April 29, 2004
gutterlectuals
interesting to follow the various petridis-slagging threads whilst simultaneously still receiving comments on my own unashamedly extra-scenic musings on Dizzee. Because on balance, what the comments add up to is something positive: that although there are those ready to slag you for daring to think about music, there are also those who are prepared to accept that there's no need to be protective-aggressive, that it's not meant as (nor does it constitute) a threat or a selling-out.
It just feels like the mirror-image of academia, to me. There are plenty of academics, even those working in 'contemporary' theory, who shrink at any contact with the outside world, and look on any looping of the theoretical with the popular as unforgivable miscegenation. There are closed and open-minded people in any 'scene'.
It's obvious that Petridis' vision of a "comical polarization" comes from his own laziness (incidentally I'm as ready as anyone to laugh at a blogger who describes records as 'texts', but I've not seen one yet). The imputation of ignorant exclusivity insults both groups. And hasn't all music, from classical to jazz, to hiphop and drum&bass, thrived on the internalisation and transformation of 'outsiders' theoretical crystallizations (often skewed - being 'right' doesn't matter here) of its meanings? What else constitutes progression in popular music except for the repeated trope of musicians' failing, in some characteristic way, to accurately copy their idols, those who went before?
Certainly, if a musical form internalizes its own analysis in the spirit of smugness and reinforcement, you get student-techno, drill&bass, crap art-rock, and any amount of shite. But it's equally possible (even inevitable, in a superconnected digital environment) for theories, metanarratives, cross-media connections and alternative mythologies to nourish a culture from outside (isn't that it itself almost a definition of the reason for hip-hop culture's longevity?).
It's more interesting in the case of Grime because, thanks to the web, the practitioners and the commentators/theorizers meet for the first time in a smooth space. Sometimes this makes for a virtual punch-up, which can be disturbing for the usually happily-insulated theoriser (i.e. me!) but it's also exciting. Even if in some limited sense this makes 'us' polarized, that's not the same thing as 'eternally separate' or 'mutually exclusive' as Petridis seems to suggest.
Cautionary Verse
Beware the eyecatcher, child;
Malignant impotence whose food is fear;
Shun the foul succubus
wolf-familiar that guides his eldritch hand.
The unseeing eye would know you
and ensure your visibility
And with infernal apparatus
order a mass-scan of the innocents.
Spawn of ressentiment, his tabulations would be legion
marking each bad seed
for ejection or incarceration
between chainlink fence and DHSS form
Beware the Eyecatcher, my child
Lest you become his prey; swallowed by
abyssal cross-referencing
Look you not into the dead lens
And carry not the card.
"...but relax. We are only doing this to make you safer"
(with apologies to Terry Nation, and thanks to k-punk for his premonitory comparison many years before the full horror of the situation became evident)
April 16, 2004
Attention, Turkish Censors!
Simon announces the results of the great book-title compo, and in grand baited-breath style...if the book doesn't sell, there's always presenting the national lottery to fall back on :)
But hold on - The Medium Was Tedium rejected because 'this title would just be a gift to negative reviewers wouldn't it'; ummm...and the winner, Rip it up and start again isn't??
dysfunctional sidebar: automatic penalty for insufficient content. You can't cow me into submission, Movable Type.
April 14, 2004
elidor
A bit embarrassing that after talking shit about everyone else's lack of blog activity, I've done nothing for ages - well, I have plenty of excuses, but what's the point....anyhow, I just discovered that I'd missed the recent return of THAWE and have the pleasure of catching up with a ream of new stuff. In the interim it tangentially occurred to me to read Alan Garner's Elidor (after which I presumed THAWE's URL was named) , and finding that there was a copy in the house, I'm doing so. An amazing book; do yourself a favour, stop being an 'adult' and read it.
April 08, 2004
last-hour reprieve for hostage cormorant
...as heronbone yields to the demands of the Popular Blogger's Front. But don't you realise that means the terrorists have won?
The cormorant can now go back to its natural environment on the banks of the canal to be stoned by lawless grimesters ;)
Luke returns joyously with an 86 bus talk selection, albeit with an outburst of unwarranted modesty too.
It must be spring, cos Software Subversions is also reanimating! Now all we need is for sphaleotas to lay off the crack pipe and MTV for a while and scandalise us again.
April 07, 2004
correction
as per mark's learned comment, last entry should read 'the illusion of the illusion of an illusion'
The illusion of an illusion
"The trick was not even an illusion; it simply did not and had never existed." Try this for a measure of the capacity of a crowd, a cultural milieu, to generate and perpetuate hyperstitional realities without the least crumb of a 'material' basis.
