multiculturalism has failed'. 'Failure' or indeed 'success' don't enter into it - the territory is constantly mutating, constantly up for grabs. Alliances, mimetism, dialogue or, conversely, fractures and antagonism occur along all kinds of lines that reductive views about wholly consistent, self-contained 'cultures' don't even begin to take account of.

Incidentally, my new masthead quote (from The Fatima Mansions' 'Brain Blister') is a response to the curious victim mentality (ok, maybe not so curious, maybe it's part of the pathology) that has been noticeable in the outbursts of our masters. Things like this and of course Cameron's 'failed multiculturalism' speech.

If we boil their arguments down, they're making those tired old 'inverse racism'/'inverse sexism' claims, those laments of the historically/socially dominant group attempting to justify its phobia and its feelings of aggression.

"Not long ago, one of those good French men said in a train where I was sitting: "Just let the real French virtues keep going and the race is safe. Now more than ever, national union must be made a reality. Let's have an end of internal strife! Let's face up to the foreigners (here he turned to my corner) no matter who they are." It must be said in his defence that he stank of cheap wine; if he had been capable of it, he would have told me that my emancipated-slave blood could not possiblybe stirred by the name of Villon or Taine."

"Statements, for example, that the north of France is more racist than the south, that racism is the work of underlings and hence in no way involves the ruling class, that France is one of the least racist countries in the world are the product of men incapable of straight thinking."

Frantz Fanon, 'Black Skin, White Masks', first published in France in 1952

***

On a separate note, here's a mix I did.

2011-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Actually, the new Charlie Brooker series is kind of 'Ways of Seeing' meets 'Being No-one'. OK, an exaggeration but at least it ties critical viewing of TV into a broader critical assessment of our experience of the world - which, because of 'phenomenal transparency', according to Metzinger, we intuitively find to be 'natural' and direct, that Cartesian idea that we cannot be wrong about the content of our own minds. To an extent, the likes of 'Ways of Seeing' and 'How TV Ruined Your Life' can be usefully linked to the lessons of 'Being No-one'. They highlight certain typical learned responses, judgements, reactions that, if repeatedly reinforced, no longer become accessible to us, 'dropping' to a subpersonal level perhaps (effecient storage, says Metzinger) becoming part of the frame that we're not aware of around the transparent partition of the Phenomenal Self Model - unless something prompts you to scrutinise it again, to make it accessible for attention and cognition via the opaque portion of the PSM.

And the 'Orlov' sequence was a little piece of brilliance,quietly haunting.

2011-01-17T01:47:00.000-08:00

(Via Stylopoke)

Crippen Ward

2011-01-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

While this is going on, I have coincidentally started rewatching the BBC's 90s medical 'black comedy/drama' series Cardiac Arrest. CA was written by Jed Mercurio, who as the series started to air was still working at a hospital and appears on the credits under a pseudonym, John MacUre. He went on to write 'Bodies', which aired on BBC Three and BBC 2 for a while.

'Cardiac Arrest' bristles with the indignation of someone who knows the NHS intimately, from the inside, and its overriding theme is that, contrary to the arguments of 'modernisers' who say that the NHS is in a mess and only privatisation can save it, it is actually managerialism, 'business ontology', that is responsible for the mess. The cause of the sickness is being prescribed as the cure.

Speaking of 'business ontology', much of what K-Punk discusses in 'Capitalism Realism' is dealt with here - not just the audits and endless forms that no-one really knows how to fill in, but all the pettiness and Kafka-esque 'logic' and bullying tactics deployed by the hospital's managers and, since this is a hospital, the casual endangering of life (of the patients) and sanity (of the staff) in the name of efficiency.

The focus throughout is on the system and its impact on individuals - I don't think it's doing the series any disservice to say that some of the characters are reasonably flimsy. Although the principle protagonists are granted more of an inner life as the programme goes on, many can be seen as 'types' I suppose (caricatures if you're being less charitable). But this is no more the case than in a standard medical soap, and of course CA does use many standard soapy elements, which it then frequently subverts to make a wider point. A good example is the plotline in the second series that sees suspicion fall on a nurse with a history of mental illness following a couple of unexplained deaths in the hospital. The standard plotline would be that of the 'crazy nurse' murdering patients but here the emphasis quickly moves to the impeccably Blairite (and this was still a couple of years before Blair's New Labour came to power) new administrator Paul Tennant (Andrew Clover) and his attempt at dealing with his 'dirty laundry', using the nurse as an easy scapegoat. In fact, it transpires that the 'mental illness' involved the nurse being treated for depression following her twin sister's death, and that the fault lies in lack of training and stretched resources.

The first series, only six episodes long, is the most televisually static but also most rigorous and bracing of the three. Each episode begins with a shots of children playing and a voiceover from one of them explaining why they do (or don't) want to be a doctor when the grow up. This idealism is obviously in stark contrast to the realities of hospital life. Andrew Collin (Andrew Lancel) is still basically a child in a grown-up world when he arrives (he looks almost painfully young, his frame too small for the white coat and often wearing oversized glasses), hopeful of making a difference, clinging to his Christian faith. Other members of staff (like Raj and James) survive by using ironic detachment as coping mechanism, as discussed in Kotsko's 'Awkwardness'. Here though, we're looking at something different from the basically meaningless office job. Here it's the case that too much is expected of the doctors, not too little, and this is not just in terms of the hours they work but also of public expectation. As Mercurio puts it in this article,

"We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly, or at all. We were resentful that the nurses weren't angels. We were resentful that, when news programmes broke stories of medical calamities, they did not seem interested in how the system had failed, only in which doctor was to blame."

The impossibility of bridging the yawning gap between the hallowed ideal and the overwhelming demands of management and patients and a daily exposure to death and decay lead to another form of detachment - cynicism (the alternatives, as in the case of the bullied, over-stressed and unsupported Monica Broome, are alcoholism and eventually suicide). Dr Claire Maitland (Helen Baxendale) is presented as being the exact opposite of Andrew - hardbitten, uncaring, possessed of an incredibly dry wit and immune to the shit that surrounds her. Except of course she isn't - throughout the first series, Andrew starts to find in his feet in his new environment but also, through small acts of kindness, contributes, (along with the avoidable death of a child, something unbearable) to the partial decomposition of that facade, to her rediscovered sense of idealism. "I've got no speech. It's just wrong" is how she calls off her affair with the bullying Simon Bettencourt (well that, and biting his nether regions) when he reveals the extent of his involvement in Andrew's exploitation.

In the second series - which gets a bit more slick and soapy, and introduces some more sympathetic characters like 'Scissors' Smedley, but also extends its analysis of management's machinations - Andrew and Claire are shown to be respectful allies, and it's Maitland who ends up going on a crusade when costcutting measures mean that she and Andrew are placed on call for the Ear, Nose and Throat department despite having little relevant experience or training. Again, there's a crunch moment - a haemophiliac father with a nosebleed shockingly bleeds to death,and all over her. She blows the whistle on the hospital, which she is perfectly within her rights to do, but is then suspended for not having paid a trifling sum for a carton of milk.

Together with Paul Tennant, the manager more interested in securing a five-star venue for his debut conference and spending money on having a TV crew film around the hospital as part of a PR exercise (Mercurio: "The uncertainty principle states that, in measuring a quantity, you alter it. Reel after reel of fly-on-the-wall footage from Jimmy's or Children's Hospital shows doctors playing doctor for camera.") the other big hate figure in the series is the superficially affable 'old boy' Doctor Turner, who tells Andrew at the beginning of Series 1 "My door is always open to you" ("Something he heard on Casualty a couple of years ago" says Claire) but who is more interested in golf and cricket and his private consultations than any of the staff or patients. He makes a show of 'empathising' with the lot of his staff but never pitches in to help when they need it, always protects the interests of the manager, and uses his powers of patronage or its inverse to exert power over the junior doctors. ("Patronage will never die", he says)

After the nosebleed incident, he tells Claire that it is a tragedy and that he will make "a representation in the strongest terms" to the committee. Later, Claire sees 'the committee' through a window laughing and sharing drinks.

(In an interview in 1996, Harold Pinter said of his play 'Party Time': "I started with the idea of a party in a very elegant and wealthy apartment in a town somewhere. It became clear as I was writing that outside in the streets something else was happening. Gradually, it became clearer that what was happening in the streets, which was an act of repression, had actually been organised by the people in the room. But the people in the room never discussed it, just one or two fleeting references. They were happy drinking champagne and eating canapes and they were very, very happy. They knew it was all going well.... Without making any great claims, I believe it's an image that has a universal reference.")

Consultant Surgeon Ernest Docherty is the ghost of NHS past who haunts the new hosptial superiors. In opposition to their slickness and efficiency, he is bumbling and forgetful - but also a skilled surgeon, compassionate, a source of inspiration to other surgeons and clear-headed when he needs to be. His view of the past is undoubtedly rather misty-eyed (his presence is often accompanied by somewhat mawkish music) but he's also a sharp-eyed observer of what's going on around him ("I want no part in your brave new world" he tells Tennant) and at least tries to be a voice of sanity. Naturally, Tennant and Turner want rid of him, as that niggling reminder of the principles they are happily 'rationalising'.

As Mercurio confirms, 'Cardiac Arrest' was born of anger. You can certainly feel it. One of the first series' most powerful moments (one which undoubtedly sees Mercurio indulging in a little wish-fulfillment) sees Andrew, exhausted after having had no sleep for days on end, bleeped in the night to deal with one more patient. It's Tennant's predecessor, the man who has denied him leave or the chance to have any break at all, who has a had a heart-attack and is now completely dependent on Andrew. "How safe do you feel?" Andrew asks him. The nicest thing about this scene is that the way it's played (and shot) is that it could be a fantasy on Andrew's part (so it's a minor disappointment when, in the second series, this is confirmed as actually having happened.)

Although the production values are lower and the scope little smaller, this is a series that has more in common with The Wire than Holby City. In the targets it hits (and I haven't even mentioned the institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, the breakdown of stable relationships because of the imppossible hours) it has a relevance that extends way beyond the NHS - I'd even go so far as to say that the treatment of Maitland's whistleblowing echoes through the Wikileaks affair. It's also often genuinely funny and strange, often shot the way dream or memory sequences are, overlit and suffused with white so that the image is often hazy, indistinct.

Accentuating the whiteness we all associate with hospitals to this degree contributes to the series' oneiric ambience, and is highly suggestive in other ways - it's like the sun in Camus' 'L'Etranger', bleaching the landscape, erasing any moral contours that might guide the protagonists. The sense of unreality it creates is also one that fits with Mercurio's comment that "When Cardiac Arrest was branded unrealistic, I understood that the TV mythology had usurped the truth." When certain fictions have become accepted as 'truth' then the truth turns fugitive and hides in unreality - in dreams and, paradoxically, in new fictions.

An Awkward Post

2011-01-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

Since moving to Cambridge and leaving behind my job working for a 'media company' I've survived on some freelance writing work and also working in a framing shop. I don't actually make picture frames, that's taken care of in workshop - I'm at the retail end. One aspect of the job that's strangely gratifying is that I can very easily describe to someone what it is I do to someone of any age, background etc. I wouldn't go so far as to start talking about 'honest toil' or anything like that, it's simply that I recall numerous situations where I would, quite apologetically, give long and tortuous explanations of my job and the function of the company. And there's also that lack of any real commitment to the company and the job, going hand in hand with the company's lack of real commitment to you, particularly when an American CEO takes up the reins. Many people I knew at the company were also: freelance journalists, stand-up comedians, playwrights, bloggers, musicians etc. The office was our 'day job'. So Adam Kotsko's 'Awkardness' hit home on that point, in its tackling of the office (and The Office). I was in that classic job about which people would ask 'So what is it that you do exactly?'. My sister told me on many occasions that she still didn't really understand what it was I did. (Let's say I, and others like me in the company, provided a range of services to TV companies.) I'm also conscious that I was largely guilty of using the irony tactic of dissociating myself from a role I ended up in, that of a Team Leader. Highly symptomatic behaviour would be that in an appraisal situation with one of team where I'd basically be going through the old 'you and I know this is bullshit, but we've got to go through the motions together' routine. It's worth mentioning, though, that in retail - so, not necessarily in an office environment - I've encountered numerous people who have gone the other route, overidentification. That's a shop manager's speciality.

