.
The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it all – which technological advances have exacerbated if anything – isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since, paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.
- César Aira
.
December 7, 2010
December 2, 2010
Six Fernando Pessoa Quotes
.
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
Trying to revive tradition is like raising a ladder to climb up a wall that fell down. It’s interesting, because absurd, but only worth the bother because it’s not worth the bother.
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.
My destiny belongs to another Law, whose existence you’re not even aware of, and it is ever more the slave of Masters who do not relent and do not forgive.
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
One day, perhaps, they will understand that I carried out, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own times… and that it was a pity it should have been so. And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now.
.
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
Trying to revive tradition is like raising a ladder to climb up a wall that fell down. It’s interesting, because absurd, but only worth the bother because it’s not worth the bother.
The only basis for truth is self-contradiction. The universe contradicts itself, for it passes on. Life contradicts itself, for it dies. Paradox is nature’s norm. That’s why all truth has a paradoxical form.
My destiny belongs to another Law, whose existence you’re not even aware of, and it is ever more the slave of Masters who do not relent and do not forgive.
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
One day, perhaps, they will understand that I carried out, as did no other, my inborn duty as interpreter of one particular period of our century; and when they do, they will write that I was misunderstood in my own times… and that it was a pity it should have been so. And the person writing, in whatever future epoch he or she may live, will be as mystified by my equivalent in that future time as are those around me now.
.
November 24, 2010
The opening line of Sinners in the Summertime by Sigurd Hoel
.
You are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation.
.
You are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation.
.
November 19, 2010
Tears, stupidity and failure.
.
Pain, crime and sadness.
Tears, stupidity and failure.
Violence, light and charm.
Crime, wisdom and more crime.
Bitterness, love triangles and just getting by.
The peculiar, the odd and much, much more.
The polymath, the dictator and true love.
A good joke, a bad joke and a neutral joke.
Slim chances, great wealth and poverty.
Witch trials, public television and melancholy.
Permission, psychosis and the average.
Ambition, fame and regret.
Longing, talent and a lack of talent.
Sexual greed, average lust and plenitude.
Decision making, scarcity and whatever’s left.
The similar, the opposite and the word “yes”.
Again and again and again.
.
Pain, crime and sadness.
Tears, stupidity and failure.
Violence, light and charm.
Crime, wisdom and more crime.
Bitterness, love triangles and just getting by.
The peculiar, the odd and much, much more.
The polymath, the dictator and true love.
A good joke, a bad joke and a neutral joke.
Slim chances, great wealth and poverty.
Witch trials, public television and melancholy.
Permission, psychosis and the average.
Ambition, fame and regret.
Longing, talent and a lack of talent.
Sexual greed, average lust and plenitude.
Decision making, scarcity and whatever’s left.
The similar, the opposite and the word “yes”.
Again and again and again.
.
November 17, 2010
How can so many people do so much and generate so little meaning.
.
How can so many people do so much
and generate so little meaning.
It takes talent. Assholes have talent.
Sad, sad obdurate talent.
You are born and you must do
something whether you have something
to do or not. The worst is still to come.
Another solution: a redefinition of
meaning. Anything that means now means
a lot, a lot of the time, against itself
or towards happiness. Competition goes
away. Away to heaven. I don’t think that
suicide and war are the same thing.
But what I do not yet know is whether
they are opposites.
.
How can so many people do so much
and generate so little meaning.
It takes talent. Assholes have talent.
Sad, sad obdurate talent.
You are born and you must do
something whether you have something
to do or not. The worst is still to come.
Another solution: a redefinition of
meaning. Anything that means now means
a lot, a lot of the time, against itself
or towards happiness. Competition goes
away. Away to heaven. I don’t think that
suicide and war are the same thing.
But what I do not yet know is whether
they are opposites.
.
November 14, 2010
Polyamorous Love Song (Daily Music Column)
.
What follows is a column I wrote during the five days of Pop Montreal 2010 as part of the project Daily Print organized by Palimpsest Magazine in association with ArtPop and DHC-ART.
[Please note: this column should not be confused with my recent novel also entitled Polyamorous Love Song.]
#1
The title of this column is Polyamorous Love Song. I will try to write one of these every day. I am worried I might fail. Why such a title? Perhaps because this column will revolve around various gradations of music and speculation and one such speculation has something to do with love songs. That most love songs, mainstream or otherwise, are directed towards one person, the ultimate soul mate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soul mates, might undermine some of the basic songwriting assumptions. Some such songs must exist in the world already but I’m not sure I know them (one exception: Two Are One by Dri. YouTube it, the video is quite good.) As well, if you are reading this (if anyone is reading this), and can think of further – better, more enticing – examples, please send them along.
