the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered.
Friday, November 26, 2010
civility
the culture of death, harry potter, and the charismatic movement
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Ticklish Subject
sports vol. I
What did ... I mean ... how can ... wow. That's it, wow. He didn't know that games could end in a tie. You know who knows that games can end in ties? Everyone. Even Tony Siragusa knows that. Yet a quarterback who has led his team to four NFC Championship Games and one Super Bowl didn't know. I mean, it's not like the referee says it before every overtime session! (And to those who think he's joking, he's not. Donovan laughs at his own jokes more than Jon Stewart; his demeanor was far too serious for that to be a joke, despite what his inevitable excuse is today.)
Friday, November 5, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
nostalgia as end times
From: Joseph Coombe
Subject: opening line
To: "Loper, Brandon"
Date: Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 3:43 PM
"The band members were having troubles. It was weeks before for their first show, rather than worry about equipment issues, set lists and guest lists, they were some place else. As the topic of discussion stalled, they argued that if they could claim their origin from when they first practiced rather than from the date of their first show, could they be accused of being pro life?"
Jason,
Very witty, and i think a publisher would keep reading, if that were the opening: mundane, a good sense of tone, funny, and finally, thought provoking. Why, in other words, do some debates have such arresting power to make people take sides?
I should be doing something else, of course. But I've trying to think through the concept of the will-have-been, or future anterior. For example, perhaps the true fallout of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War, and what we know culturally as the 1980's has only become legible in certain discreet phenomena: on the liberal side, we have the event of the hipster; and on the conservative side, the event of the tea party. Both rely, or are affected by a kind of generalized nostalgia for the 'unremembered 80's:' cable television and ronald reagan.
What we have is the generalized effect of conceptual remembrance, and while nostalgia is not quite the proper descriptive modality, nor is a term such as 'structure of feeling' entirely sufficient because it is too rigid, and too vaguely historical in the positivist sense. Rather, we need something to suggest a slight calcification, a hardening of effects, something sticky yet durable.
Think of the event of the Soviet Collapse as an explosion of string or cord. The expansion of string into nothingness, into time would be like potential virtual pathways into (our) future. Inevitably, the attempt to live those pathways in time, or untangle their spontaneous knotting, produces certain effects, certain structures, certain antagonisms that 'will have been.' As such, I think the hipster and the tea party are two sides of the same cultural mobius strip. Then again, it is easy enough for nearly everyone to counter here with countless examples of red state-blue state dialectics, i.e. young republicans versus non-profit interns, tea partiers versus campus anarchists.
Yes, dialectical antagonisms are easy enough to produce, but I see something else at work, something that I think Jameson would term a 'vanishing mediator' and Deleuze would term 'dark precursor.' This some-thing, as it were, in any event, is the diffused, obscured evental ground. This thing does not as such exist, and therefore no positivist history can call it forth from the shadows of its virtuality. Yet, we have its traces, which fracture and multiply in parallaxes of antinomies: Ian Curtis, Ronald Reagan, Lisa Bonet, Andrew McCarthy, Newt Gingrich (p.s. check out maureen dowd's editorial today, very cut and paste). For example, there is something deeply wrong with that Drums video you sent: it's like Vampire Weekend as Ivan Drago, if anything.
Anyway, this leads me to my full point. Pitchfork Media recently gave Weezer's second album Pinkerton a 10, and given the conversation we had last week about critical algorithms that will exceed the current market share (not instrumental keywords, musical dna, but critical numeric ratings), I think we should reject this effort. Although no one really believes in the power of these neo-aristotelians, the so-called Chicago school of contemporary media, I think we are witnessing the rise of an influential apparatus which will come to control our ideas of media. Despite, of course, their efforts to maintain a public face of modesty, some false description of their efforts as eccentric, provincial, and influential only within a narrow bandwidth.
Let me be blunt: Weezer is Marilyn Manson, and if we are forced to choose sides, to choose the shape of the prophet to come, then Manson is the true progressive choice. Rivers Coumo is a traitor to the cause: he is the reason everyone is in a band rather than listening to bands. There is no rehabilitation for Weezer, and this re-elevation of their efforts into some golden calf is wrong and deeply reactive, for the consequences of this act are yet unknown and deeply disturbing. We do not want a future where Pinkerton is a paradigm. Whereas Manson is said to have inspired perverse acts of divine violence, Weezer continues to inspire date rapists, orientalists, and the viability of the Viper Room and Robert Downy, Jr. The Pitchfork act glorifies the spectral half-life of celebrities whose fame and credit is based on the princely entitlement of one-work, one-hit, one-identity. Let's say that fifteen years from now, someone looks into Weezer, and declares the first two albums to be a dialectic of popular artistic success. Where does it go from there? There is nothing else to mine but the personality of some dead ghost. There is nothing redeemable in the corpus. Whatever progressive energy Weezer possessed passed into the body of Rushmore, and its later manifestation as Jason Schwartzman.
Blue Album, 1994
Anti-Christ Superstar, 1996
Rushmore, 1998
As Lenin writes, "There is no space for compromise here, no 'dialogue,' no search for allies in difficult times--today, in an epoch of the temporary retreat of dialectical materialism, one insight is crucial: 'when an army is in retreat, a hundred times more discipline is required than when the army is advancing....' When a Menshevik says, 'you are now retreating; I have been advocating retreat all the time; i agree with you, I am your man, let us retreat together,' we say in reply, 'for public manifestation of Menshevism our revolutionary courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what."