That aside, what I wanted to look at was Kotsko's assertion that 'radical awkwardness' is what ensues when people from two radically different cultures meet. But perhaps there's a more fundamental, radical awkwardness than that, which is the awkwardness of subjectivity. I see that the social context is still key - an individual doesn't exist in isolation first and then enter society; I'm thinking more that subjectivity engenders the situation not just of trying to identify with a managerial role when there's nothing there you could wholly identify with, but of trying to identify with yourself - where, equally, there's nothing to identify with. That's where society (including family, government, media, the whole apparatus) is, giving you explicit cues and implicit clues as to the person you're supposed to be but can never fully inhabit. That's in part because those cues and clues are contradictory (double binds), but also because there is no authentic self. I'm going with Metzinger here: we are no-one. That's my (rough) idea of radical awkwardness, and I see it as leading to the same coping mechanisms of over-identification or that technically un-ironic irony.

I'm surely not the only person to feel this kind of awkwardness quite deeply to have used the latter mechanism as shelter, largely from people who seemed to be more of the first persuasion, the kinds of people most likely to pierce a fragile carapace and witness your fundamental inadaptedness and lack of sympathy with yourself as something shameful.

The ironic stance can clearly be a dead-end, but it can also be a phase that is moved through (as our culture has, according to Kotsko, started to move through it), perhaps more easily than the over-identification setting, although the overcoming of the latter, if it can/could occur, would be more dramatic, revolutionary.

Either way, on the other side, Kotsko suggests, is the potential for a solidarity based on 'awkwardness'. I'm now at the point of dropping that word 'awkwardess' and opting for: a solidarity based on an awareness of the problems of subjectivity, of being systems with Phenomenal Self Models.

That's the beginning of where, lately, I think I've accidentally started grasping some of the political implications of Speculative Realism, without having had any direct contact with work by the relevant philosophers, but more by stitching together threads of reading/viewing from last year - Metzinger, John Berger, K-Punk, the Kotsko book, Frantz Fanon maybe. So coming soon, where 'Ways of Seeing' meets 'Being No One'.

The Song Remains the Same No 4: "It can call itself what it likes"

2010-12-22T02:12:00.000-08:00

"When the Czech police use their truncheons in Wenceslas Square we describe this as an act of brutal repression consistent with the practices of a totalitarian regime. When the English police charge students on horseback on Westminster Bridge we describe this as a maintenance of law and order and are advised that it is a containment of essentially subversive forces. The Czechs use precisely the same language (as of course do the Turks, the Chileans, the South Africans, etc: the demonstrations are against the state and must be crushed. Here, as there, I believe we must assess a governing power not by what it says it is, or by what it says it intends, but by what it does. It can call itself what it likes."

Harold Pinter, from an article 'Eroding the Language of Freedom' published in Sanity in 1989.

Merry Xmas!

The Song Remains the Same No3: King's Cross

2010-12-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

There's an interview here with PSB about coming up with this song, still one of their most moving for the way that it makes the personal and the political indistinguishable from each other, "I've been hurt, and we've been had" (because it's not just about the economics of it, we're dealing with crushed souls, defeated imaginations here), for its exquisitely mournful tone, the echo of fading promises, just the delivery of lines like "I've been guilty of hanging around"

For these purposes, the key lines are obviously about the "smack of firm government";"good luck, bad luck waiting in a line/it makes more than a matter of time."

Isn't the problem with the prized idea of social mobility that it's about exceptions that prove the rule, the dream of transcending your allotted station (which is why the Daily Mail are obsessed with it, with the idea that Kate Middleton is a beacon of hope for their readers' petit bourgeois desire for social advancement). You have the opportunity to move up in the world, you just have to take your chances ("someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday"), and if you don't then you're to blame. The notion of social mobility is a symptom, and a salve.

Love the idea in the interview of King's Cross as "the end of the line, the place from which there is no escape but death", especially given the area in question's shiny 'regeneration'.

Sit Down and Be Counted

2010-12-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

Student sit down protest in Cambridge's 'Grand Arcade'/Lion Yard yesterday.

The Song Remains the Same No2: I Still Believe

2010-11-12T00:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, this isn't a song I've been remembering fondly, in fact it's pretty recent... and it might be one of the single worst songs I've ever heard. But it is something of a time-capsule in the way that it just sounds so defiantly... Evening Session-ish. It's like something Steve Lamacq fever-dreamed into being. Rock n roll is going to save us? From corporate soullessness? Fuck off mate, do you even know what's happening around you right now?

Possibly he doesn't - according to Wikipedia he attended Eton alongside Prince William and his father is a city investment banker. But I didn't know that when I first heard the song ant that didn't stop me gesticulating at the radio in mute rage.

It really gets you from the first moments this, that 'Hear Ye, Hear Ye'. Just there you've already got most of the ingredients that make 'I Still Believe' so diabolical. The words, which say "hey I'm just a rock n roll troubadour" - he even sings about "folk songs of the modern age" a little later on - the strident guitar strumming(which in Frank Turner's mind = truth), the lack of any melodic guile whatsoever (again, it's the simplicity of the message that counts) the strained and just slightly nasal (traces of commercial US punk mixed with early 90s shit-indie) vocals. And that's before the music-hall piano and skiffle beat kick in (thanks the Libertines!) and you listen in sick amazement (TM CC) to lines like "we're not just saving lives, we're saving souls, we're having fun."

But this isn't simple at all. Even trying to unpick what this song actually means now, in this place and time, about late capitalism; rock music; authenticity; rebellion and belief makes my brain cry. The idea of community it celebrates is as noxiously vaporous as the notion of the Big Society. The disconnection between what this song is saying and SELLING, and what's actually happening around us is so great that, to quote John Berger does in 'Ways Of Seeing', one can only say that "this culture is mad. Reality itself becomes unrecognisable."

The Song Remains the Same No1: Only Losers Take the Bus

2010-10-25T04:54:00.000-07:00

Have been thinking recently about songs from previous eras (particularly the 80s, but not only) that seem to have taken on a renewed relevance, piquancy and poignancy now. The obscene 'Wacky Races' scenario of 'Only Losers Take the Bus' - "Get these dead bodies off my race track!" - was inspired by a quote attributed (perhaps misattributed) to Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." There are echos if this in IDS's recent suggestion that the people of Merthyr Tydfil should "get on a bus" to find work. Now this sounds more like a recommendation for public transport than the first quote, but the suggestion is still that the bus is the mode of transport best suited to society's 'failures'.

Essential Viewing

2010-10-21T01:20:00.000-07:00

..

Tom alerted me to this series, wolfed down in one sitting yesterday. Ubu web is fantastic resource (have watched films on Celine, Leonard Cohen and an arresting/uncomfortable TV interview with Lacan so far). The accompanying essay by Momus already goes a fair way towards describing what makes 'Ways of Seeing' so special, but it's perfect example of that kind of BBC paternalism that is also wholly unpatronising - Berger sets his ideas out clearly and the viewer is credited with the ability to understand them. The brilliantly devised second episode, 'Women in Art', sees Berger set out his thesis (and he's always at pains to point at that it's his thesis, encouraging the viewer to respond critically) in the first half and then have a group of women discuss and respond to a viewing of that first half of the programme. It's not just a token gesture, this takes up the rest of the running time of the episode. Episode 4, 'Commercial Art', also felt like the perfect companion to Mad Men. If the BBC still made programmes like this (Momus suggests they never did, that this was a one-off) it might actually deserve the 'lefty' label slapped on it by the Daily Mail.

The only programme I can think of in recent years which has encourage this kind of critical thinking about images is 'Newswipe'/'Screenwipe'. Obviously, the latter are in a more matey vernacular, because that's the only way that people will apparently absorb that kind of information now. 'Ways of Seeing' is not without its period trappings either, but those only enhance its appeal - as Momus puts it

" The Britain we glimpse in the films, already alienated by spooky BBC Radiophonic Workshop music by Delia Derbyshire, is alienated even more by the passing of time. Alienated usefully, in the Brechtian sense; we look at a capitalist society which is like, and unlike, our own."

I was also intrigued by the fact the last episode is in colour whereas the others are in black and white. I tried to imagine this was another audacious move on the part of the programme makers, but it must be down to how these recordings were captured (the series was in colour but eps 1-3 were from a b&w TV?)

2010-10-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

More TV Debate

2010-09-15T02:16:00.000-07:00

Interesting article that covers similar territory (and with greater rigourousness) to my post here but comes to a slightly different conclusion.

"BBC scheduling is just as much slave to the rigid demands of predictability as that of its commercial rivals, even though there are no commercial messages to insert. End credits are ruthlessly squeezed down beyond recognisability so as to promote a forthcoming viewing option – because that is what commercial stations do, and the BBC is competing with them for reach and share."

I agree, but my favoured (and perhaps unworkable) solution is to change the landscape and the terms of the debate entirely so that it's not just about what the BBC does and doesn't do but the conditions that all channels exist in (hence my 'license fee for publc service OR subscription and NO packages ' model).

EP

2010-09-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

The first Kelvox1 EP is available to download free now from bandcamp here

It's basically a live recording; 'No Cave, No Pilot' was recorded slightly earlier and has a little post-production so is a bit less 'room-y' than the other three tracks, which were all recorded together the same afternoon - for better or worse! Whether we'll stay with this approach I don't know, I like the slightly more produced sound of 'No Cave, No Pilot', but then I can can picture the grotty room these songs were recorded in, which doesn't help.

Ice Age

2010-08-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

In discussions/meditations on containerisation and container ships, I was surprised that this album didn't get a mention: Icebreaker International's 'Trein Maersk: A Report to the NATOarts Board of Directors'. I first picked this up in the music Oxfam in Ealing (one of the few things I miss about working there, interesting post-punk stuff cropping up a lot of the time, vinyl almost always in pristine condition)having heard nothing about it... the sleeve was so curious. It was clearly not some kind of straight sound-effects job - the image on the reverse (very much like the one at the top of this post) signalled that there was some kind of concept behind this, it was some kind of wheeze (I mean, the guy on the right looks like Sufjan Stevens or something...). The sleeve opens out to reveal the following

"On 6 January 2000 Alexander Perls and Simon Break boarded the container ship Trein Maersk at the port of Yokohoma, Japan. Their mission, as specified by the NATOarts board od directors, was to produce an audio report that would promote free international trade....

Trein Maersk... is intended not only for use by academics and policymakers, but also as a guide for artists, merchants and members of the public who wish to make connections between developments in contemporary art and international trade. Mr Break and Mr Perls hope that this document will serve as a tool to open national markets to free and unfettered global exchange."

Inside the sleeve is also a large global map showing the route taken through four major ports, plus statistics and other information on the ports and their development. Before having done a little internet research it was possible to believe that this whole story was a fabrication, a very well thought-out conceptual package, although even then by feelings about it were nicely poised: surely NATO endorsement would have to be official, they wouldn't allow this as a joke, surely? Anyway, they did undertake the journey, NATOarts is real.