Somewhere the American art critic Dave Hickey writes (I believe in the introduction to Air Guitar but my books are all in storage) that he was in Mexico, wondering why there are so many songs about love, about falling in love or being in love, and so few works of visual art or critical texts along the same lines. As he was pondering this question he saw the following scene: two dogs fucking in the middle of the street, and a mother with her young daughter plus her daughters fiancé trying to cross the street, to walk around the copulating animals. The young couple both seemed extremely interested in the dogs, while the mother was of course trying to rush the young couple along, divert their attention.
I believe Hickey draws a sort of lesson from this scene, though I can’t precisely remember what it is. Something like: the dogs don’t need love songs, they just go for it, but the people are in a state of avoidance or embarrassment which expresses itself as courtship and therefore they require a constant stream of love songs to keep the avoidance/courtship in play. I can’t remember, in Hickey’s analogy, if the dogs represented rock n’ roll and the mother plus young couple were the politeness of visual art, or vice versa, if the dogs were art, they didn’t need songs to hook up, and the mother/young couple were the necessity of love songs to deal with the reality of what they were avoiding. I will have to look it up. My memory no longer works nearly as well as I would like. I probably have it completely wrong.
#2
Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true to me, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great tune and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible tune, the entire endeavor was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?
Bands exist on the internet. The first time you hear a new band, or hear about a new band, now most often occurs on line. I find it difficult to even remember the experience of going to a record store, buying a record I had never heard and knew almost nothing about, taking it home, placing the needle on the vinyl, and hearing the first notes for the first time. There was a level of anticipation and curiosity that simply no longer exists. Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare with our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs were written in about five minutes.
I love to listen to music alone. When I am at home, there is almost always music playing, and with astonishing frequency I stop whatever I am doing and simply listen. I also love to go to a bar, to drink, to watch and listen to music in a room full of other people. I rarely think about the two experiences as having anything to do with one another. For me, listening to recorded music, alone, over and over again, is somehow the ‘real’ experience of music. Going out to a show is something else, a chance to see people, get a better idea of what the band is about, add some extra information to the very personal experience of listening to my favorite songs. However, if the band really sucks live sometimes it can totally ruin them for me. It can be years before I genuinely listen to them again.
#3
When did bands start playing along to backing tracks? Suddenly I’m seeing it all the time. I wonder if it has anything to do with hip hop, with being part of a generation that was raised on hip hop and how common it is to rap over pre-recorded beats. It is very strange for me to watch musicians struggle to remain in sync with a backing track, like they’re trying to ace an exam and rock out at the same time. What is the sexual equivalent to playing along with a backing track? Fucking with the assistance of sex toys? Hanging from a full body harness as you go at it? (I’m going for the cheap laughs here.) But music often reminds me of sex, and thinking about sex often makes me wonder if there’s any choice other than monogamy.
I often send songs to friends and lovers over the internet. I have a file of mp3’s on my desktop for that very purpose. But sometimes I get confused. I can’t remember which songs I’ve sent to which people, and worry that I’m going to send someone the same song twice. I wonder what it would feel like to receive a song you have already received from me, if you would sense my confusion, if it would make you feel less special. I believe this anecdote has something to do with being non-monogamous.
I am writing this at Club Social (where, in the past, I have regularly noticed the staff of Pop Montreal.) It is raining outside. Over the sound system I have just heard The Thompson Twins (Hold Me Now), Prince (Purple Rain) and M.J. (Beat It, really not his best song.) None of these artists have anything to do with any of the artists I will see, think about or write about during the five days of this column. (Well, maybe Prince.)
I am reading The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny. The book arrived in the mail two days ago. Blatny was a Czech poet who in 1948 defected to England and spent most of his life in various mental hospitals until his death in 1990. He also has (almost) nothing to do with anything. However, I particularly like these lines: “To carry the world around, / like the stone of Sisyphus, in my head, / this was all I knew how to do and that is very little, / just as in Chinese poetry / there is sometimes very little / nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one.” When did bands start playing along to backing tracks?
