Friday, May 28, 2010

Steve Shaviro's Doom Patrols

"With postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it...

"Plagiarism "is democratic," Morrison says, "because everyone can plagiarize... The text takes on a whole other meaning when passed through a plagiarist." And so, in exemplary postmodern fashion, Morrison vandalizes, appropriates, and recycles the most diverse, incongruous sources. And not just old comics. Burroughs and Borges, for instance, are frequently in evidence. A single page of DOOM PATROL may also contain allusions and references to Gnostic heresies, pop music, and chaos theory, to Thomas De Quincey and Andy Warhol and Jack Kirby, to the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali and Mr. Ed, to X-Ray Spex and My Bloody Valentine and T. S. Eliot and Terence McKenna. The comic shows an amazing capacity for sucking up and regurgitating the detritus of Anglo-American (and world) culture. It annihilates categories of high and low, proper and improper, subjecting all distinctions to a continual play of absorption, mimicry, frantic accumulation, and prodigal display. It opposes the dreariness of standardized routine with its continual show of recombinant delirium..."

"We're not complaining that the values people once believed in are now empty; to the contrary, we're doing our best to empty them more and more. Get used to it. Stealing is a thrill in itself; this enjoyment is the real reason for postmodern appropriation. We aim to undermine those "convictions" of authenticity and truth, of proper meaning and right order, that sometimes seem to be as dear to Marxist dialecticians as they are to bureaucrats in the Pentagon. Speaking in my own voice is a tedious chore, one that the forces of law and order are all too eager to impose. They want to make me responsible, to chain me to myself. "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself" (Nietzsche). But forgetting myself, speaking in others' stolen voices, speaking in tongues: all this is pleasure and liberation. Let a hundred simulacra bloom, let a thousand costumes and disguises contend..."

"Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL. Irresponsible freeplay is our best response to a cultural landscape supposedly composed of fragments and ruins..."

"In the postmodern world, where everything is borrowed and transitory, identity explodes to such a point that we can't even say that it has been lost. We experience not the morbid fixity of melancholia, but the accelerated dislocation of convulsive hysteria and full-blown paranoia. We don't project allegories upon the ruins, so much as we restlessly traverse the bifurcations of Borgesian labyrinths: the infinitely divisible straight line suggested at the end of "Death and the Compass," or the proliferating multiplicities of "The Garden of Forking Paths." Here "nothing is true, everything is permitted"; every alternative gives way to the next, with no ground for choice among them. The paranoid discovery that there is no solidity or consistency in the world, that nothing is truly my own, at least frees me from the burdens of indebtedness and guilt...Does this mean that we've now reached the stage, dreaded by Benjamin, when mankind "can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order"? Say rather that the King, the totalitarian Leader, loses his head when he is reflected in these delirious mazes. Andy Warhol made multiple portraits of Chairman Mao, just as he did of Marilyn and Elvis. Is there really any difference? What Taussig calls our culture's "mimetic excess" destabilizes all fixities of signification and power. The proliferation of Pop replicas, the paranoiacally elaborate plot twists of science fiction novels, the lurid colors of comic books: these cannot be dismissed merely as distorted adolescent representations, since their `distortions' make up the real itself. DOOM PATROL is less a surreal fantasy than it is a naturalistic rendering of our supersaturated cultural space. We never come to the end of simulation; there is no culminating moment (such as Jean Baudrillard melodramatically imagines) when everything has been captured, coded, and serialized. There's always the possibility, indeed the necessity, of once more upping the ante. The famous "extermination of the real," encountered in the form of a comic book apocalypse, turns out to be just a cheap plot device, a suspenseful (and ultimately ridiculous) twist designed to keep readers in a state of ungratified anticipation, the better to lead them to the next issue in the series. Don't produce, but waste and expend; for every destruction marks the birth of a yet realer real, of still another grotesque, outrageous, and irresponsible flowering of simulation."


I had forgotten how sheerly fucking AMAZING this essay and this entire book are. If you haven't already read it, do yourself a favour and JUST DO IT!

Speaking of forgetting...

Oh maaaaan, remember drum and bass - when it was THIS fucking good?!?