The natural thing for me, and clearly for other people too, is to approach this as an act of subversion. I recently came across this interview, though, where they refute that reading:

A: And we’re not like Deep Forest, you know? It’s not like we’re attempting to… The whole point was we’re making a portrait of the world in which people from all over the world…
S: Essentially share the same culture.
A: Share the same culture, which happens to be the American-dominated one. That’s the kind of realistic portrait whereas hundreds of these World, like Douchy-Doouchy from Djibouti
S: And if you go to Djibouti…
A: They all drink Coke!
S: They drink Coke and listen to Destiny’s Child and they’re very happy. And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is. I mean we’re certainly not going to say it’s bad (like a lot of people, they say this is terrible) because that’s like saying that the people who like these things are stupid. We don’t think they are. The stance of this audio-document is very much in favour of globalisation and presenting an argument in favour. Now whether people want to see that as being in some way, you know, a stance that we’re taking, in some way ironic, is up to them; entirely irrelevant. But certainly from our point of view it’s entirely sincere. But the choice to not be trying to take cultural elements from these different places we visited was very very deliberate because we found… It’s not like we went out to tiny places in the countryside where we may have found whatever the kind of local folk-zither players were like. This was a journey around big big industrialised cities. And what we found was that what we saw in each one was mostly the same. There were variations, but they weren’t to do with local culture, they were more to do with shifts in political and economic geography rather than culture. Certainly the culture, the business culture would change from place to place but the actual artistic culture, for want of a better word, is very much now a sort of global dialogue.

Should they be taken at their word? Is this really a record promoting the benefits of global capitalism?

Perhaps better to take the quote "And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is" as the cue. It stands, it presents. But what do you make of it?

Musically, it purports to be representational - it's divided into two records, each with a side devoted to a port: so side (C), in three movements, 'describes' the leg of the journey that takes the duo to the Port of Rotterdam. Often, with its clean electronic sounds and guitar lines, its steady rhythms, this sounds like music that could work on some kind of high-class sales film or company induction video.

Peppered throughout are utterances like the following, disembodied, just capital thinking outloud:

"The good news is the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting richer too"

"Ten years ago, Ronald Regan was being toasted in Moscow"

"I believe that the genius of our system is that the founders set up checks and balances to limit our dependence on great leaders"

"Virtually every leading economic indicator is pointing in the right direction, the markets are up" (this on a song called 'The Long Boom')

Maybe the interview's part of the act, but in a way it's more interesting if they mean it. Because just by making you think about the big picture, this 'communicational sublime' as K-punk termed it in a Kraftwerk review, and which was developed here, it sets itself up to be investigated, challenged, thought through. Obviously, time and the global crash have magnified the Canute-like folly and pathos of that last quote from 'The Long Boom', but there's an undoubted Kraftwerkian melancholy about the (A)/Port of Yokohoma sequence. Then there's the exaggerated gameshow positivity of Port of Dubai, which sounds like the theme from Blockbusters.

Also as they acknowledge in the quote above, that music doesn't sound as though it necessarily needed to have been made in the part of the world it was recorded in, it isn't ethnographical. In fact, it erases ethnicity - 'local culture' just adds flavour to the business transactions, all you need to do is... break the ice?. This is relevant while the positives or otherwise of deterritorialization are being discussed.

This is the sublime of Capitalism - the lack of sense of effort, of manpower, everything glides, there's no hint of a human presence on the Maersk ship you see on the sleeve. The only struggle is to unblock the lines, maintain the flow.

"In order to continue to grow its economy, Dubai... must resist pressures to impose unnecessary regulatory burdens on corporations"

"The Port of Yokohoma... faces serious challenges in the long run. Hamstrung by restrictive Japanese labour laws, complex environmental regulation and a high federal tax burden, Yokohoma finds it often cannot compete with ports such as Manila and Taipai"

Everything must flow.

*****

Side D ends with just the sound of the sea.

"The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years."

Obsolete

2010-08-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

Cambridge, Gwydir Street

The Big Society 1838

2010-08-12T09:35:00.001-07:00

Free meal for the poor on Parker's Piece, Cambridge, while the Cambridge elite admire their own generosity (at a safe distance)

Town Not Gown

2010-08-10T02:29:00.001-07:00

We moved to Cambridge just over two months ago. Both myself and M had our reasons, not least among them being that it forced us to leave jobs neither of us could stomach anymore.

Cambridge is a place I know and I don't know. It was where I did my A-Levels and so it's the site of many formative experiences. When I was younger it was also a place that I would sometimes come to for the day with my parents. On some occasions, we would spend half a day or more in the Grafton Centre (pictured above). I'm sure I'm not alone in having parents (or even grandparents) who were in the habit of doing this (my Gran is always up for checking out a new branch of TK Maxx) and it usually left me feeling profoundly bored. Bribery with a CD or a magazine would help. The other members of the band are here too, so before the move I had been making the trip almost every Sunday from Peckham, frequently dealing with weekend delays, replacement bus services etc. So the main sites were already familiar, as was the Mill Road/Romsey area - the 'quartier populaire' as the French might call it - where we now live.

But I still feel very much an outsider (typical conversation: "Where's x?" "Just along from y" "Ah ok, where's y?" and so on) and that probably goes triple for M. One way in was to attend one of the famed walking tours conducted by Allan Bringham, which intrigued me as it was around the Grafton Centre a site which was, as I mentioned, one I associate with the boredom of a Saturday spent shopping. Around the Grafton is an area known as the Kite, simply because the original developments (which in the early 19th century were on the very fringe of town) formed a kite shape. The link there details some of the struggle over the fate of the area, and Bringham pointed out the way in which the victors appropriate and deploy the symbols of the defeated - the Grafton centre's logo is comprised of 'kites'.

One thing that emerged from the tour was the origins of Town v Gown animosity in Cambridge. This tension between students and locals is familiar to many towns, of course, but in Cambridge (as it possibly is in Oxford too) it is rooted in the great power that was wielded by the colleges, which not only owned a great deal of land but also had their own police force and had the power to lock up 'loose women' in the University jail. Then you can factor in the exploitation that occurred in conjunction with the population explosion in the early 19th century, the most obvious being the culture of undergrads paying regular visits to prostitutes in Barnwell, or simply availing themselves of their maids (many of whom would be young teenagers). Unlike the undergrads, the prostitutes might then have to face the prospect of being 'saved' ie effectively imprisoned in the Cambridge Female Refuge that stood just behind the site of the Grafton centre today.

I Was Re-reading Proust When...*

2010-08-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

...I happened to notice a copy of the Evening Standard lying on a seat near me. Since I've moved out of London, that hasn't happened for a while. And yet the compulsion is still there to pick it up.

In the London of the Evening Standard, we have the pseudo event, the feigned amazement (and a po-mo labyrinth.)

"A hedge maze appeared in Trafalgar Square today to the astonishment of office workers and tourists."

Reviewed by a 12-year-old girl on a school trip. Or maybe a fully paid up Standard reporter, impossible to be sure which.

"I was staring at two of London's iconic landmarks feeling as if I was standing next to a woodland creek. Surreal."

Little blue plaques along the streets in the maze, informing visitors that "Carnaby Street is said to have inspired Ray Davies to write the Kinks' hit Dedicated Follower of Fashion".

Real antagonisms are either geographically distant, or supplanted by illusory ones: Milliband v Cameron. All's well with the banks (just keep up with the contrite expressions for a little while longer).

Most strikingly, the Big Society in all it's glory:

On pages 8 & 9, a spread on the working poor taking the night bus to work, part of the Standard's Dispossessed Fund, which aims to raise £1 million for charities from its readers, which will be matched by the government.

On the front page, David Milliband's revival of the Mansion Tax idea will 'hit £2M house owners to help the poor.'

As the leader reminds us:

"People living in, for example, Kensington and Chelsea, where it would be easy for their house to fall within the scope of a mansion tax, are not necessarily millionaires." (My italics)

* A French friend told me that she'd encountered this example of disavowal when a French public intellectual (of which they seem to have quite a few in France, the right-wing mob - Alain Finkelkraut and the like - dominate in terms of media presence) was on the radio discussing a reality show that he happened to have seen. "I was re-reading Proust," he said, "when I happened to look up at the TV.."

Spartacus: Class War

2010-07-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

Is Spartacus: Blood and Sand the most class-conscious series on TV? The last, and extremely bloody, episode ‘Kill Them All’ sees class solidarity between slaves calling each other ‘brother’ and overcoming interpersonal enmity, and a brutal uprising against the masters and supposed betters who have treated their slaves as pawns in their power games throughout the series. It’s not just brothers either; as the makers of Spartacus have been even-handed in their portrayal of sexuality (little fuss is made about the presence of a homosexual gladiator – he meets a tragic end but then so do plenty of others and it in no way comes across like a punishment for his preferences) and the deployment of nudity (everyone gets their kit off), so the band of brothers standing at the end of the revolt also includes sisters who have played their part. Ok, so it’s mostly brothers who have done the fighting, but each one has done what they could given the weapons and opportunities at their disposal.

On the one hand, Spartacus’s story was all about personal revenge - he would, naturally, eventually discover that his wife’s death was ordered by his Batiatus (played with relish by John Hannah, an actor I’ve never previously enjoyed watching) and respond with force. What was interesting, though, was that the other tension in the narrative was the wait for the moment when characters who, previously blinded to the bigger picture by their loyalty to the house of Batiatus or the reality principle (this is your lot, get used to it), would realise together that they had been systematically screwed by their masters (literally, in the case of tender beast Crixus), when the individual grievances that had built up over the series would be recognised as having a common cause.

Of course, this could just be a Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves-style case of American self-identification with rebels who band together to overthrow a ruling order (for Roman read English) or perhaps it’s just a safe enough fantasy, enclosed as it is in a highly stylised, CGI-dominated world. But it has been an intriguing series (actually, there are still a couple of episodes to run on Bravo I think) which, even with some hammy acting and pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, avoided post-modern reflexivity and took itself seriously. Also, I’m not averse to a bit of creative swearing, and “Jupiter’s cock!” will live in the memory for some time.

But first, the bad weather...

2010-06-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of Cathal Coughlan's forthcoming album 'Rancho Tetrahedron', here's an interview about the last one, 'Foburg', that I did on Resonance FM in 2006. I think I did an ok job, although the nerves definitely show through in a couple of places where I can't really find my words.

Suprisingly, A Post About Football

2010-06-21T03:16:00.001-07:00

This is one of the fastest-selling issues ever of French sporting gazette L'Equipe apparently. The intrigue has even juicier elements than Anelka being sent packing after insulting his coach - the confrontation is said to stem from the fact that Zidane had undermined Domenech's authority by contacting the players directly to suggest tactical changes. These changes were then presented to Domenech, who rejected them (apparently also knowing full well where they came from).

One of the first things to note about the French coverage of the debacle and the performances put in by Les Bleus is that it shows up the fallacy that it is specifically the British media that heaps undue pressure on the national team. If anything the French coverage, at least in this case, is even more scathing. While our papers still evince a certain perverse optimism, the attacks on the French side are absolutely withering. The Ribery scandal and the fact that France look almost certain to not make it out of the group stage (putting them in a worse position than England) might be contributing factors here, though.

But what has struck me particularly is a comment quoted in the Independent:

"By the end of the match, I was supporting Mexico," said Alain, 43, a chef in a Parisian cafe. "They at least looked as if they wanted to play and that football was still fun for them. Our guys - what do they earn? Millions? - looked bored, miserable and as if they didn't give a damn."

You can argue that the deep-seated psychological terror suffered by our players when they pull on the shirt is something specific to England, but this schadenfreude on the part of supporters/impartial observers is something that transcends national boundaries. And it suggests a deep frustration with meritocracy. On the English side too, the amount of money these players are making is freqently raised. And why not? If Richard Seymour is right in 'The Meaning of David Cameron' to say that

"Class is not a status, a culture or an ethnicity. By class, I simply mean the relationship between the minority who own the lion's share of wealth and capital, and the majority who sell their labour to get by"

then the working class-or-not backgrounds of the players are irrelevant. The hugely inflated salaries for those 'at the top of the game' are hardly unrelated to the fact of fans being milked for their loyalty via Sky subscriptions and higher gate/season ticket prices. It's not just in the emotional sense that people are (or have) invested in these players.