#4
Yesterday, in a poem by Ivan Blatney, I read the following lines: “The number of ringlets on the wasp means the number of its marriages / they don’t have a queen they mate freely.” Reading these lines felt like a pleasurable coincidence. (See title of this column.) Coincidences are one of my favourite things. During the last song of the first band I saw (Tu Fawning), the chorus was “sex is all it is” over an over again. (At least I think that’s what she was singing, I might have it completely wrong.) But this heard, or mis-heard, lyric is only partly a coincidence, because Polyamorous Love Song isn’t about ‘sex being all it is,’ but about love, about love not having to be with just one person, and why are there no (or few) songs that try to explain what this feels like.
And then I’m somewhere completely different, from love to war, watching a documentary about the Tuareg – nomadic people of the Sahara desert – fighting a rebel war against a government hell-bent on protecting the uranium-rich areas being profitably exploited by various multi-nationals. The Tuareg continuously speak of wanting to be free, and theirs is a kind of freedom I find it difficult to imagine, what the physical experience of it would actually be (so far from the suggestive, innuendo-drenched freedom of rock n’ roll.) The footage that struck me most intensely was of uranium processing, the most artificial shade of yellow I’ve ever seen, the exact opposite of the desert from which the Tuareg eek out their existence. And a scene with the female-led group Tilwat, where a man reads out a text extolling how much they all desire peace and on his final words of peace the women are meant to begin their song, but instead get into an argument about who gets to start playing first.
Where else but in a pop song can one repeat the same phrase over and over again and not have it be completely annoying. A bunch of twenty year olds blasting through some fairly compelling power pop. But I can’t help imaging them as middle aged men, rolling through the exact same set twenty or thirty years down the line. As you might imagine, this image is not particularly inspiring, or inspiring only in its sadness and pathos. And yet later the same night Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens make middle age seem like the best fucking thing that ever happened to anyone. There’s no arguing with flair. Then again, maybe all there is to do is wait for middle age to pass. Aim for that second, exponential, level of nostalgia.
.
What follows is a column I wrote during the five days of Pop Montreal 2010 as part of the project Daily Print organized by Palimpsest Magazine in association with ArtPop and DHC-ART.
[Please note: this column should not be confused with my recent novel also entitled Polyamorous Love Song.]
#1
The title of this column is Polyamorous Love Song. I will try to write one of these every day. I am worried I might fail. Why such a title? Perhaps because this column will revolve around various gradations of music and speculation and one such speculation has something to do with love songs. That most love songs, mainstream or otherwise, are directed towards one person, the ultimate soul mate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soul mates, might undermine some of the basic songwriting assumptions. Some such songs must exist in the world already but I’m not sure I know them (one exception: Two Are One by Dri. YouTube it, the video is quite good.) As well, if you are reading this (if anyone is reading this), and can think of further – better, more enticing – examples, please send them along.
Somewhere the American art critic Dave Hickey writes (I believe in the introduction to Air Guitar but my books are all in storage) that he was in Mexico, wondering why there are so many songs about love, about falling in love or being in love, and so few works of visual art or critical texts along the same lines. As he was pondering this question he saw the following scene: two dogs fucking in the middle of the street, and a mother with her young daughter plus her daughters fiancé trying to cross the street, to walk around the copulating animals. The young couple both seemed extremely interested in the dogs, while the mother was of course trying to rush the young couple along, divert their attention.
I believe Hickey draws a sort of lesson from this scene, though I can’t precisely remember what it is. Something like: the dogs don’t need love songs, they just go for it, but the people are in a state of avoidance or embarrassment which expresses itself as courtship and therefore they require a constant stream of love songs to keep the avoidance/courtship in play. I can’t remember, in Hickey’s analogy, if the dogs represented rock n’ roll and the mother plus young couple were the politeness of visual art, or vice versa, if the dogs were art, they didn’t need songs to hook up, and the mother/young couple were the necessity of love songs to deal with the reality of what they were avoiding. I will have to look it up. My memory no longer works nearly as well as I would like. I probably have it completely wrong.
#2
Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true to me, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great tune and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible tune, the entire endeavor was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?
Bands exist on the internet. The first time you hear a new band, or hear about a new band, now most often occurs on line. I find it difficult to even remember the experience of going to a record store, buying a record I had never heard and knew almost nothing about, taking it home, placing the needle on the vinyl, and hearing the first notes for the first time. There was a level of anticipation and curiosity that simply no longer exists. Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare with our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs were written in about five minutes.