Goldie - Sensual

Thursday, May 27, 2010

"To avoid being trapped in certainties, we must take the broadest possible view—we must take in the whole universe from the macrocosm of stars and planets to the microcosm of subatomic wave/particles..."

from “A Space of Shifting Constellations”: Michael Boughn’s Dislocations in Crystal" by Meredith Quartermain

The Mescaline Experiment



"Humphry Osmond was the British psychiatrist who coined the term “psychedelic”. This short video documents an experiment in 1955 in which he administered mescaline to Christopher Mayhew, a member of parliament. Mayhew ingested 400mg of mescaline hydrochloride and recorded his experience on camera.

The footage was originally supposed to be broadcast on BBC.
Mayhew himself maintains that it was a genuine mystical experience which “took place outside time” and wanted it to be shown. However, an “expert” committee of psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians reviewed the footage and reached a unanimous verdict that Mayhew’s experience was not a valid mystical experience. So it was never broadcast…"

Via: Stewart Home

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Eckhard Gerdes Drops a New Novel


"“Fan-favorite novelist Eckhard Gerdes is back, and this time with both barrels loaded! These two novels tackle modern life’s complexities as only the twelve-gauge pen of Eckhard Gerdes can. The Unwelcome Guest is the story of one man’s flight from paranoia, and Nin & Nan features a gender-ambiguous couple who take on the entire federal government. Both novels are richly humorous, but at the core of each is the pressing concern that modern concerns are pressing on us too much…"

Click here for more info

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Alcest - Printemps Emraude

This is utterly transcendent. Alcest gives me a serious case of the soaring misty-eyes. If there is anybody still out there who doesnt understand why black metal is considered a spiritual music, well…

Owl Flight by Larry Carlson

OWL FLIGHT from Larry Carlson on Vimeo.

Monday, May 17, 2010

'Spirit of Nature! all sufficing Power,
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
Unlike the God of human error, thou
Requir'st no prayers or praises; the caprice
Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee
Than do the changeful passions of his breast
To thy unchanging harmony: the slave,
Whose horrible lusts spread misery over the world,
And the good man, who lifts, with virtuous pride,
His being, in the sight of happiness,
That springs from his own work; the poison tree,
Beneath whose shade all life is withered up,
And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords
A temple where the vows of happy love
Are registered, are equal in thy sight:
No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge
And favouritism, and worst desire of fame
Thou know'st not: all that the wide world contains
Are but thy passive instruments, and thou
Regard them all with an impartial eye,
Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,
Because thou hast not human sense,
Becuae thou art not human mind.

--from Queen Mab, Percy Shelley

Saturday, May 15, 2010

I'm getting all nostalgic here today...

I was shocked to discover over at Lo-Res Viscera that Terveet Kadet are STILL out there working their leather-clad, smelly-ass magic. I mean, I remember these guys from back in the 80's, when I was just a yooth myself!

And I have to admit, there's a side of me that thinks it's really, really sad and pathetic that a bunch of 50 year-old dudes are out there being all crusty-punk, thrashing around and being loud, drunk and obnoxious like they were still a bunch of stoopid kidz.

Shouldn't they have found something more mature and constructive to do with themselves by the age of 50 than that? Why don't they grow up and get real lives, for fuckssakes?!?

Fear not, though - your trusty hero here is still fighting the good fight against the forces of terminal adulthood, and winning enough ground to think that it's just fucking AMAZING and AWESOME that the lads are still working that punk-rock mojo at their age. Esoecially when they still do it so well (as one listen to their most recent sonic output will confirm)...

And I guess somebody's got to do it, so it may as well be them, innit?

So show them some well-deserved punk-rock luv, ok?

Speaking of the 80's...

Back in the day, before industrial music morphed into what the kids nowadays called EBM (electronic body music - which I can only tolerate when I'm OBLITERATED on drugs), there was no shortage of people working the territory that Sopor Aeturnus is working here:

Sopor Aeturnus: "The Bells Have Stopped Ringing"


If you take the time to listen to a few other of his tracks over on Youtube, though, you will see that he doesn't limit himself strictly to droning industrial stylings. He also produces some stunning music that one could easily classify as dark synth-pop. Or, as distasteful, limiting, and downright misleading as labels can be, I think the word that will immediately jump into even the most casual listener's head after a while in his musical universe is "Goth." (Cringe)

But whatever you want to call his music, it's uniqueness or originality isn't what's important. What's TRULY heartening about discovering him (thanks to Sue Fox, whose work you can encounter in every single issue of Paraphilia Magazine) is just how fucking well he does it!