As with captains of finance, though, we hear that the players are worth their salaries as that's what's necessary to retain the services of these most talented people. The trouble for footballers, as opposed to bankers, is that we actually get to watch the players doing what they do - badly. There may be differences of opinion on what the causes are for their woes and what the corresponding solutions might be (sack the coach, bring on Joe Cole etc) but there's widespread agreement on the fact that what we've seen so far in this tournament is a malfunctioning team. There's that truism that everyone's an expert when it comes to football. Of course there are difference levels of analysis, more acute points of view, but I maintain that we can all watch the England team and see that they are not only playing badly, but not even enjoying playing. It might not be true that everyone's an expert, but everyone can see and judge what these players are doing to earn their money. And whatever the supposed merits are that make them worthy of their pay packages, the sentiment abounds that, frankly, me and my crippled friend and my blind grandma playing our hearts out against Algeria just because we're overjoyed to be in the World Cup would make for a more edifying spectacle than what was witnessed.

We mutter about bankers not being worth their bonuses and all politicians being corrupt but since we don't have first-hand, visual evidence that ties their actions to our woes (and could such evidence even exist..?), we can still be convinced that this is only cynicism, that it's a judgement that only really applies to a minority. When there's a political scandal, a newspaper sting or a Channel 4 documentary catches someone in the act of abusing their power and influence, the initial sense of righteous indignation felt is quickly followed by a weariness and resignation - having your most cynical, kneejerk opinions confirmed is pretty depressing and we gradually, happily, and perhaps with some relief, revert to a the mildly optimistic default position, while the revelation that our betters are nothing of the sort is re-relegated to the status of a niggling suspicion. That was why at the height of the expenses scandal, the papers rationed their revelations, maintaining the high as best they could, to gradually diminishing effect and to the point where the attempt to relive the excitement of those heady days through the David Laws 'saga' (whatever the rights and wrongs of his position) was a dry, weary clusterfuck that left everyone involved feeling soiled and sorry - the press for going through the motions of calling for one more head, the coalition for going through the motions of 'accepting his resignation', and from anyone else for summoning interest in the news.

Back to the football... and between international competitions, when we don't get to see England in action, we 'forget' that they are a mediocre side and are (cautiously) optimistic again by the time the next one comes around. But while we're watching, the World Cup, perhaps partly for its scale (this is supposed to be the best team our country can produce) brings the reality of meritocracy very close. And we don't appear to like it.

Think You're Hard Enough

2010-06-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

An excellent essay on Houllebecq by Ben Jeffrey, apparently writing the Zero book on Houellebecq, pinpointing very well the perversely invigorating quality of Houllebecq's prose.

Hysteria!

2010-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

After watching Dario's Argento's 1977 horror classic 'Suspiria', the one with the Goblin soundtrack that's become hip in recent years, Justice sampling it etc, it occured that best equivalent in pop for Argento's brand of horror, at least in this film, is The Associates' 'Bap de la Bap'. It's in the luxuriant textures and the hall-of-mirrors sounds, but also the rising intensity, reaching a peak of hysterical, irrational but somehow totally lucid panic - too much lucidity, for in that moment you've grasped something terrible and it's even worse than you could have possibly imagined. The mouth gapes ever wider, the pupils dilate further...

"How does an antelope feel when it's getting chaaaased? The same as man with a geiger pointed in his faaace!

Folk politics, folk psychology and TV drama

2010-06-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

David Simon:
“If we had anything right in the first four seasons as to the nature of the city, its problems, and why those problems seem so insolvable, why is it that we're not intensely aware of those problems?”

The montages that close each season of The Wire, although inseparable from the episodes preceding them where the relationships between these disparate scenes are explored, the “money” is followed and so on, they can also be viewed in themselves as pieces of popular art concerned with a Real that isn’t that of folk politics, of naïve-realistic cause and effect. It’s tempting to refer to The Wire’s attempt to map a more complex reality in terms of Metzinger’s ‘convolved holism’ in which “objects of experience are made up of other objects in a nested hierarchy.” In these montages it’s always an ‘individual’ who, momentarily, becomes the nexus of the events of the series. These montages mirror the opening credits, which are impersonal, depersonalised – no faces, no selves, just the money, drugs etc going round. On the most functional level, these moments end the series with a nice update of where the main characters are and what the state of play is in Baltimore. They can also be read in the conventional terms of character psychology as moments of realisation ie the character becomes conscious of the fact that they are caught in a web that is not of their making (with, in the Season 2 montage above, Nick Sobotka clinging to the fence with eyes closed, as if plugging into the network - I chose this one specifically because, via the container port, it has a scope that extends beyond Baltimore and the US). And yet the montages contain scenes which those characters could not have direct knowledge of, so that what we are also being shown is a sample, a taste of the what lies beyond an individual’s phenomenal experience. Simon’s “if we had anything right…” is an important qualification – although, as a journalist, I think Simon sees a lack of proper reportage as the most pressing issue to be addressed (the thrust of the fifth season) – it perhaps indicates a sense that, in philosophical and neurobiological terms, he and the other Wire writers were attempting to map the unmappable. But with its vision that ‘contains’ folk politics and folk psychology, The Wire’s message is that if we don’t try to look at the world in this way, we won’t learn anything. It also makes a serious case for fiction and art (albeit supported by a great deal of journalistic groundwork) being the best means of trying to apprehend the real of neo-liberal capitalism.

In a Sight and Sound article, the BFI’s Mark Duguid goes on the defensive for British TV drama, claiming that UK efforts have been overlooked in the rush to praise the American ‘golden age’. Some of his points ring true (the shallowness of British TV criticism for example) but is still forced to concede that “we might have to accept that sprawling, authored work isn’t a natural British form, just as our novelists don’t perpetually strive to write the Great British Novel. Anyway, how realistic is competing with America?” and mentions the budget for the latest HBO series. Budget issues aside (but see an earlier blog post for comments on how HBO is funded, and also hasn’t the quality of previous HBO projects then attracted big money producers like Tom Hanks?) but this relativist approach (ie both US and UK shows are good in their own ways) avoids the issue of whether it is precisely the scope of certain US dramas that accounts for the richness that so many admire, this sense of the form attaining a new maturity. Duguid also concludes “Though American drama may deal with universal themes, we also need drama that reflects our specific lived experiences and social problems, drama that can help to combat the alarming deficit of empathy that distorts public understanding of, say criminality, abuse or injustice (something that I’m not convinced much American television, however, sophisticated, does).

In other words, British drama should remain synonymous with social realism and kitchen sink psychology. Meanwhile, one of the defining features of the key US drama series is the way they transcend, or at least complicate, folk psychological (and by extension, folk political) interpretations of reality.

More is likely to follow on this subject.

Precision

2010-05-14T01:05:00.001-07:00

"Clegg placed a reassuring hand on the prime minister's shoulder."

2010-05-12T04:06:00.000-07:00

Since reading this line in The Guardian, I have been unable to view this 'climbing into bed' as anything other than an erotic scenario, with the fact that both are, for some some factions of their own parties, selling out their 'principles' (yuk yuk!) only adding to the frisson. The nature of the office romance and the explanation for why so many occur, apart from the daily proximity, is that professional boundaries (plus maybe the spouse/partner at home)and the fear of being discovered (or even having emails and phone calls monitored) only add to the tension, the intoxicating sense of risk. And the tease is slow and therefore more intense; since the stakes are high, you have to play your cards carefully, cloaking your flirtatious statements and actions in ambiguity as far as possible so that you have a position to retreat to, but always trying to push it a little further every time, waiting for a sign, a glimmer of recognition, the reckless twinkle in the eye. Did you imagine it? Did that smile mean what you thought it meant? Did anyone else notice the complicit glance, the squeeze of the hand?

Imagine what it's like with the whole country watching, with the paps lurking outside your door. Surely the temptation becomes almost unbearable.

Everybody's Always Talking 'Bout Who's On Top

2010-05-07T02:03:00.000-07:00

Post Punk New Wave-y Riffs

2010-05-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

For what it's worth...Edith Nylon's is surely textbook

Violator: Stadium Weird

2010-04-29T03:30:00.000-07:00

So apparently ‘Violator’ is 20 years old. I’ve never found much that was ‘sexy’ about it; I think when Americans say they find it sexy they mean something else, or they’re confusing the album with the people who made it (I’m not going to argue with that - if I could look like Dave Gahan when I’m his age, and he basically killed himself once…)

Depeche Mode’s ‘Violator’ was the second album I ever bought (on cassette – the first was Queen’s ‘The Miracle’.) It was an album that did all it could to weave itself into the fabric of my life at an age (12) in a place (Italy, where I was staying with relatives) and in circumstances (my first proper holiday away from home) that undoubtedly made me highly impressionable. As with holidays that followed, I was shuttled around between my mum’s four brothers and would spend a little time with each. While staying with the second youngest (or third oldest) uncle, my routine would involve him taking me to the condominium he worked in and having a swim in the pool there while he went to the office. Then, at lunchtime, he would take me back home again. Early in the day I would be the only person at the pool apart from the lifeguard who took me under his wing, and into his confidence, from the first morning. He was in love with the boss’s daughter, he said. The boss was my uncle, of course, and the daughter in question was the elder of my two cousins. He asked for a favour: could I give her a message from him? It was very important that I delivered it only to her, in private – no-one else could hear it. What was the message? This was exciting, I was being entrusted with something very important. What he wanted me to say to my cousin was “enjoy the silence.” She would know what it meant.

I was determined to help, and to execute the task properly. Back at my uncle’s flat, before lunch that day, I took my cousin to one side and whispered the message to her. She smiled and thanked me, but didn’t say much more. After lunch, she announced that she was going out with ‘someone’. My Aunt, giggling, said we should go to the balcony and watch her leave. I had recently been diagnosed as being short-sighted but didn’t have my glasses to hand, so all I could see as we peered at my cousin from the fourth floor was that she was getting into a car with a man. I immediately felt sorry for the lifeguard, nursing this passion for my cousin while she was going out with someone else. It seemed unfair of my cousin to be interested in someone else when the lifeguard was so likeable.

It didn’t take long for me to find out that the man with the car was the lifeguard. ‘Enjoy the Silence’ was their song. They had played a game with me; I was a little disturbed at having been so gullible but I didn’t mind that much. As the go-between, I’d been given privileged access to a more interesting and still somewhat mysterious adult world.

‘Policy of Truth’ was the video of the week on Videomusic during that time, which was the first Depeche Mode song I was genuinely aware of (although of course I would have heard earlier songs). I hadn’t actually heard ‘Enjoy the Silence’ at that point (a fact that only served to increase its mystique). ‘Policy of Truth’ intrigued me.

Marin L Gore has had a fair amount of stick for clunky rhyming and the naïvety (or faux- naivety) of many of his lyrics. Some of his lines do have sing-song-y gracelessness and moon-in-june rhyming schemes, it’s true. (one famous example: “Promises me I’m as safe as houses/as long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers.” - part of the problem with lines like that is Dave Gahan’s delivery and the music’s air of seriousness – as a T-Rex lyric it might be taken differently). But that naivety has be taken in the context of what was a genuine attempt, coming out of the post-punk era, to try to look at human relationships with fresh eyes and find new and better ways of living together. That impulse underlies even the largely maligned (in the UK) likes of ‘The Meaning of Love’ and ‘People Are People’. The insights aren’t always particularly insightful, but on the likes of ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Lie To Me’ (“lie to me/like they do it in the factory”), DM succeed in depicting the inter-personal and the political as being two sides of the same coin. They obviously weren’t alone in that but, as Simon Reynolds pointed out in ‘Rip It Up…’, they were the ones to take these ideas (as well as ‘industrial’ approaches to music making, sampling themselves bashing bits of metal and so on) to the largest audience.

By the time of ‘Violator’, Depeche Mode was a somewhat different animal though, the most overtly political phase of their career was over, and the American stadium phase was just peaking. The lyrical concerns were becoming more metaphysical (or vaguer, you might say, more open to whatever you might want to project onto them) but ‘Policy of Truth’ is one of the songs to still work on that personal/political level (just the use of the word ‘policy’ for starters). As a 12 year old I remember being drawn to it because that’s an age where you’re starting to be aware of the hypocrisy of adults but you’re still told by parents, teachers (and priests – raised a Catholic, I was) that lying is wrong. So to hear a song that pointedly delivered the opposite message was something of a revelation. The fact that it didn’t give you all the details made it more fascinating – what could the person being addressed in the song possibly have done to make lying preferable to telling the truth, for the consequences to be so bad.