I love to listen to music alone. When I am at home, there is almost always music playing, and with astonishing frequency I stop whatever I am doing and simply listen. I also love to go to a bar, to drink, to watch and listen to music in a room full of other people. I rarely think about the two experiences as having anything to do with one another. For me, listening to recorded music, alone, over and over again, is somehow the ‘real’ experience of music. Going out to a show is something else, a chance to see people, get a better idea of what the band is about, add some extra information to the very personal experience of listening to my favorite songs. However, if the band really sucks live sometimes it can totally ruin them for me. It can be years before I genuinely listen to them again.
#3
When did bands start playing along to backing tracks? Suddenly I’m seeing it all the time. I wonder if it has anything to do with hip hop, with being part of a generation that was raised on hip hop and how common it is to rap over pre-recorded beats. It is very strange for me to watch musicians struggle to remain in sync with a backing track, like they’re trying to ace an exam and rock out at the same time. What is the sexual equivalent to playing along with a backing track? Fucking with the assistance of sex toys? Hanging from a full body harness as you go at it? (I’m going for the cheap laughs here.) But music often reminds me of sex, and thinking about sex often makes me wonder if there’s any choice other than monogamy.
I often send songs to friends and lovers over the internet. I have a file of mp3’s on my desktop for that very purpose. But sometimes I get confused. I can’t remember which songs I’ve sent to which people, and worry that I’m going to send someone the same song twice. I wonder what it would feel like to receive a song you have already received from me, if you would sense my confusion, if it would make you feel less special. I believe this anecdote has something to do with being non-monogamous.
I am writing this at Club Social (where, in the past, I have regularly noticed the staff of Pop Montreal.) It is raining outside. Over the sound system I have just heard The Thompson Twins (Hold Me Now), Prince (Purple Rain) and M.J. (Beat It, really not his best song.) None of these artists have anything to do with any of the artists I will see, think about or write about during the five days of this column. (Well, maybe Prince.)
I am reading The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny. The book arrived in the mail two days ago. Blatny was a Czech poet who in 1948 defected to England and spent most of his life in various mental hospitals until his death in 1990. He also has (almost) nothing to do with anything. However, I particularly like these lines: “To carry the world around, / like the stone of Sisyphus, in my head, / this was all I knew how to do and that is very little, / just as in Chinese poetry / there is sometimes very little / nothing more than the sky and a bird flying across it, / a bird flying across it; a bird, but a real one.” When did bands start playing along to backing tracks?
#4
Yesterday, in a poem by Ivan Blatney, I read the following lines: “The number of ringlets on the wasp means the number of its marriages / they don’t have a queen they mate freely.” Reading these lines felt like a pleasurable coincidence. (See title of this column.) Coincidences are one of my favourite things. During the last song of the first band I saw (Tu Fawning), the chorus was “sex is all it is” over an over again. (At least I think that’s what she was singing, I might have it completely wrong.) But this heard, or mis-heard, lyric is only partly a coincidence, because Polyamorous Love Song isn’t about ‘sex being all it is,’ but about love, about love not having to be with just one person, and why are there no (or few) songs that try to explain what this feels like.
And then I’m somewhere completely different, from love to war, watching a documentary about the Tuareg – nomadic people of the Sahara desert – fighting a rebel war against a government hell-bent on protecting the uranium-rich areas being profitably exploited by various multi-nationals. The Tuareg continuously speak of wanting to be free, and theirs is a kind of freedom I find it difficult to imagine, what the physical experience of it would actually be (so far from the suggestive, innuendo-drenched freedom of rock n’ roll.) The footage that struck me most intensely was of uranium processing, the most artificial shade of yellow I’ve ever seen, the exact opposite of the desert from which the Tuareg eek out their existence. And a scene with the female-led group Tilwat, where a man reads out a text extolling how much they all desire peace and on his final words of peace the women are meant to begin their song, but instead get into an argument about who gets to start playing first.
Where else but in a pop song can one repeat the same phrase over and over again and not have it be completely annoying. A bunch of twenty year olds blasting through some fairly compelling power pop. But I can’t help imaging them as middle aged men, rolling through the exact same set twenty or thirty years down the line. As you might imagine, this image is not particularly inspiring, or inspiring only in its sadness and pathos. And yet later the same night Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens make middle age seem like the best fucking thing that ever happened to anyone. There’s no arguing with flair. Then again, maybe all there is to do is wait for middle age to pass. Aim for that second, exponential, level of nostalgia.
.
November 10, 2010
November 7, 2010
My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled...
.