Billy
and the obvious: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/310042/june-03-2010/vampire-weekend
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Centers
The need for a toilet seat, as the inherited one had broken through the ring, a vagina dentata chewing white thighs as we read Vanity Fair and Vogue. Being out on a busy holiday Saturday, a Halloween weekend. Burbank, full of obtuse angles, lost anger, slow bourgeois egresses, signs monumental like headstones read from the transcendental passage of the interstate. The nerves of shaved teenagers and glutted federal spending, places to eat meat and salt and caffeine.
Once inside the home center, I fell under its bureaucratic spell of aimless reconstruction, its smooth concrete floors, the long rows of practical and potential necessity, the strange dull pomp of the associates, goateed in available denim and hybrid boots, the women a sexual real in hazel, names like monica or liza, soft flanks and small parcels of jewelry beneath the collar of shirts to wear to work. Cut dowels, bum couples, the everywhere infinity of improvement, the factor of some plan to be. It is taken at a languid pace, for no one really wants to leave here and go back. I wait at the counter alone as a tall man, who happened to be covering the register, goes back through aisles 34-37 to find a price tag. The small print on his own tag read delivery services since 2003. The girl across the way spoke up slightly and told me there was coffee. I said I had had too much already. There’s chocolate, she offered. Deferred. Hot chocolate, too, is what I mean. No thank you.
As I return to echo park along the interstate, a car lies dead and reversed at the freeway's end. The state troopers stand in boots and put on black latex gloves. Down Alvarado and Glendale, where traffic snarls at this arthritic pinion, small buckeyed men sell baggies of spiced and sugared fruit from coolers set in the shade of scrub pines rawboned with odd bleached trash. We all wait there like bulls with any pedestrians to not be noticed. On Saturday, the division of wealth begins to feel ever more abstract and dangerous. Left alone with anything but our own errands and children, there is no one else to see. No one but this immediate group of friends to share this afternoon. There will never be anything but what we can afford, or some worse maintenance. No sudden bird come to the window brightly and breathing the violence of something entirely desired.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Logical Investigations
Due to a knowledge of reality-construction (IKONOKLAST PANZERISM), the incomplete outline-construction in the drafting technique, the construction of this next style is concluded as an educational technique, (JEWELRYSM) or the DISCRETIONISM or JURYISM.
The NYMPHISM is a practice that based on my studies are the growing baby-tanks. NYMPHISM shows the only technique of WILD STYLISMS with some discipline and goal. Other styles and/or GOTHIC FUTURISM include Dimensional map techniques, BUBBLE-style techniques that deal with elements of commercial calligraphy.
All-conceived WILD STYLISMS in any plan of operations whether for military purposes or not will advance in drawing-technique to a PANZERISM-style technique on the letter’s structure, masterpieces and pieces in and on any medium does not include scenery. Any masterpiece or piece that has a crack in its outlined structure techniques according to PANZERISM-technique has been fired upon and hit, evidence is cracks a factual damage-symbol in anything that deals with art.
solidarity and the object
Why is writing about a sound of popular music different than a subject to the event of (the historical experience) of the sound of the song of the subaltern feminine: cultural jouissance radiating from structural antagonisms of the non-existent antonymic entity, namely that society doesn’t as such exist. The birth of metaphysics and fantasy and ideology: what Other as the basic moment of what do Others Enjoy.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Music Vol. I
One should be able to write an unsentimental genealogy of the phenomena known as head-banging. It would begin, presumably, as a rudimentary form of dance, especially associated with proto-heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. It would seem to be marked by a certain nervous masculine intensity, perhaps even reaction against the fashions of spontaneous dance associated with the development of rock and roll culture: the jerky rhythms of early teen beat dancers, the overwhelmed screaming of the teenage mania girl, the druggy spirals and freak moves of the so-called hippies. As a movement of instrumentalists, the headbang is style of performance that accentuates a cerebral rhythm of punishing movement, concentration, and quasi-religious neophytism. The phallus of the guitar is sublimated into a kind of spectacle of genuflection to the ritual of sound; a sound pushed to such sublime extremes of volume via motifs of almost brutal simplicity and repetition. The religious elements of this dance need not belabored, however prevalent the reactionary themes of Anglo-American Satanism are associated with the style. That said, the eyes are hooded in a cloak of hair and the body is still. The concussive pain of the dance perhaps its own high, something akin to huffing glue. It is a Pavlovian movement of triggered response like teenage erections and bodily shame, zombie-like quadrilles of judgment, beavisboys with overgrown heads and puny bodies.
It should be further suggested, given the framework here, that the antecedents of headbanging be pursued in musical styles and subcultures marked by a compulsive rhythmic intensity and sublimated sexual frustration. Perhaps a true bastard constellation would trace the phenomenon to the development of early techno-dance subcultures. Here we could begin by properly flattening the correspondence of two mutations qua mutations: hair metal and rave culture.
The term "headbanger" was coined during Led Zeppelin's first US tour in 1969. During a show at the Boston Tea Party, audience members in the first row were banging their heads against the stage in rhythm with the music.
Lemmy from Motörhead, however, said in an interview on the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years, that the term "Headbanger" may have originated in the band's name, as in "Motorheadbanger".
Ian Gillan, frontman of Deep Purple, when asked if he invented headbanging he said, "That’s a definite possibility".