“It used to be so civilised/you will always wonder how/it could have been if you’d only lied.”

And to cap off the intrigue, I remember it also occurred to me to wonder what was at stake for the person delivering the advice – “hide what you have to hide/tell what you have to tell.” What was his relationship to the addressee? Was this the voice of bitter experience – had he been in a similar situation? Since he was someone advocating not telling the truth, could he himself be trusted?

Again, this seemed like an insight into the stranger, darker world of adult feelings and relationships – simultaneously attractive and unsettling, a description which also applies to ‘Violator’ as a whole. It’s weird enough just through being such an anomaly: the band’s one great album. It was their seventh album and yet there’s little indication even on its predecessor, the solid but largely dull ‘Music for the Masses’ (that nevertheless accompanied their big US breakthrough) that the quality would improve so sharply, and the fall-off afterwards is fairly steep.

The difference, aside from it being Gore’s most consistent batch of songs, is in the details and the textures, courtesy largely of Alan Wilder (a listen to Recoil albums like ‘Bloodline’ supports that) and the production team that included Flood, François Kevorkian and Daniel Miller. In places, the textures are as smooth and blankly suggestive as the monoliths in 2001, on ‘World in My Eyes’ and ‘Clean’ for example (which is another candidate for ‘precursor to the BBC News music’ along with Leftfield’s ‘Song of Life’). The sticky, three-note electro riff that basically constitutes the chorus of ‘World in My Eyes’ dominates the song, which was a hit single, with its oddness, an oddness that is as much about the sound itself – which I sometimes think is a flashback to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’ (!) – as the notes (it's a sound that was echoed in Roisin Murphy's excellent 'Overpowered'). It’s an oddness that just a notch below that of the irrecuperably odd equivalent part in Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’, or those staccato ‘pips’ at the end of the chorus of ‘Open Your Heart’, or the ‘chorus’ of ‘On My Radio’ – where the hook is partly the wrongness itself. The main riff from ‘Policy of Truth’ is similar in that respect, with its tape-warp decay that recalls another Human League song, ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’.

Elsewhere, though, and this is Alan Wilder’s speciality, there’s a clammy, bio-mechanical feel (that often puts me in mind of Aliens… all that ‘matter’ in the places where they’ve nested that is the product of something sentient, but not human), as with the techno-organic throb of ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Blue Dress’ or the passage between ‘Blue Dress’ and ‘Clean’ where harmonious moaning is offset by unsettling noises that in my mind’s eye could the sounds made by ant mandibles, amplified and treated, and the equally insectoid, rising and falling electronic signals that you could imagine coming from robot crickets. Elsewhere, voices are processed to sound less human – there’s that cyborg “sometimes” on ‘Clean’ and the post-tracheotomy utterance “crucified” between ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Policy of Truth’. And then there are all those uses of human breath (or emulated human breath) as part of a percussive or rhythmic loop, fused with scrap metal samples and drum machine hits, which is a recurring motif in Depeche Mode’s recordings up to ‘Violator’ (cf: the outro for ‘Master and Servant’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’). It’s in the breakdown in ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Halo’ (the ‘hoo-hoo-hoos’ in the intro loop), the breathing in the “and when I squinted…” section of ‘Waiting for the Night’ that feels so close it almost leaves a little condensed moisture in your ears.

Whether by accident or design, David Gahan does little to humanise the songs he sings on, that deal almost exclusively in abstracts, archetypes and metaphors (Gore brings a more torch-y feel to his turns). By this point the baritone has got stronger and a little richer, but it’s still fairly inflexible, he’s not getting all throaty and choked liked on the pumped-up follow up ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’, which brings in the gospel choirs and the ‘soul’ and has almost none of the strange power of its predecessor. Frequently on ‘Violator’ Gahan sounds like a disinterested deity trying on human ‘feelings’ for size, turning them over in his hands in a bid to understand what they do, what they’re for. At the very least, this helps to elevate ‘World in My Eyes’ above the level of a corny “why don’t we make a little room in my BMW?”-style come-on.

Apart from ‘Policy of Truth’ I haven’t given much space yet to Gore’s song writing. The overly worn themes of devotion, obsession, redemption etc are crystallised rather than ossified. At least four songs – ‘Sweetest Perfection’, ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Clean’ work as drug metaphors, but obviously ‘drugs’ can stand in for a lot of other things. There a magnificent chord changes in ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Halo’, and ‘Blue Dress’ is a lovely Euro-ballad (again, it’s the sonics that take the song into stranger territory.)

On ‘Halo’, he casts Gahan in a role that could, as with ‘Policy of Truth’, be taken as satanic, a tempter – “all love’s luxuries are here for you and me” he tells the guilt-shackled addressee – but the mood is more tragic-heroic. I’d say it was humanist except its protagonist appears to accept that there’s a higher justice and that retribution will come: “when the walls come tumbling in/though we may deserve it/it will be worth it”. But it’s certainly on the side of the fallen; again, for a boy with a Catholic education, this was (and remains) a provocative idea.

‘Halo’ is a sympathetic performance, but for the most part, I agree with people who find there’s a coldness, an emptiness at the core of Depeche Mode. I’ve seen ‘Violator’ referred to as a synth pop ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (Pink Floyd also = soulless) – I can see that, it’s definitely very hi-fi friendly, and there are some very Floydian passages, like the section linking ‘Enjoy the Silence’ to ‘Policy of Truth’, although a couple of moments remind me more of the beginning of ‘Meddle’ actually – with the bass sound going to ‘Clean’ and the organ stab ending up on ‘Waiting for the Night’.

However, this lack of a mushy human centre, of ‘soul’, as some people might call it, only adds to the unnerving effect of the music on ‘Violator’ because its surfaces are undoubtedly suggestive, but what of? Even ‘Enjoy the Silence’ is moving less for the subject matter than for its poise and uncanny architectural perfection, its flawless design demonstrating an abstract intelligence beyond that in evidence in the actual lyrics. It’s that sense of a beyond-human guiding intelligence at work, transcending the individual talents involved, that marks out ‘Violator’ from the rest of Depeche Mode’s work, and also as a truly weird (and stadium-sized weird at that, before U2 copped the move with ‘Achtung Baby’) artefact. I know that it made an Extreme-loving friend of mine that I lent it to uncomfortable – I still remember him trying to articulate what it was about it that had that effect on him. As a 12 year old I thought this secret knowledge, this alien logic, was proper to the world of adults, but I know better now.

Observe, a new Conservative paradigm!

2010-04-21T00:52:00.001-07:00

Boredom (Badum Badum)

2010-04-08T06:13:00.001-07:00

To chip in on the discussion of boredom and Graham Hon’s post:

“Boredom on the other hand is not tedious or flat - it is a free floating state of restless potentially dangerous energy. Boredom is systematically annihilated by ‘keeping busy’ with tedious tasks or having ‘experiences’ in museums or being ‘entertained’ by enervating 3D risk-free spectacles…”

This immediately put me in mind of Beckett – the impact of his plays is undoubtedly bound up with boredom, or at least the potential (or the fear) of boredom. Watching ‘Happy Days’ in a theatre you share the virtually featureless landscape with Winnie. I think maybe it’s an underdiscussed feature of Beckett, but the fact is you know that you’re going to be stuck there for a while and the surprisingly powerful dictates of politeness will probably keep you there. In that position, you’re as reliant on distraction as Winnie is – boredom creates a tension, and you’re hyper-focused on any occurrence, anything that comes to relieve it. But of course, the silences, the longeurs are also there – you know it’s there, the sense of futility, you feel it (or at least you do in a good Beckett production).

Of course, it’s a difficult thing to accept now that boredom can have a function like that in a play/film/TV series – boredom is simply not allowed, it can’t even be risked. Imagine if for a second we had to reflect on the implications of that silence, that boredom, in our own lives.

In Happy Days (and other Beckett plays) it’s also crucial that there’s always an ‘other’ being performed for that is supposed to acknowledge this activity, and the strength of belief in the fact that this ‘other’ really exists, or is really listening and isn’t indifferent, waxes and wanes (mostly wanes) throughout, even if it cannot be renounced completely. The various audiences: ‘us’ the theatre audience, ‘Willie’ (who may or may not give a toss), ‘God’ or any Big Other (or the ‘self’ performing for the ‘self’ – as problematic as that binary is). Which links to Wayne Blackledge’s response to K-Punk’s Alice post (and my own feelings about the ideas that guide the production of TV programmes) when he mentions ‘what the people want.’ The ‘people’ (this nebulous concept that is the product of fear, received wisdom, condescension and market research – the results of which, of course, are always shaped by the questions that are asked) are who this constant, cheap stimulation is supposed to be catering for (the new Doctor Who looks to be an improvement on the previous era, but that continuous, pumped-up, overbearing soundtrack remains), the imagined audience for this prattle. But who are ‘the people’ really? Not the people making the programmes/films/papers/music etc (since they know better – just ask David Yelland) and not the actual, existing viewers/readers/listeners either who are only getting what it’s assumed they want - but since it’s all supposedly created for them they end up thinking it’s what they deserve, or that this is just the way these things are supposed to be. It’s for no-one, but the belief that it’s for someone persists, cannot be renounced.*

Beckett dramatised this prattle and in doing so actually takes us close to experiencing the ‘real’ in which it takes place; now all we have is Winnie’s chatter, accelerated and virtually ceaseless. No gaps=no ‘boredom’ as we once might have understood it - but without boredom there is no relief (in more than one sense).

By the way, did anyone catch ITN’s coverage of the election campaigns getting underway? Where to even begin?

How about with this example of bad faith:

Reporter’s voice-

“Oh look, here’s another politician trying to establish a ‘relationship’ with a voter. It’s enough to make you want to go down the pub.”

(Yes, yes, you’re with us, the ‘people’, aren’t you? You see through the charade, right? You’re as tired of this as we are? So why the fanfare? If it’s so boring, then why are you showing us? And why, of the footage you had, have you chosen to air the bit where a politician called a member of the public who turned out to be unwilling to engage in conversation? Weren’t there a number of other phonecalls with more positive outcomes? Or was that single phonecall set up in the first place to be filmed by the news cameras…?)

Also amusing if depressing:

Interviewer hectoring Gordon Brown: “But how can you say business leaders have been deceived? How could they be deceived? These are some of the most intelligent people in the country.”

*Underlying this is also hatred. Don’t those media tycoons, those mass media producers, hate ‘the people’ with their whims and their fickleness, always having to keep them entertained, keep them watching? Don’t ITN’s producers and reporters hate these viewers they have to condescend to? Doesn’t Winnie want to kill Willie, kill the audience, and annihilate herself in the process?

Camberwell Then

2010-03-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Possibility of a Book About Houellebecq

2010-03-25T05:43:00.001-07:00

It looks as though Zero have a book on Houellebecq in the pipeline - makes perfect sense, after all it he was he who identified very clearly the way in which 'business ontology' had come* to dominate even interpersonal relationships in 'L''Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte' - lazily translated into English as 'Whatever' when it really translates as 'the extension/broadening of the field of struggle'. It'll be interesting to see whether it just tackles his work or his public persona as well (those comments on Islam etc). I suspect (and hope) it will largely be the former - but will that include the film of La Possibilité D'une Île (which I've only managed to see a few clips of on YouTube), his dabbling in 'erotic' film and that album on Tricatel where his poems are backed by Bertrand Burgalat and his house band (mostly lounge-y, Air-y vibes that work well with Houllebecq's images of consumer-business classes 'enjoying' their leisure/travel time)?