My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled. We all got on the plane, they announced that the second engine didn't work, and then we all got off again. By the time I got to Amsterdam I had already missed my connecting flight back to Montreal. I am now stranded at the Van Der Valk Hotel Schiphol A4 for one night. The fact that it has the letters "A4" at the end of the hotels name makes me feel like I'm staying on a sheet of paper. (A not altogether unpleasant sensation.) I am reading When Spring Comes: Awakenings In Clinical Psychoanalysis by M. Masud R. Khan. It is a book I stumbled upon in a book store back in Melbourne and bought because I suddenly remembered I had read another book by him when I was a teenager and was fascinated by the way he would directly interfere in the lives of his psychoanalytic patients. Before that I had no idea any such thing was possible. I remember finding his actions brilliantly surprising, maybe even leading to some of my own more unconventional choices in life, blurring the boundaries between living and work in ways that don't always feel socially acceptable. In his introduction, M. Masud R. Khan says the original title of his book was Transgression: Passions, Pain and Solitude but he changed it because he found "that the dominant theme was rather that of 'awakening' - the acknowledgement and acceptance of those acts of transgression which invariably arise, in all areas of relating, from any attempt to satisfy needs, desires and demands." When I read this earlier on the plane I suspected one of his considerations might have been that When Spring Comes feels considerably more upbeat and marketable than Passions, Pain and Solitude. I am also working on a new book and can't decide whether I should call it Artists Are Self-Absorbed or Polyamorous Love Song. The first title might be more accurate but I think the second one feels more energizing (at least to me.) I want my book to have an energizing title but I don't want to make decisions, or for that matter compromises, based on faulty logic or fears in and around the books eventual reception. I'm genuinely not sure how I will make up my mind.
.
My flight from Dusseldorf was canceled. We all got on the plane, they announced that the second engine didn't work, and then we all got off again. By the time I got to Amsterdam I had already missed my connecting flight back to Montreal. I am now stranded at the Van Der Valk Hotel Schiphol A4 for one night. The fact that it has the letters "A4" at the end of the hotels name makes me feel like I'm staying on a sheet of paper. (A not altogether unpleasant sensation.) I am reading When Spring Comes: Awakenings In Clinical Psychoanalysis by M. Masud R. Khan. It is a book I stumbled upon in a book store back in Melbourne and bought because I suddenly remembered I had read another book by him when I was a teenager and was fascinated by the way he would directly interfere in the lives of his psychoanalytic patients. Before that I had no idea any such thing was possible. I remember finding his actions brilliantly surprising, maybe even leading to some of my own more unconventional choices in life, blurring the boundaries between living and work in ways that don't always feel socially acceptable. In his introduction, M. Masud R. Khan says the original title of his book was Transgression: Passions, Pain and Solitude but he changed it because he found "that the dominant theme was rather that of 'awakening' - the acknowledgement and acceptance of those acts of transgression which invariably arise, in all areas of relating, from any attempt to satisfy needs, desires and demands." When I read this earlier on the plane I suspected one of his considerations might have been that When Spring Comes feels considerably more upbeat and marketable than Passions, Pain and Solitude. I am also working on a new book and can't decide whether I should call it Artists Are Self-Absorbed or Polyamorous Love Song. The first title might be more accurate but I think the second one feels more energizing (at least to me.) I want my book to have an energizing title but I don't want to make decisions, or for that matter compromises, based on faulty logic or fears in and around the books eventual reception. I'm genuinely not sure how I will make up my mind.
.
November 6, 2010
November 2, 2010
Some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt by Destroyer
.
In other exciting news, Destroyer will release their ninth album, Kaputt, on CD, LP, and digital download on January 25.
Dan Bejar sent us some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt, in absolutely no linear order:
Kaputt by Malaparte, which Bejar has never read… Kara Walker, specifically the lyrics she contributed to the song "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker"… Chinatown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… Baby blue eyes… 80s Miles Davis… 90s Gil Evans… Last Tango in Paris… Nic Bragg, who played lead guitar on every song, again… Fretless bass… The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays… And what's to become of film?… The Cocaine Addict… American Communism… Downtown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… The LinnDrum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls… The devastated mind of JC/DC, who recorded, produced and mixed this record from fall of 2008 to spring of 2010… The back-up vocals of certain Roy Ayers and Long John Baldry tours… Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence…
Track listing:
1. Chinatown
2. Blue Eyes
3. Savage Night at the Opera
4. Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
5. Poor in Love
6. Kaputt
7. Downtown
8. Song for America
9. Bay of Pigs (detail)
.