It's been many a moon since I heard dark music this scintillating (to borrow again from Sue), and it is well worth your time to delve deeper (and deeper and deeper...) into this man's world. Someone to watch more closely, for sure...

Friday, May 14, 2010

Sri Aurobindo: Proto-Dadaist?

“All Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own spheres as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour…

The accordance of active life with a material of form, in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities…The accordance of conscios mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overly self-conscious…is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels…

…the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites (is not only) rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.”

Sri Aurobindo Online

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Black-Metal Is Dead! Long Live Krallice!

Krallice - Aridity




Hmmm...



Powerful magnetic fields can induce hallucinations in the lab, so why not in the real world, too?


Sonny Sharrock - Who Does She Hope To Be?



It may be kind of odd to hear someone who many consider to be the godfather of noise guitar get down in such a lyrical way here. But anybody who’s familiar with the full body of his work knows that was a big part of what he was about. I remember reading an interview with him once where he said improvised music must be imbued with the “terrible beauty of a snowflake.”


Nuff said on that topic, I think…


I wish I could click my little black slippers together and suddenly find myself magically transported to Chicago.

In the Realms of the Unreal with Henry Darger
Intuit: The Centre for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Through June 28, 2008



(Click the pic for an expanded view)

Henry Darger, Angel with American Flag Wings (detail), 107” x 24”, courtesy of Intuit: The Centre for Intuitive and Outsider Art

Saturday, May 8, 2010


In SOLIDARITY with the mighty RIOT-DOG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

"...the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the most pleasant life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding.

Today we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and add the warning, "Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and especially, your heart." Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous contents and, as an uncriticized avidity, altogether in the power of things, i.e. nothing but a vessel of the most various appetites -- then it was unavoidable that the free understanding must serve the "bad heart" and was ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired...

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it. So the Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant, ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man. This war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the old world does it end in peace..." -Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Kosmic Renaissance @ Old Ironsides




David Boyce

Art and Fear

"Virilio wants to recognize that in video and in film, in TV and on the Internet, Auschwitz inhabits us all as a fundamental if ofetn repressed component of contemporary processes of cultural globalization...In jeopardy of preoccupying itself with virtualized self-absorption, contemporary art, Virilio argues, as well as humanity, has attained such a level of 'self-alienation' that it can now 'experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order'"


"Hypermodern art is for Virilio a manifestation of contemporary aesthetics that aspires to celebrate Nietzschean violence while discounting a crisis of meaning that is so profound that it is fast becoming indistinguishable from what he describes in "A Pitiless Art" as the call to murder and torture..."

- John Armitage, from the Introduction to Paul Virilio's Art and Fear



"At the end of the millennium, what abstraction once tried to pull off is in fact being accomplished before our very eyes: the end of REPRESENTATIVE art and the substitution of a counter-culture of a PRESENTATIVE art. A situation that reinforces the dreadful decline of representative democracy in favour of a democracy based on the rule of opinion, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of virtual democracy, some kind of 'direct democracy' or, more precisely, a presentative multi-media democracy based on automatic polling."

"Today, with excess heaped on excess, desensitization to the shock of images, and the meaninglessness of words has shattered the world stage."

- Paul Virilio, Art and Fear

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Nazi Knives # 6


Click


Thanks Kick To Kill!

Jah Wobble's Ten Best Dub Tracks

1 KING TUBBY MEETS ROCKERS UPTOWN
Augustus Pablo I first heard this as a pre-release in 1976. Love the sound of Augustus Pablo's melodica; I am also kinky for the sound of the dubbed-up timbale drums that feature on this recording. King Tubby was the king of pure, heavy-duty dub at that time. It was released in this country on Island Records. Hearing 'King Tubby' for the first time had a profound effect on me: it was like hearing music from another cosmos. There are any number of good King Tubby compilations now around - Trojan Records and the Blood & Fire label are good places to look.