Coincidentally read a review of a book whose theme follows on from the debunking of tulipmania thread: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick reveals how this famous trick, in which a Fakir's boy assistant is seen to climb up a rope and disappear into the sky, was nothing more than a myth fuelled by the popular need, in an age of disenchantment, to believe in the inexplicable; stoked by a hoax article in the Chicago Tribune, an article whose intent was to lampoon those gullible enough to be taken in by 'eastern' charlatans!
Once the meme was out, not only did it persist, but the substance of the trick grew in the telling, becoming a grotesque bloody pantomime, with the fakir chasing the boy up the rope and from his invisible perch, tossing down bloodied limbs which then reassembled themselves. And, of course, the visual image of the fakir with his basket, and the boy disappearing into thin air, was to remain a staple of exotic illustration and trick photography for decades. And in fact, as this poster shows, it was ultimately to become a real illusion in the repertoire of at least one magician.
Nietzsche as blogger
is there anywhere Nietzsche wouldn't have outclassed our present-day bloggers?
Another new discovery (courtesy of glueboot).
Also here (apparently the same author), with some astute words on hiphop and revolution ( I think I partly agree...). The search for the overt signs of an effective 'counter-culture', which never arrives, can only lead to despair. The energy of popular culture is of itself potentially revolutionary...('How did it happen? The counter-culture was always so explicit about not letting them separate our culture and our politics' reminds me of the powerful Spinozan/D&Gian/Nietzschean meme that the work of the strata/sad passions is 'to separate bodies from what they can do.')
'The worst sell outs, we would be told (if we were still listening to those who care about selling out) are the rappers, who took the beautiful nascent counter-culture of Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and reduced it to bling and bitches ... this criticism fails to understand where the revolutionary potential of hip-hop came from in the first place. Because perhaps the most interesting thing is that hip-hop has never been a counter-culture; it didn't start out as oppositional (unlike Rock'n'roll, which, as the white appropriation of blues was a more or less conscious rejection of class and race priviledge).'
April 06, 2004
About my exhibition. Just in case anyone's anywhere near this remote location:
I'm holding a cormorant hostage in the basement and will execute it in 24 hours unless I see a new heronbone post.
Tulip tales
K-punk reports that a researcher at Deutsche Bank has discovered that 'tulipmania' never really had as much of a financial effect as we have been led to believe: Don't believe the hype about the hype. This apparently exaggerated or fictional tale of deluded speculation has been used as an analog, warning, and moral fable against the contemporary dotcom bubble. One can't help suspecting that such damaging parallels provide a psychological motive for this apparently random piece of research from the 'Global Strategy' PR team...
k-p > I desperately want to believe that the tulipmania story was true....
Desperate for truth...not a very hyperstitional attitude either way ;) I'm inclined to hedge that the truth of the matter, as if we could ever know, probably lies somewhere in between the story-myth and the statistical-myth.
It's interesting though, this relationship between stories/myths/tales and 'hard' economics - because what was the 'new economy' but a collection of myths (about the future, apocalypse rather than cosmogony), get-rich-quick stories, libido-stirring tales of glamour...and those business plans of course. A business plan's just a science fiction story, that's all it is, no matter how many spreadsheets you adorn it with. Many's the time the flakiest, most outlandish business plan got funding because the financiers were so desperate to believe (indeed, in that climate, couldn't afford not to believe) what couldn't possibly, _rationally_ be true...(But the concept of 'belief', like that of 'greed', is clearly nothing more than a parochial delusion, insufficiently addressing the transhuman tensors that tug these people about like so much flotsam). The stories became so powerful that for a while money flowed like water - finance could be taken for granted so long as you were a good storyteller.
So for a short moment, money really did become totally flush with desire, at least for some people. Where one flowed, the other flowed instantly, because in the absence of material constraint (and that's what the technology seemed to offer), the mere presence of desire signalled the potential for future profit. And in the absence of current hardships, in the soft climate of financial ease, the mere possibility of future profit, no matter how distant, was worthy of investment. So the future took over briefly. It seemed that the (western) world finally could afford for stories to become reality. So long as you could identify a large group of people who desired something, it was possible to obtain funding for an apparatus to electronically capture the constituency, on the basis of its potential monetization.
Ultimately, of course, the reality principle struck twelve, Now returned, and the magic fell away: it turned out that people were not so easily captured and kept locked-in, it turned out that the technology was not a universal cipher, but had specific traits more suitable for some types of commerce than others; but above all the slush fund had run out, and the flows could no longer rush along unperturbed. Future horizons began to recede, returns were expected sooner and sooner (there was a time when a business plan could get by predicting a profit in year 10, now it was 1 or 2), there was no space for loose stories and tall tales anymore.
Difficult to make any judgment on all of this yet, except that it's unfortunate who we allowed the privilege of writing the plot - a bunch of harvard MBAs and bored toffs, basically.