In other exciting news, Destroyer will release their ninth album, Kaputt, on CD, LP, and digital download on January 25.
Dan Bejar sent us some of the themes alluded to or avoided in the album Kaputt, in absolutely no linear order:
Kaputt by Malaparte, which Bejar has never read… Kara Walker, specifically the lyrics she contributed to the song "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker"… Chinatown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… Baby blue eyes… 80s Miles Davis… 90s Gil Evans… Last Tango in Paris… Nic Bragg, who played lead guitar on every song, again… Fretless bass… The hopelessness of the future of music… The pointlessness of writing songs for today… V-Drums… The superiority of poetry and plays… And what's to become of film?… The Cocaine Addict… American Communism… Downtown, the neighborhood bordering on Bejar's… The LinnDrum… Avalon and, more specifically, Boys and Girls… The devastated mind of JC/DC, who recorded, produced and mixed this record from fall of 2008 to spring of 2010… The back-up vocals of certain Roy Ayers and Long John Baldry tours… Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence…
Track listing:
1. Chinatown
2. Blue Eyes
3. Savage Night at the Opera
4. Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
5. Poor in Love
6. Kaputt
7. Downtown
8. Song for America
9. Bay of Pigs (detail)
.
October 31, 2010
Vattimo on truth as persuasion
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I wrote an essay once on truth as rhetoric. It might look a little different if I were writing it today, but let's see if we can clear the matter up once and for all. First and foremost: I am convinced that truth is not a problem of political science, or even a matter subject to scientific demonstration. Truth for me is persuasion, I don't mean "take it from me, sonny boy," I mean something more like "let's all lend a hand here." In other words: philosophical arguments are arguments ad homines, not ad hominem. By truth I mean truth as persuasion, but persuasion in relation to, and together with, a collectivity, not the art of persuading people to part with their money or something like that. Essentially I am talking about proposals for interpreting our common situation along certain lines and starting from shared assumptions. I will try to persuade you by mentioning the kind of authors you have presumably read and experienced for yourself - not the kind whose business is proving that 2 + 2 = 4, the kind who were also seeking an interpretation of our common situation. Not just any authors, authors who have earned a permanent place on your bookshelf and who are linked to your own specific experience. So the truth to which I bring the discussion back is this: how can you still be saying that without invalidating the experience you had when you were reading Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud? Doesn't the experience that you got from reading Nietzsche (or Kant, or Hegel) now block you from saying things you might once have said and defended?
The question arises: what kind of evidence does this furnish? I answer that differently from Richard Rorty, although he more or less shares my premises. I regard truth in philosophy as the result of a form of ad homines persuasion, but persuasion grounded in a certain faith in the history of Being, faith in our capacity to trace (interpretively) lines of continuity in the history of Being. To me, this faith corresponds to what some might call a kind of philosophical evolutionism: the classics, the things that have held out, weren't perhaps necessarily classics right from the outset, things destined to hold out, but the fact that they did become classics involves me, what I am is largely the fruit of their endurance...
- Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher
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I wrote an essay once on truth as rhetoric. It might look a little different if I were writing it today, but let's see if we can clear the matter up once and for all. First and foremost: I am convinced that truth is not a problem of political science, or even a matter subject to scientific demonstration. Truth for me is persuasion, I don't mean "take it from me, sonny boy," I mean something more like "let's all lend a hand here." In other words: philosophical arguments are arguments ad homines, not ad hominem. By truth I mean truth as persuasion, but persuasion in relation to, and together with, a collectivity, not the art of persuading people to part with their money or something like that. Essentially I am talking about proposals for interpreting our common situation along certain lines and starting from shared assumptions. I will try to persuade you by mentioning the kind of authors you have presumably read and experienced for yourself - not the kind whose business is proving that 2 + 2 = 4, the kind who were also seeking an interpretation of our common situation. Not just any authors, authors who have earned a permanent place on your bookshelf and who are linked to your own specific experience. So the truth to which I bring the discussion back is this: how can you still be saying that without invalidating the experience you had when you were reading Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud? Doesn't the experience that you got from reading Nietzsche (or Kant, or Hegel) now block you from saying things you might once have said and defended?