* and that tense right there is very important in Houllebecq, 'Atomised' begins with it. In both that and 'The Possibility of an Island', the Last Men in their near-obsolescence (like Island's 'shock' comedian Daniel) are observed from a future standpoint - "I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end." Houllebecq is someone who actually does envisage the end of Capitalism, either through the genetically engineered arrival of the post-human in Atomised, or through immortality equalling the elimination of desire/'self' in The Possibility of Island.* In the latter, it's hardly an image of human collectivity (only very loose kind of future-internet-based one)... but then there is that 'possibility', which in Houllebecq's work isn't much, but it isn't nothing either.

*What is the island? A place where the miserable desiring machines of the past, and the desire-less clones that persist for the rest of forever, could be reconciled.

NB On closer inspection I just imagined that thing about the tense - it's just the simple past he uses after all... maybe the pluperfect/past perfect just feels like the right tense for Houllebecq.

Kicking a Cold Corpse

2010-03-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

Recently for the Rockfort French music website I asked electronic producers Hypo and EDH to interview each other. The full result can be read here and I think makes for a great read, but this part from Hypo about postmodernism really stuck out for me. The clunky translation from the French is mine:

"I liked playing with the codes of postmodernism. That’s really the background that I’ve come from, like V/Vm (that's the Caretaker, for the hauntologically inclined) and several others among my contemporaries. We took great pleasure in wringing music’s neck. It was good, necessary and healthy. And I still do it to a certain extent. But at a certain point, our generation woke up next to a cold corpse that everyone had been sticking their boot into, and we really had to decide what to do with it. Since then, many people have carried on thumping on cold meat as if nothing had happened, with others retreating to very conservative, classical forms, and yet others cultivating some form of revival of all sorts of genres, with the ‘mise-en-abyme’ of ‘revivals of revivals’."

I also like him on live vs recorded music.

You can get pretty much the whole of Hypo's back catalogue here for free

lyndhurst grove

2010-03-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Accentuate the Negative

2010-03-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

I attended Mark Fisher’s Kafka 2000 talk at King’s with M. yesterday. Apart from anything else, we both enjoyed the feeling of being back at school, and I felt myself in the shoes of those engaged, questioning mature students at University that my listless, apathetic self (as it was at that time, for some more, and less, common reasons) had looked at askance – I’d actually read the book, for heaven’s sake! The material was familiar though it was nice to have it reactivated, but it opened up a bit more when it came to the questions afterwards. One question was about how art can respond to capitalist realism, and one answer was naturally the hauntological approach – but what tweaked my antennae was the idea that artists should reclaim ‘negativity’. It struck a chord as it’s something I’ve been trying to work through myself – what ‘negativity’ could mean when applied to music-making.

(I haven’t read Cold World yet, but I guess some of what follows might be creeping onto the same territory).

Initially, I think it’s possible to define the negativity by what it isn’t. The first point is that, in itself, this negativity runs counter to pervasive compulsory affirmationism. Also, it needs to be distinguished from the fossilised James Dean, rebel negativity of, say, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or The Kills or groups like that, which isn’t even “I wear black on the outside because that’s the way I feel on the inside” but “I wear black cos it’s, like, cool.”
On that note, it’s also a negativity that shouldn’t be so much ‘misery me’ as ‘misery us’ – the point of view presented should be depersonalised, de-self-ised (NB overheard as a response from one woman to another’s woes on the train: “You should be more selfish.”) In lyrical terms, for example, this wouldn’t have to mean not using ‘I’, but it’s important that the ‘I’ is not the Romantic one of the artists typically eulogised in Laura Barton’s reliably toe-curling ‘Hail Hail Rock n Roll’ Guardian columns, and more of a meta ‘I’.

Thinking more now about the positive properties of this negativism: the post-crisis moment can give artists of this generation a moment and a subject. What I suppose is a standard-issue existential-artistic dissatisfaction with what is sold to us as reality can take on an added resonance now that some people (including artists themselves, perhaps) are waking as if from a slumber. If there’s a small chink here, the work of anyone sensitive to it, in any walk of life whatever their aptitude, must be to keep it open in themselves and in others, and to – at the very least – contribute to and cultivate the ambiance of negative feeling towards neo-liberal realism as the psychic foundation for genuine social change. This ‘negativity’ must be, in K-Punky terms, ‘libidinised’, and music is an excellent medium for through which that can happen - This is not just an argument in favour of sonically impoverished sloganeering, though.

I noted with great pleasure that Poetix (aka Cold World author Dominic Fox) has a nicely detourned quote from Cathal Coughlan/The Fatima Mansions atop his blog at the moment (from The Door To Door Inspector “You made your choice when mocking the ways of true grown men.”) since, when I was a teenager, the Coughlan of The Fatima Mansions (and we can argue about the sonic shortcomings or otherwise of Coughlan’s various musical formations another time) was one of the first people to make attractive a certain negativity (as outlined above) and seriousness, one that was on speaking terms with musical surprise, absurdity, grotesque humour and invigorating language-mangling (Coughlan and Chris Morris are strangely twinned in my mind). At the time I perhaps didn’t even take Coughlan as seriously as I should have – after all, an album like Valhalla Avenue which then seemed thrillingly paranoid and bilious now reads, from ‘Evil Man’ to ‘Be Dead’, like a pretty sane and reasonable state of the world address. That is not to argue that The Fatima Mansions should be taken as the model (they just might not work in that way for you), or that words-in-music are the only way of expressing negativity (this would be a terrible, unmusical straightjacket). The expression of negativity vis-à-vis neo-lib realism perhaps doesn’t have to be as literal, as literary, as Coughlan’s.

The great thing about the Zero Books project is the manner in which it libidinises thinking against and around capitalist realism, or it has certainly had that impact on me (although the economic crisis itself also played a large part in that…). And one interesting aspect of the Michael Jackson tome was that it demonstrated how this kind of thinking can be the background hum, the bassline mood of a work even if it isn’t its ostensible subject. I think this is relevant to other forms of artistic/cultural production, including music.

Ah...

2010-03-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

So it was Lime Headed Dog we saw that day, James...

Peckham or Atlanta: Don't go there...

2010-03-10T08:48:00.000-08:00

From the Pecknam blog

'Shot in Atlanta and Peckham'

2010-03-08T02:26:00.000-08:00

Black Hole Sun

2010-03-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

Probably one of the most spine-tingling sequences in recent TV history. The more you stare at this picture, the more you realise you're staring into two bottomless black holes in Don's face. The black hole in the sky is the black behind Don's eyes (those ridiculous, cartoonish 'pupils', those 'windows into the soul' that are really nothing but the reflection of the sun.)

Burt Cooper asks later: "After all, when it comes down to it, who's really signing the contract, anyway?"

Crow Calling

2010-03-05T03:33:00.000-08:00

Until now I'd only ever heard the Martin L Gore cover of this on the Conterfeit EP. Don't know anything much about Joe Crow himself except that, according to a review on his MySpace page, it took him a mere 28 years to follow it up with an album!

One of the things I like about the song is that the restless, circular nature of the melody creates the imperative that drives the lyrics. "Finding the right words, can be a problem/How many times must it be said/There's no chance/It had to happen." It's not an 'emotional' outpouring, but more like automatic writing. The lyrics both dramatise the process and are process.

this man has my flask

2010-03-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

After Your Health (Sketches from a song)

2010-03-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

I

Middle class emotion is always muted or modulated. The compulsion is to put on a brave face and carry on as usual, so sadness is preserved, internalised - becomes part of the fabric of things, the background hum; the family home is retained, the ritual of Sunday lunch continues but rooms are hollow shrines now the children have moved out and the spouse has passed on, and there are empty places at the dinner table. But it must continue for it’s all about family, even though family and its aspirations (for itself, for the world, for its posterity) are also the greatest cause of suffering. These homes are haunted by the spectre of the successful, healthy family unit; melancholy slips into the silences and slender gaps between the ideal and reality, settling there like sediment. No major disasters, nothing alarming, just a slight falling short of expectation, of what was promised. Quiet defeat, entombed.

II

“Old age isn’t nice” my grandmother tells me on a regular basis. This is not just because of the physical deterioration, it’s also because it seems the longer they are alive, the more people become depositories or vessels for distress, sadness and disappointment. Not just their own, but those of their extended family, of friends of friends, of all the people they have known and outlived. Via my grandmother, I’m just a short step away from the War; from poverty on Clyde Bank; from a sibling who never made it out of childhood; from my grandfather’s glancingly acknowledged mental problems and their reverberations; from his mother, a hard Irish woman “incapable of love”; from another mother (herself) feeling no connection to her youngest son, viewing him as some sort of alien perhaps; from a boy I’m related to in some distant way who suffered from paranoid delusions that he was being monitored by malicious agents and eventually committed suicide, and whose parents subsequently separated (I’ve listened to that sequence two or three times). So many stories that have unfolded, played out to their conclusion. Identity is memory, and so many memories end in… well, where does anything end, if the long view is taken? A typical trigger – “I went swimming today, grandma” – leads to the same recollection every time, of going swimming with a good friend, a good friend who died many years ago. Always: from swimming, to death.

2010-02-26T01:35:00.000-08:00

treats of the eye

2010-02-25T04:21:00.000-08:00

brilliant interview with gil scott heron as he defends himself against a hardboiled power suit inquisition:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=925627437

eloquent smackheads in swansea have a 'dig' in close up

Andre tarkovsky's masterpiece starring the singer from these new puritans

Straight Outta Pecknarm

2010-02-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

At a party some time last year, M. and I met a policeman working in Peckham. I said that when I’d first moved there from East London I’d bought an album by a local rapper because I’d heard it was good, and I was curious about musicians in the area. Lyrics were along the lines of “if you’ve been in a gun battle in Peckham, you know me.” (I haven’t, as it goes…). The policeman said “Ah, you mean Giggs.” Giggs is well known to the local force – although this particular member of British law enforcement seemed more keen to see him succeed than some representatives of Operation Trident (according to this article, anyway), as it would mean his not having to fall back on other “businesses” (quote from this Paul Morley interview). The picture the policeman painted was of detectives spending a lot of time on YouTube watching clips of local rappers to glean names, faces, details of incidents, in a bid to build up knowledge of the area’s gang members. (SN1, the name of Gigg’s shop, is also known to be a clique of local gang The Peckham Boys.)

I like about half of ‘Walk in Da Park’, beats-wise and for Giggs himself. Giggs is not a rapper you admire for his acrobatics – he’s a ‘grain’ or ‘presence’ rapper, one you love for the sound of their voice more than for their speed and rhyming dexterity. I’m not sure in what way he could be seen to be “fighting free of clichés” while at the same time “thickly eulogising vengeance and violence”, though, unless it’s just through the very fact of him having a voice at all, or being charismatic and articulate. Which clichés are we talking about, exactly? Judging by an episode of Silent Witness I watched recently (a repeat I think), the white, middle-class Other can countenance a black yooth from a 'bad area' being self-aware and blessed with wisdom beyond his years, as long as the character explains that gang violence is caused by rappers and computer games.

What is certainly interesting is that, despite the apparent obstacles, Giggs has got this far without tempering the music or his ‘real’, which is (and also addresses) the intertwining of “thug” fantasies (capitalist fantasies in the raw) with social and specific local concerns. So it seems strange, then, to worry about Giggs “dissolving into posture” when a lot of ‘Walk in Da Park’ is simultaneously about a posture that needs to be maintained, and a posture being maintained. Concerning Giggs’s further success, the question – which is hardly unique to him – is more: will he have to adopt new postures and, if so, will it be possible for him, for others, to reconcile them with the earlier ones?

"And always I am hungry..voraciously hungry."

2010-02-19T04:25:00.000-08:00

Watch Henry Miller conduct a tour of his bathroom.

"Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. In an intelligently ordered world there would be no need to make the unreasonable attempt of putting such miraculous happenings down. Indeed, it would make no sense, for if men only stopped to realize it, who would be content with the counterfeit when the real is at everyone's beck and call? Who would want to switch in and listen to Beethoven, for example, when he might himself experience the ecstatic harmonies which Beethoven so desperately strove to register? A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible. Which is to say, the universe."
Henry Miller, Sexus

2010-02-17T05:52:00.001-08:00

Sunshine Cheesy Cybernetics

2010-02-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

So while the Brit Awards Brit Award for Best Brit Award was being presented last night, the band said “down with that sort of thing” and went on an outing to see Steve Reich’s ‘Drumming’ performed at the South Bank Centre. Swimming somewhere around my consciousness are some received ideas that Reich gets dissed in certain circles – quite possibly by some Classic FM-y types who might talk about melodic naivety (more below on that) or the lack of ‘emotional depth’ - ‘Classical music’ being freighted with Romantic notions of how music ‘expresses’ something, or that music be ‘representative’ as Tom put it, whereas ‘Drumming’ expresses things through being what it is rather than something else. But I guess he might not be thought of favourably elsewhere for things like the following (said last night during the after-performance discussion): “For some people percussion was a way into electronic music, but I thought ‘what if percussion is a way out of electronic music?’.” Another objection is further down in this post, from Professor Eno.

The what it is of ‘Drumming’ is, firstly, an exploration of timbre, acoustics and phasing. One interesting feature of the performance mentioned in the talk last night was that the players are not only encouraged to listen to the magic effects, the ‘ghost’ sounds that can reach a pulsing intensity, but also to use only what they hear (particularly in the case of the singers), amplifying what’s already, accidentally, there.

It’s also definitely a visual experience, one that lives through being performed. I thought back to the Brian Eno ‘Arena’ documentary, with its talk of cybernetics and feedback (also, hadn’t realised Cornelius Cardew was in Reich’s band)… and I found Eno here knocking ‘Drumming’: “He uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He’s learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play.” Last night both confirmed and dispelled that opinion; it was clear that these musicians were ‘really feeling’ what they played, and that feedback was essential to the unfolding of the music (as per ‘listening to the magic effects’ above - band leader Colin Currie confirmed this), with ‘aberrations’, that in some cases might be specific to the room, being emphasised, developed and integrated into the whole; it’s musical evolution, literally. But Reich himself made the point that he’d never really heard ‘Drumming’ the way he heard it last night, with all the musicians being professional percussionists. He admitted to being only a so-so drummer, and the impression he gave was that the same went for others that he played with back then – that might account for the ‘stiffness’. Also, it’s perfectly possible to accept that Reich isn’t any sort of visionary when it comes to possibilities of recorded sound – nothing he said last night indicated that this was his focus (even if the ‘kaleidescopic’ – Currie’s words – musical changes in ‘Drumming’ have a lot in common with dub and techno sound manipulation).

‘Drumming’ also lives through performance because it’s a utopian spectacle – it was remarked upon how each player (all from different walks and stages of life, Currie stressed) developed their own ‘ready stance’ when preparing to start or rejoin the performance, and then subordinated themselves to the larger programme before taking a rest and allowing others to continue the work. Another instruction to the drummers was that they shouldn’t rush and feel obliged to change anything, but if an individual felt the pattern was getting boring and wanted to emphasise something new they should feel free to do so. It’s a process which, for the performers, appeared to be its own reward. And for the audience too, I think. You’re not having your emotions manipulated by the music so much as thinking with and through it.

Also interesting, though, was to see Reich embracing what, for want of a better word, you might describe as the slight cheesiness the actual music (the notes) expresses– I’m paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of “When I listen, I hear some sheets on a line in the California sun, corny stuff like that. It’s sunshine music.” Simon Reynolds, on the subject of dance music, though, makes the point that for electronic producers, it’s not the notes in a musical figure/riff that count so much as the fact that they are a vehicle for displaying texture, treated sound. For Reich, they’re the vehicle for exploring the acoustic qualities of instruments interacting with each other and the sound of a room. The ‘corny stuff’ is accidental, he seemed to be saying – which does back up Eno in a way when he says that Reich was more interested in process than results. (Where’s the line between Reich and some of Eno’s music in that respect, though – ‘Discreet Music’, say? Just that Eno gets better recorded sound from his processes? The non-musical concepts that feed into Eno’s stuff? That Eno’s music doesn’t have a sunshine cheesy vibe? These are not rhetorical questions, btw…)

Meanwhile, hostess of the after-show discussion Gillian Moore wanted to pin Steve down on a very important matter – just where was the ‘one’? She could well have been on the pipe throughout the show for how lethargic she appeared, but it was fun to envisage an alternate scenario where she pinned him to the wall, screaming “Where’s the ‘one’, Steve? WHERE’S THE FUCKING ‘ONE’!”)

Some additional points/study from Tom:

Steve Reich’s manifesto

The book on African music that was a major influence on Reich:

A comparison between Reich and William Carlos Williams (who Reich got into because of the symmetry of his name apparently).

Williams’s poetry has phasing-esque techniques in it:

“They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her”

And a quote:

"I wanted to compose music that I loved intensely, that was completely personal...but that was arrived at by impersonal means.”

(“completely personal” – so I suppose that could include embracing your sunshine cheesy side rather than dismissing it as an accidental effect?).

Choice in the Workplace

2010-02-16T06:30:00.001-08:00

Either say 'yes' to worse redundancy conditions (but better than the statutory miniumum first tabled by the management, thanks to the unions) and therefore accept becoming more expendable, and that you are being made to pay for the parent company having taken out loans to buy your company in the first place and for the need to make it more saleable now they probably don't want it anymore

or

vote to strike and risk the unions being derecognised and the imposition of even worse redundancy conditions. But at least you have a choice!

The Power of Mattel Compels Thee!

2010-02-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

Mill Road Methodist Church, Cambridge (nr. James's house)

TV OD

2010-02-12T06:27:00.001-08:00

From K-Punk's latest post:

“the kind of "entrepreneurs" that dominate our culture - whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne - have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money”

“and for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism's culture is”

And makes particular reference to TV. A few points then:

“Risk averse” – British Capitalism has always been risk averse, in fact this has been one of its defining features from the start. Whereas other countries have traditions of banks having closing ties to industry, and even specific banks for specific industries, our banks’ (and company shareholders’, and all gentleman capitalists’…) fear of long-term commitment, and desire for quick returns without soiling one’s hands in the actual production of something new, is intimately linked to our cultural, social and industrial stagnation. And the City of London was world leader as far as inventing “new ways of making money” goes. The ‘funny’ thing now, though, is how ridiculous the ‘risk averse’ attitude looks now in the light of the economic crisis – the risk was only perceived in terms of long-term investment in the UK but not in, say, the international trading of debt.

As for TV… I have some experience of the world of cable/satellite broadcasting through my day job. TV companies are constantly jittery, fiddling and fussing with schedules to improve the ratings (and therefore retain/increase advertising revenue) while mostly just shifting the same old effluent around the schedules, or exchanging it amongst themselves (“You’ve seen every episode of ‘Friends’ over a hundred times – but have you seen it on our channel?”); re-branding channels without making any significant changes to the actual content, coming up with diminishing-returns format ideas that are always X (a series that rated well) meets Y (another series that rated well) or X with a twist; wasting money and energy in months of work for half-baked celebreality series that might be canned after two episodes if they don’t rate well. Ask people involved what their idea of good TV is, though, the paragon, and they’ll say ‘Mad Men’ or something along those lines. (But they’ll respect the makers of awful programmes that get high ratings). It’s not that they don’t know what good TV is (as opposed to ‘good TV’ –ie populist, gets the ratings), it’s just that “bless them, it’s what the Freeview viewers (or whoever) go for.” And all of this useless activity is largely colluded with by TV journalists and celeb mags.

It’s clear the BBC, or the idea of the BBC, needs to be defended – otherwise we wouldn’t even have BBC4 and the occasional other decent programmes it can produce. But does that mean protecting the license fee in its current form? Part of the BBC’s problem is that it is isolated, a lone public service broadcaster that is perversely expected to compete against the commercial standards of other broadcasters ie get the ratings. So perhaps the idea of opening up the TV tax to other broadcasters is not a bad idea, but this would need to come with a public service remit – and obviously, that would have to be preceded by a very serious conversation about what public service means. But while TV companies are prey to stats and the whims of advertisers, nothing will change and TV will keep spiralling down the plug-hole. (Also antithetical, at least it appears to be at the moment, to TV’s potential social function is non-linear TV: Video On Demand, series linking etc – all the methods for offering customers ‘more choice’ not just about what they watch but when they watch it).

Another model is HBO, which established a direct relationship with its viewers, has demonstrated that people will pay for quality, raised money without advertising, and built up loyalty through not patronising its viewers, Could the two options be used together? Either broadcasters accept a ‘public service’ remit, receive public money and are free to air, or their revenue has to come solely from charging customers directly. For this to work, Sky-type ‘packages’ would need to be prohibited as well as advertising – a customer would have to choose to pay for each channel individually, and the channel would have to be funded solely from that revenue, HBO-style. Those channels would obviously have to charge more than Sky/Virgin etc currently do – and then we might see what people are really prepared to pay for.

And finally…Newswipe. One of the strangest things about the segments of the show where real clips from the news are shown (like Channel 4 News’s mock interrogation of Tony Blair) is the impression that news broadcasters, far from being shamed by the way the fictional new stories on The Day Today were presented, watched them and thought “Brilliant, let’s do that!”

Mad For It

2010-02-10T04:33:00.001-08:00

As with Mark Lawson’s baffling conclusion that The Sopranos’ great legacy was linguistic (can’t find the link but it was basically: “more swearing on the box – yay!”), so this verdict on the appeal of Mad Men from a little while back also missed the mark entirely in its Last Man-ish smugness – the very idea that ‘we’, at the end of history, ‘know better’, that what Mad Men details is the work in progress that culminated in our totally liberated selves, divested of all illusions, free of all prejudice*… MM does demonstrates the foundations being laid for the age to come, but in quite a different way - not just the manner in which our desires were being shaped and exploited by capitalism, but the way in which mass media invaded our unconscious.

How much does Peggy look like a marionette here, as though Ann Margaret is performing through her?

Watching Mad Men with M. after The Wire, M didn’t like it at first – her complaint being “you don’t really know anyone.” Of course, you don’t know anyone in The Wire better than you do any of Mad Men’s characters, but the nature of The Wire’s wide-ranging, systemic analysis meant that a certain, rapid thumbnail sketching of character traits was necessary. The ‘self’ – or rather the lack of an authentic self – is Mad Men’s major subject. (Ok, The Wire’s too, in a sense, where individuals believe they’re masters of their own destiny but are prey to a larger force – Capital – working around them, through them). Don Draper’s rather Ripley-like assuming of a new identity, escaping his poor, ‘shameful’ background, has been painted as a metaphor for America, but is obviously also a dramatic representation of the ‘self’ as a construction, and one that we have far less control over than we believe.

Like Ripley, even though Don has accessed the class he aspired to belong to (not exactly through murder… although he does ‘accidentally’ send the ‘real’ Don Draper up in flames after experiencing a moment of humiliation), it hasn’t relieved him of the pressures of being, just given him new ones (like boredom). Nor has it given him as sense of wholeness (how could it?). How many Don Drapers are there? Not just the ‘real’ Don (who died) and the fake ‘Don’ who assumed his identity, but Don the husband, Don the father, Don the ad genius, Don the romantic etc which all co-exist but don’t form a coherent ‘reality’.

Mad Men is Laingian in a way (double-binds, the family nexus and so on)…

Laing on Wikipedia:

“In The Divided Self (1960), Laing contrasted the experience of the "ontologically secure" person with that of a person who "cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted" and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid "losing his self".

It’s arguable, though, that as much as Don strives to avoid losing himself, he equally puts himself into situations where he risks losing himself, where the conflict between different ‘Dons’ can no longer be smoothed over. He craves the void as much as he tries to avoid it.