And now we call it madness. We'll probably be told in a few years that it wasn't as big as it was cracked up to be, that it can all be fitted into rational economic models, that it was just a blip, that everything's really quite sensible and that stories don't ever come true - and they don't, not for us, anyway.
April 04, 2004
town crier 'not infamous blogger' shock
After further protestations of authenticity, I am now fully willing to accept that undercurrent has indeed been blessed with the comments of the real Peter Moore, Town Crier to the Mayor of London. But with people like sphaleotas around you can't be too careful, as Tom'o'Connor is soon to discover.
Anyway, as Peter himself says : "RE YOUR COMMENTS ON YOUR WEB PAGE I AM NOT A INFAMOUS BLOGGER. I HAVE BEEN TOWN CRIER FOR OVER 25YRS. ".
And let that be an end to the matter. Sometimes, you know, I wish I'd never got caught up in the strange and frightening world of town criers. It could make a good photographic project though, 21st-century town criers, what do you say, guys?
April 03, 2004
glue
Reciprocal hello to glueboot, who is a welcome new arrival on my egosurfing technorati weekly check (you've got to do it haven't you - seriously, what an amazing tool for reverse-engineering and reinforcing networks. Won't be satisfied til I break through to a second page though!), and the first to use the new address which is, in case you weren't listening before, http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/.
Glueboot posts some well-deserved invective against the latest output of the british film industry here (let's face it, even after k-punk's recent Billy 'OPPRESSIVELY CANONIC' Elliot aneurysm (in the comments) there's always more to be said on this score). Interesting from the pov of recent mp3/viracy debate, and what with glueboot apparently being 'of the mp3 generation', that Hugh and co didn't even get the meagre satisfaction of a fiver at the box office cos she just downloaded it to see how shit it was. Hmm...how fondly I remember the joys of broadband, it would take me about six weeks to download a shit film now and, erm, I'd probably be too angry to watch it then anyway.
'Drawing partial objects' - is that possible?...visual proof? I identify with the air of philosophically-inflected confusion here, anyway. Oh, and by the way k-p, glueboot loves Kill Bill. * Let the bloodshed begin *
Queasy Madeleine
As if to totally undermine that last haughty post, and to show that I appreciate good writing wheresoever it may be found, I'd like to salute the Guardian's food writer Matthew Fort who I believe, properly cultivated, has it within him to become a culinary Mr Agreeable.
This Saturday he takes a break from his punishing schedule to review the food on offer at Heathrow Terminal Two. I thought this bit was great : (on Caffe Nero) The coffee was thin and bitter as gall. The cake managed to unite two conflicting qualities : it was dry and sickly, and it had a disturbing aftertaste. It took me a little time to work out that its Proustian resonance was that of baby's sick. My critical apparatus rebelled. 1/20.
I think he should follow up with a tour of really ruff greasy caffs and fast food joints - that would stretch his writing skills and the resulting stream of adjective-rich, gustatorily precise disdain would be far more entertaining than endless poshnosh reviews. Could be a companion volume to Simon R's next book after [TBA] - 'The Pret Years' ;)
depressive plague hits blogdom
note to both robin carmody and luke heronbone :
no - don't give up!
(Heronbone : "on the page, it became clear to me that it's all shit." / Mr Carmody: "i recognise now more than ever just how *different* i am from so many of my blogging contemporaries...")
Need it be said, it's because both present a divergence from the 'mainstream' of blogdom that they're two of the best. That's if there is such a thing as a mainstream; how quickly we move to judge and segregate something that is tout court an indisputably good thing. but nevertheless if anything is needed to make sure blogdom remains vital and an example of everything good about the web, it's such people's resistance to the tendency to gravitate around 'global' concerns and universally-accessible modes of expression: which otherwise would inevitably lead to an homogenisation (one million sub-mere-pseud-mag-editor dissections of what was on MTV last night/on the news this morning), a capitulation to all the bad things about the web and 'global' culture.
We need the imperfections of : Heronbone because he bothers more than most to look beyond the TV screen and the newsagent shelves, tells us something about his plot of reality, and talks like a person not a journo; THAWE because he has an unashamedly idiosyncratic take on everything, and uncovers flabbergastingly unexpected connexions wherever he goes.
That's my opinion, anyway, as a six-month old blogger...
Just start typing...you'll feel better immediately
April 02, 2004
Town Crier Continued
Peter Taunton, Town Crier of Stafford, confirms:
Oyez Oyez Oyez
Let it be known that John Sweetman is a well respected Town Crier in the "Proclaiming world"
currencies
Heraclitus : All things are an exchange for fire, and
fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.
The Cornish moors are where civilisation ends temporarily, small oases of inutility; land that since neolithic times has been neglected as unusable, uncultivated, filled with tough, incredibly tenacious and prolific plants as hardy as the rocks and boulders they share their unhomely life with.