2 CONCRETE DUB Bob Marley
I no longer have this record... in fact, I have not heard it for probably 25 years, so I hope it does really exist and is not a figment of my imagination. If memory serves me well, it was the dub version B-side of an Island 7" single; probably of the track called 'Concrete Jungle', from the Catch a Fire album. It must have been one of the first ever domestically released dub singles. It was great to hear a dub version of a Marley track - I nearly always preferred the dub version of a tune. There was more space, and the bass and drums were pushed to the fore.

3 MARCUS GARVEY (DUB VERSION) Burning Spear
One of the very first dub versions I ever heard. I heard it in 1975 on a Friday night on the Capital Radio reggae show. I used to listen to that show religiously - Tommy Vance was the DJ. I now occasionally hear him DJing on heavy-rock stations as I channel-hop.

4 PROMISE IS A COMFORT TO A FOOL Trinity/Yabby You
A classic bassline, with a beautiful vocal refrain, and DJ chat. There are some bass lines that contain the whole mystery of creation within them. This is one of them. Other examples are Roy Budd's bass line to the title track of Mike Hodges Get Carter, and Cecil McBee's line on Lonnie Liston Smith's 'Expansions' are two that come immediately to mind. The crediting of reggae musicians is notoriously lax. There are three possible players, re this particular tune. All giants of the bass - Robbie Shakespeare, Aston 'Family Man' Barrett and Clinton Fearon. If I had to put money down on who it is on this track, I would say it was Mr Fearon.

5 TWO SEVENS CLASH Culture
For a while back in 1977, you could not get away from this tune. It still sounds heavenly. It reminds me of walking back from a party in Hackney on a Sunday morning as the sun was coming up. I couldn't get the tune out of my head.

6 JUJU MUSIC King Sunny Ade
There was a little-known dub version of this classic album, mixed by an engineer that I worked with, called Groucho. What he did was devastating. I would love to hear it again. It was on Island (again!) and was released around 1982.

7 ROWING Dennis Bovell
One of the great musicians of his generation. I used to watch him perform this with his band Matumbi. As with "Juju Music", I hankered after hearing it again. I'm pleased to say that the label Pressure Sounds has released a compilation of Dennis's dub stuff, which includes this track.

8 THE SAME SONG Israel Vibration
Similar to our own late, and very great Ian Dury, 'Skeleton,' 'Apple' and 'Wiss' [Israel Vibration's three members] were stricken by polio in the fifties. This blend of their vocals within a dub context is wonderful. Yet again, there is a great compilation on Pressure Sounds.

9 CONSCIOUS MAN DUB Lee Perry and the Jolly Brothers
You could not have a dub selection without Lee "Scratch" Perry appearing. This is a great example of his idiosyncratic style.

10 SMILING STRANGER John Martyn
This is taken from his 1980 album One World. It was one of the first records outside reggae to utilise dub techniques. Superb.

Download here

Thanks to Gary Waterworth!

Monday, May 3, 2010

21C Magazine is back with Apocalypse Noir!


"21C is back with new material, plus archival material by or about Hakim Bey, William S. Burroughs, Erik Davis, Philip K. Dick, Ashley Crawford, Mark Dery, Verner Vinge, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Jack Parsons, Richard Metzger, Genesis P. Orridge, Kath Acker, JG Ballard, John Shirley, Robert Anton Wilson, Iain Sinclair, Terrence McKenna, Buckminster Fuller, R.U. Sirius, Timothy Leary, Bruce Sterling and more..."

The full story and the link to the magazine can be found over here at Techno Occult


I'd also like to welcome Red and Anarchist Black Metal to the blogroll...

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Dripping

from Disintegration of Thought Patterns During A Synthetic Mind Travelling Bliss

Dripping - Escape into Orbital Infinity



Dripping - Reflecting Identities



DRIPPING -Bring The Suffering 2005 : FULL Part 1



(look to the sidebar at Youtube for the rest of the album)

DRIPPING Compilation , Part 1



(look to the sidebar at Youtube for the rest of the album)



Thanks! Lo-Res Viscera!
7L & Esoteric - Way Of The Gun Feat Celph Titled, Lord Digga & Apathy



Thanks Grant Wamack!

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