The question arises: what kind of evidence does this furnish? I answer that differently from Richard Rorty, although he more or less shares my premises. I regard truth in philosophy as the result of a form of ad homines persuasion, but persuasion grounded in a certain faith in the history of Being, faith in our capacity to trace (interpretively) lines of continuity in the history of Being. To me, this faith corresponds to what some might call a kind of philosophical evolutionism: the classics, the things that have held out, weren't perhaps necessarily classics right from the outset, things destined to hold out, but the fact that they did become classics involves me, what I am is largely the fruit of their endurance...
- Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher
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Vattimo on philosophy and the edifying
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Naturally, if philosophy does not bracket science and all its results and achievements and consequences for existence, but does not regard itself as science either, philosophical practice has some explaining to do: just what is it then? My own response is that philosophy is a discourse more edifying than demonstrative, it is oriented more toward the edification of humanity than toward enhanced formal comprehension and advancement in knowledge. Edifying doesn't mean antitheoretical, it doesn't mean there is not a progressive acquisition of knowledge during the edification of oneself and humanity. Rather, it means that that isn't the sole or overriding objective. The "edifying," according to Kierkegaard, is the terrible, the disquieting, and under certain conditions, the sublime (i.e., the negative, which for him means the perception of one's own finiteness); at the same time, it is that which ameliorates and constructs. So it is not without its theoretical or cognitive side, but it is also something more, and something different.
- Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher
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Naturally, if philosophy does not bracket science and all its results and achievements and consequences for existence, but does not regard itself as science either, philosophical practice has some explaining to do: just what is it then? My own response is that philosophy is a discourse more edifying than demonstrative, it is oriented more toward the edification of humanity than toward enhanced formal comprehension and advancement in knowledge. Edifying doesn't mean antitheoretical, it doesn't mean there is not a progressive acquisition of knowledge during the edification of oneself and humanity. Rather, it means that that isn't the sole or overriding objective. The "edifying," according to Kierkegaard, is the terrible, the disquieting, and under certain conditions, the sublime (i.e., the negative, which for him means the perception of one's own finiteness); at the same time, it is that which ameliorates and constructs. So it is not without its theoretical or cognitive side, but it is also something more, and something different.
- Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher
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Tao Lin quote
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My target demographics are hipsters, depressed teenagers, depressed vegans, sarcastic vegans, college students.
- Tao Lin
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My target demographics are hipsters, depressed teenagers, depressed vegans, sarcastic vegans, college students.
- Tao Lin
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October 30, 2010
October 26, 2010
...
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Cancer is not a natural disease. Cancer is an environmental affliction created by man-made chemicals in our air, water and food. Therefore, we should not be searching for a cure for cancer. This is a red herring meant to distract us from the real culprits. Instead we should be protesting, legislating and prosecuting the corporations that produce and profit from the chemical world in which we live.
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Cancer is not a natural disease. Cancer is an environmental affliction created by man-made chemicals in our air, water and food. Therefore, we should not be searching for a cure for cancer. This is a red herring meant to distract us from the real culprits. Instead we should be protesting, legislating and prosecuting the corporations that produce and profit from the chemical world in which we live.
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October 24, 2010
It was around that time I became obsessed...
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It was around that time I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted people to read my books long after I died, that I wanted to be one of those authors – like Kafka, like Walser, like so many others – whose work only found a substantial readership after they were gone. I didn’t want to do anything in particular to achieve this goal, I just wanted to work, to live, within the vague, unverifiable hope that it might eventually come true. And it occurred to be that this hope was a bit like the Christian idea of an afterlife, that my body would die but my work would live on in the eternal heaven of a considerable posthumous readership.
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It was around that time I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted people to read my books long after I died, that I wanted to be one of those authors – like Kafka, like Walser, like so many others – whose work only found a substantial readership after they were gone. I didn’t want to do anything in particular to achieve this goal, I just wanted to work, to live, within the vague, unverifiable hope that it might eventually come true. And it occurred to be that this hope was a bit like the Christian idea of an afterlife, that my body would die but my work would live on in the eternal heaven of a considerable posthumous readership.
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October 22, 2010
Two short sentences generated ramdomly during the relay-interview excercise in Stockholm
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Things that love feel strange, confused.
Sad naturally wrong game.
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Things that love feel strange, confused.
Sad naturally wrong game.
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October 21, 2010
Leszek Kołakowski Quote
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There is a certain attitude of the soul, so to speak, which manifests itself in the similar insights attained, with great effort, by all those who strive to touch the essence of being, whether they are Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Platonists. They know that if they ever imagine that they understand God, they are wrong: it is not God.