Don, in a moment of ontological insecurity:

The recurring motif in Mad Men – the shot from behind an actor, usually seated – is one view of ourselves that, even with an elaborate mirror set-up, we can never have: the ‘thing’ in repose before the performance of language/self recommences. In that moment, we are Don/Betty… we know them as well as we can know ourselves. Sometimes what happens next surprises or shocks us, at others we feel as though we might know what they’re thinking…

* The point is, surely, not to just laugh or be aghast at the prejudices and conventions of the era. Mad Men functions in the way that some sci-fi does, by showing us ourselves, or people very much like us, but at a remove that allows us to see the bigger picture - it's just several years into the past rather than the future. One of the questions it poses is: what are the attitudes which seem normal to us now that, if we had just a little perspective on them, would appear naive or even horrifying?

Race to the bottom

2010-02-09T05:31:00.000-08:00

From an essay written in 1996 by Nicholas Hildyard, this paragraph is about the effect of the globalized labour market on British jobs:

The conclusion of the essay is perhaps even more relevant now than it was back then:

Indeed, the time has come to question the very notion of export-led growth and enhanced corporate competitiveness as the routes to jobs and to find new ways of pressing for a different economy, one that seeks to move from specialization to diversification; that prioritizes self-reliance over trade; that adequately safeguards the environment; that produces for use rather than profit; that protects the economy of the commons rather than the economy of the corporation; and that insists on the right to protect itself precisely because it does not seek to infringe on the rights of others to protect themselves.

This paragraph from "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", Max Weber (1904) seems appropriate:

The people filled with the spirit of capitalism today tend to be

indifferent, if not hostile, to the Church. The thought of the pious boredom of paradise

has little attraction for their active natures; religion appears to them as a means of

drawing people away from labour in this world. If you ask them what is the meaning of

their restless activity, why they are never satisfied with what they have, thus appearing

so senseless to any purely worldly view of life, they would perhaps give the answer, if

they know any at all: "to provide for my children and grand-children". But more often

and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was just as effective for the

traditionalist [an entrepreneur acting according to tradition rather than a progressive growth-based capitalism], more correctly, simply: that business with its continuous work has become

a necessary part of their lives. That is in fact the only possible motivation, but it at the

same time expresses what is, seen from the view-point of personal happiness, so

irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead

of the reverse.

Memory Palaces

2010-02-08T02:42:00.000-08:00

A Memory Palace built in the mind is a way of remembering something complex.

Four Nights of a Dreamer

2010-02-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

This film is by robert bresson and is full of the sound of footsteps.. and the sound of film. . it is shot in a way that means it doesn't seem unnatural if you accidentally watch the same few seconds twice in a row.

Carnaby Street Isn't Carnaby Street

2010-02-04T08:03:00.001-08:00

This isn't the red Carnaby brand/street logo I was looking at last night, but it works in the same way.

"The allure of the commodity arises from the non-coincidence of the object with itself." (from K-Punk)

6 songs

2010-02-02T15:20:00.000-08:00

here are some songs i've been listening to which I can recommend:

Al Bowlly - Lazy Day
Bernard Herrmann - Taxi Driver Theme
The Rayographs - Francis
Ben Frost - Killshot
Peverelist - Clunk Click Every Trip (the whole album's amazing and it's on youtube)
Sibelius - Tapiola

Tom

My Father's Suitcase

2010-02-02T03:18:00.000-08:00

Not long before he died, Orhan Pamuk's father gave him a suitcase full of his own notebooks with the idea that perhaps some of it might be publishable after his death. There's a very beautiful essay / lecture about it here:

My Father's Suitcase

Archaic Torso of Apollo - Rilke

2010-02-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

"Rodin told Rilke to stop writing about his childhood and to stop writing about love.. He said, Pay attention to everyday objects."

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Magic Malik

2010-01-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

WARNING: SPOILERS

Most of the reviews I’ve read of A Prophet gloss over, or dismiss as silly/ entertaining flight of fancy Malik’s prophetic visions/premonitions, particularly that of the deer. This seems to me a way to minimise something problematic – ie the possibility that there is a literally magical or supernatural element to the film. But the film is called ‘A Prophet’, so Audiard is hardly playing down Malik’s prophetic nature! It might be interesting if, from a socio-political angle, anyone had a decent take on what the title means. Philip French says that Audiard sees him as a 'man of the future'. I can see what he means - someone who can move between different cultures, play all the sides - but he also avoids mentioning the visions. And I don’t think the reading of the title should be tied to Christianity or Islam – Malik (whose past, and reason for being in prison, remain a virtual mystery) certainly doesn’t align himself with any religious, ethnic etc group except for expediency’s sake. I prefer to take ‘Prophet’ in the sense of ‘seer’

If nothing else, the fact that Audiard (and possibly co-writer Thomas Bidegain) leave the question of Malik’s clairvoyance (we could call it that – ‘clear seeing’) open has the effect of elevating the film beyond the straight, socio-realist mode I feared. The idea of successful criminals (or successful detectives for that matter) having a ‘sixth sense’ that allows them to stay ahead of the competition isn’t new. A fairly recent example, Tony Soprano, is told by Artie in (I think) series four of the Sopranos, that he always sees five moves ahead (or something like that – can’t find the exact quote). Of course, this is just criminal as an intuitive master strategist/chess player, and Malik clearly demonstrates this quality many times throughout ‘A Prophet’ (sending money to the Imam, setting up the Corsicans to tear each other apart). But both also have ‘dreams’ or ‘visions’ which, of course, can be treated as metaphors – the ghosts of the people they have killed as manifestations of their guilt, for example. Except Malik doesn’t seem to experience guilt as such, his relationship with the 'ghost' of Reyes (his first victim) is more complex – Reyes isn’t a frightening presence, at times continuing in the mentoring role that he appeared to assume before his bloody demise, and also apparently able to show Malik the future. Is Malik's ‘intuition’ powerful enough to be indistinguishable from clairvoyance? Or even more than that – can he bend reality to his will?

Wikipedia:
sorcery was taken in ca. 1300 from Old French sorcerie, which is from vulgar latin *sortiarius, from sors "fate", apparently meaning "one who influences fate.".

It’s not just the ‘deer’ vision; when Malik is executing the Corsicans in their car, he lies down on the floor for a while, smiling while time slows down and the Mafiosi dumbly empty their guns into the body of the bodyguard he’s shielded himself with. There’s no trace of remorse, or fear, it’s more as though he’s attained a state of grace, an elevated physical and mental level. He’s magical – it’s a quality that the others recognise in him, and by the end of the film, he has a motorcade of followers/protectors waiting to follow him as he leaves prison (and a ready-made family to boot).

When Malik spends his “40 days and 40 nights” in the ‘hole’ in prison, he calls (we think to Reyes) “Are you here?” Has Reyes disappeared because he’s no longer required? Or has Malik integrated the seer/guide completely?

David

The Countess Castiglione

2010-01-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

"A number of photographs exposed her bare legs or feet – the features that she was most proud of – and were very risque for her time."
love tom

Life of Brian

2010-01-25T06:55:00.000-08:00

The way the ‘Another Green World’ documentary struck me was very similar to a description of a review in The Wire of Geeta Dayal’s book on the album of the same name. It seems that Eno as a subject inspires an aleatory approach, or at least an attempt at conveying that aspect of his work through form as well as content. So if you knew nothing about Eno, the programme would hardly count as a definitive intro, but it did give you a ‘feel’ for Professor Eno as he is now (and I’m sure, partly, as he would like to be seen), and the previous Enos that he contains. The shots of the cat padding languidly about the workspace worked nicely – and of course, although cats frequently have that air of disinterested curiosity, they can also be fierce, “fabulous” and extremely focused.

The anecdote about U2 and Coldplay was also very telling – he had to be very careful about keeping the work-in-progress files for their respective albums apart for fear both groups would end up recording the same song!

And also – Andrea Corr? Why??

David

From a long night stuck to the bed

2010-01-25T04:02:00.000-08:00

Permament Food
Forensic Analysis Proves Mark Blanco Was Killed
Godwin's law
Ben: Diary Of A Heroin Addict
Brian Eno - Another Green World
The Car of Doctor Desourteaux
River Lethe in popular culture
SHADRACK, AND THE MANDEM, HOOD STUFF
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Cloaks on Myspace Music
Beethoven op. 131 string quartet # 14
Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament

love Tom

We Want This

2010-01-25T02:47:00.000-08:00

Based on the first listen, this justifies the hype. Straining for the serious/monumental but redeemed by pretty much achieving it.

DAVID

Good Mourning

2010-01-23T03:38:00.000-08:00

LINK

State We're In

2010-01-22T08:18:00.000-08:00

I spotted Will Hutton’s ‘The State We’re In’ on my Dad’s bookshelf recently, and I couldn’t help picking it up. What intrigued me was that I realised (and in fact I have realised for a while) that my general ‘opinion’ on Thatcher and the Tory legacy is partly a knee-jerk one, passed on to me by two Labour-supporting teacher parents. Not entirely, mind – I’m conscious that her project has essentially been furthered by New Labour, and it’s difficult to be unaware of the effects of that, and I always had in mind the idea (prompted by The Fatima Mansions’ ‘Only Losers Take the Bus’ I think!) of everyone being plonked on the same racetrack and told “the prize is for the taking”, only to discover it’s a kind of Wacky Races, where person starts with a broken leg, while another is in a helicopter and someone else gets to start from half-way down the track. Also, the contradiction of a party supporting the idea that “there’s no such thing as society” being the same one that blames the left for social disintegration told me enough, I thought.

And… there’s always a bit of trepidation when dipping one’s toe into new water – given that this is the first economically-oriented book I’ve read (although Hutton makes it clear from the off that he sees economics, the state, and society as inseparable topics) will I be so convinced by the rhetoric that I won’t be able to see the wood for the trees? Will I, in desiring to know more, find any critical thought stifled by one person’s force of persuasion, letting them become my super-ego? Still, you’ve got to start somewhere, and I know from past experience that, even when it happens, these intellectual/artistic etc apprenticeships are a useful and sometimes necessarily first step, even if you do eventually realise that your ‘master’ was maybe full of it at least half the time!

But it’s fascinating getting down to the mechanics – and what has struck me is not only the potency of the text (particularly the coruscating opening salvo) but also that its message is more pertinent than ever.

The irony is that Hutton wrote the book at a time when New Labour was in the ascendant (and it could have reasonably been hoped that a new era was underway) but his position is, tragically, just as relevant today. Our outmoded institutions and system of government are by their nature C(c)onservative, they safeguard the entrenched interests of financiers and the ‘gentleman’ class, and encourage corruption. As K-Punk argues in ‘Capitalist Realism’, the problems we’re saddled with are systemic so this issue of taxing bankers one year’s bonus is a thoroughly pointless, feeble gesture as a response to the crisis.

I’ve been trying to come up with a useful analogy and, though it may be flawed, this is the result: a spoiled teenager drunkenly crashes his expensive sports car while driving at an excessive speed (it’s not the first time he’s done that, obviously. On more than one occasion, he has narrowly avoided killing people). Rather then making him work to pay for a new one, or suggest public transport as an option (they are, after all, the people who have indulged his every whim), they immediately buy him a new one because, of course, he does also need it to get around - but they insist that, as a punishment, he can’t go to the big party coming up the next weekend. He sneaks out of the house and goes anyway. When his parents find out, they threaten to take his car away. He threatens to move out. They start crying because they don’t want him to leave – he’s their only son, they have given him everything. How can they make him understand that he needs to be more responsible?

..................

I was born in 1978. Something else that I realised reading Hutton’s book is that I’ve never known anything other than what happened after the financial genie was let out of the bottle. I have no idea how things could feel outside this. I remember my parents (SDP/Labour, remember) living on credit, buying beyond their means. I even asked once, something along the lines of ‘but if you don’t have the money, why are you buying a new sofa AND a new car?’ But that’s how they lived, and they were encouraged to do so. I remember discussing (heatedly) the modesty of my own financial ambitions with a girlfriend - for her it was tantamount to not having ambitions of any sort. She talked about the big house, the car, the holidays. After a three-year relationship, she left me for a trader!

DAVID