As the gorse flowers burst out of this bleak weatherbeaten landscape, each tiny point in the million clusters of intense, glowing yellow seems a miracle of chemical synthesis and biological tenacity; like the mice that live on the tracks of the London Underground, they make you wonder at life's opportunism and optimism in the most adverse conditions.
The only intervention humans make here, apart from feebly trying to re-imagine it all as a picturesque tourist attraction, is to burn them. Recently another massive gorse fire took place nearby; acres and acres of moorland left as charred, post-apocalyptic ruins, vast ash-carpeted fields decorated with frayed black spider-leg twigs, where a week ago there was a mass of newly-blooming gorse.
Almost exactly a year ago I scored a front page photo for a local rag. A gorse fire was blazing away on the hill above our house and I was the only person on the scene with a camera, running up the hill towards the fierce orange glow in the sky. The blaze was right next to the house that stands alone at the peak of the hill; this is supposedly the house where Straw Dogs was filmed; it was the most isolated-looking building they could find, and it's still likely that if you got caught in a man-trap here, no-one would hear you scream. I wouldn't have liked to be at home there with 80 hectares of moorland burning outside.
It's no coincidence that these fires happen at the same time every year or that according to the newspaper 'arson is suspected' vaguely in every case. The farmers receive a subsidy if the moorland that belongs to them is 'cleared' before the end of March - so if they haven't got round to it, a lot of fires just happen to get started around that time. Wonderful example of how these box-ticking quantitative bureacratic systems work; since the (appearance of the) end result is all that's measured, people will naturally pervert the system by 'delivering' in the laziest way possible, making the objectives irrelevant and the whole thing literally senseless.
It's systematization and 'accountability' itself that drains all sense and purpose from everything. Once in the smooth isomorphic realm, all things are exchangeable ad dementia. NHS hospitals suddenly offer patients appointments they can't possibly keep to make sure they'll disappear off the waiting lists until next month. Carbon-fuel-haemorraghing nations trade cash for third-world clean slates. And high high above all of this, risk managers offer to cancel out the future given sufficient funds.
Unquantifiable intensities flow on messily beneath this floating network of mutually-cancelling quanta. Is real life merely the residue of these radical chunks of commerce, these hidden circuits, these spontaneous surges and instant sublations, a byproduct, incidental, as they seem to be inviting us to suppose?
Or more a function of inefficiency, governed by the gap between the algorithms that control subject behaviour to assure predictable outcomes, and the material realm of their application; contingent upon the amount of investment available for enforcement?
Anyhow, line management ensures that qualitative intentions, if they exist, are transmuted further into pure zombie-program-flow with each step between policy and practice. Perhaps this is where reality squeezes itself in through the gaps.
Matter, difference, a matter of indifference, a faintly irritating relic that has to be dealt with only under duress, that vaguely threatens one's integrity, that must be bought off with narcommodities or fought off with insurance; It's finally left entirely to those who have somehow failed to get caught in the net; tugged and stretched by invisible, indifferent forces, they hang catatonic in the hissing cold glare of office striplights, terminally confused, brittle, filled with white noise, rampant indecision, and stewing paranoia. Through eyes corroded by clarity, they see burning, and pay homage to an economy that isn't engaged in a futile denial of its own body.
How could Heraclitus have foreseen that this cold fire, whose caustic caricature of logos he felt the need to document, whilst indeed despoiling the polis, would also be inverted, enslaved to a global machine geared to virtual equilibrium, indifferent to what flows beneath?
TECHNICAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Got a bit annoyed with all that /mt/ business.
Everything has been virtually shifted to blog.urbanomic.com :
Undercurrent at http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/
and Sphaleotas at http://blog.urbanomic.com/sphaleotas/ (although post-land-fracas Lord Sphal. has been shockingly unproductive - sort it out!).
Old links etc. should still work for the time being.
injury corner
Spare a thought for Software Subversions' Robert (btw, in your absence, rob, your blog server has got very slow and temperamental). After setting off on a epic motorcycling adventure, he very soon found his journey cut short by a large spanish juggernaut and is currently one eye and a limb down.
In a show of solidarity here's a (surreptitiously scanned on the way to hospital) x-ray of the shattered finger I sustained in a far more minor RTA involving a mountain bike and the ground. Two weeks after I'd been told by paramedics that there was nothing wrong with it, I was told by a doctor that it was, and I quote, 'buggered'. Rob quotes everyone's favourite Post-Heideggerian Aussie (who, according to this site, has published 'more than ten monographs' - can he not count above ten, or more likely is the actual number eleven?), Andrew Benjamin : 'Don't trust doctors, they're just crude empiricists'.