- Leszek Kołakowski
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There is a certain attitude of the soul, so to speak, which manifests itself in the similar insights attained, with great effort, by all those who strive to touch the essence of being, whether they are Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Platonists. They know that if they ever imagine that they understand God, they are wrong: it is not God.
- Leszek Kołakowski
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October 10, 2010
And I met all these young people.
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And I met all these young people. And they were different than the young people I knew before. Or maybe they weren’t so different. Maybe they were only younger. But they were different than me when I was their age. Or maybe not, maybe I was only different now, couldn’t remember, was confused about the nature of change. But I met them. And in meeting them something definitely changed.
I was talking to someone I had just recently met, another writer, about my own age, and we were speaking about artists we liked, and he mentioned Henry Darger. He said one of the things that fascinated him about Darger was how he lived within, worked from, such a radical loneliness. And I mentioned that I thought Kafka lived and worked with something similar, maybe not quite as extreme as Darger, but in different ways equally intense. However, as I spoke what I was thinking was: fuck, me too, that explains everything, that is the engine that drives my work, a vicious, radical loneliness that subsumes everything and cannot be dented, cracked or broken. That was the only thought in my head as I spoke about history, poetry and art: me too. Because it was true, what I experience, a loneliness that nothing touches, like a teenager in teenage hell, but also perhaps because it was flattering, flattering to my work, that like Kafka, like Darger, someone might still care about what I make hundreds of years after I die.
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And I met all these young people. And they were different than the young people I knew before. Or maybe they weren’t so different. Maybe they were only younger. But they were different than me when I was their age. Or maybe not, maybe I was only different now, couldn’t remember, was confused about the nature of change. But I met them. And in meeting them something definitely changed.
I was talking to someone I had just recently met, another writer, about my own age, and we were speaking about artists we liked, and he mentioned Henry Darger. He said one of the things that fascinated him about Darger was how he lived within, worked from, such a radical loneliness. And I mentioned that I thought Kafka lived and worked with something similar, maybe not quite as extreme as Darger, but in different ways equally intense. However, as I spoke what I was thinking was: fuck, me too, that explains everything, that is the engine that drives my work, a vicious, radical loneliness that subsumes everything and cannot be dented, cracked or broken. That was the only thought in my head as I spoke about history, poetry and art: me too. Because it was true, what I experience, a loneliness that nothing touches, like a teenager in teenage hell, but also perhaps because it was flattering, flattering to my work, that like Kafka, like Darger, someone might still care about what I make hundreds of years after I die.
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A play list of 83 videos (with commentary.)
I made a YouTube playlist in 2010. I called it 2010. I posted it on my blog (above.) I made it because my iTunes stopped working and I was looking for a way to listen to music. I did it very quickly and simply, scrolling through my list of favourites and adding the ones I wanted to listen to over and over again. I have made many works over the past few years but somehow this YouTube playlist feels like one of the most simple and satisfying things that I’ve done. It feels like pure autobiography, that if someone were to watch it they would know far more about me than I would ever want them to (this can’t possibly be true but it feels that way.)
Some of the songs have video attached but many have only a single image or a slideshow. These images are often album covers or photographs of the singer or band. It’s strange using video to watch still images. It’s strange the collage of still images interspersed with the occasional blast of moving imagery. It is a random assortment of imagery arrived at because of music I wanted to listen to in the privacy of home. But its very randomness is telling, a mirror of the randomness of the internet.
I have always made mixed tapes/mixed CD’s for friends. Of course, the thing my YouTube playlist most resembles is one of these mixes that I have been making for as long as I can remember. But somehow it is also different. It is a mix of old favourites and songs I just discovered moments ago. It is looser, more eccentric. I did it quickly and when I watch it it continues to surprise me. I never remember what’s coming next.
In 2010 I also wrote a text about artists and the internet for the Austrian periodical Spike Magazine. In the text I say that the internet changes what it means to be an artist in ways we cannot yet get our minds around. What I didn’t say, what I realize in a way only now, is that my blog, my YouTube Favourites, my 8Tracks mixes and my Facebook page feel more to me like my real art practice then my actual art practice. They are more a part of my daily life, I am more deeply engaged with them, they are more intimate and more public, they are not labored over and overworked in the same way my professional artistic life is, they are not marred by grant-writing and publicity. It is the old dream of art as completely interwoven with life. It is simple, lonely, semi-public and locked to a larger corporate and social network. I hope in the future that I will understand it more.
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