Oh my god, I wish I'd nominated you for the GIANT POST category of the lj awards now.

I see what you did there.

Ditto (on the self-referentialism)

I hope you mention something about 'architecture' at the talk...

Paul Morley irritated the fuck out of me, but His Brianness was that perfect uncle who pulls a coin out of his ear. Lovely.

Edited at 2008-10-13 12:40 pm (UTC)

Fucking Paul Morley.

Stuart Maconie (Mr "I Love the 70s/80s/90s" himself) has a current pet peeve about unwarranted use of the word "iconic", which is rife in press releases. Is everything 'iconic' these days?

How many weeks will this talk last?

Weeks? I'll get through that lot in twenty minutes then have to strum my misses on an acoustic guitar for the other forty!

Ha. Might not make my head spin so much if it was over a period of weeks! Looking forward to it anyway.

This is a book. A Barthesian projected work.

Lutz Dammbeck's movie Das Netz is on in London on Tuesday evening at 7:30.
http://resonancefm.com/archives/368

Do you think Gordon Brown has gone back to his socialist roots?
Do you think Oasis may have been referencing late psychedelic era Tears For Fears? World Party?

> Do you think Oasis may have been referencing late psychedelic era Tears For Fears? World Party?

Which wouldn't be the first time N Gallagher has done third-hand Beatles by ripping off people who got their inspiration from the Fab Four. He's lifted tunes from the Rutles!

If you ever see John Lennon's Jukebox a Sth bank show you will see the many styles the Fabs appropriated. Thing is they were messengers of the relatively obscure.
My favourite Beatles track, Lady Madonna, seems to be a take on Humphrey Lyttletons chart-topping 50s jazz instrumental Bad Penny Blues. Paul said he was trying to write something for Fats Domino. Money in the bank.

See how they run.

Is this relevant?

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/graphs-on-death-of-marxism.php

Postmodernism has us all tied up in a big ole shibari knot. The more we struggle the tighter it gets. Better relax and let it pleasure you, then hope it'll untie you when it's done and has no more appetite.

Every time you see that some old style is 'back on the catwalks', every time some series comes back from TV heaven, every time you read that your favourite artist has opted to use vintage gear on his new album, know that Uncle Pomo has just thrown another rope around your naked body. Don't wriggle, unless you actually want to excite him more.

I've re-appropriated the old hippy zen / Oasis slogan 'Be here now!' to describe what I think of as the best attitude to postmodernism. Wake up, smell the coffee, set your watch, be here now! Not because I think postmodernism is great (although it's certainly given me a hell of a lot of fun over the years) but because that's the best way to get on to the next thing. There will certainly be a 'next thing' some day, and postmodernism will be 'the last thing'.

It's actually impossible for anyone culturally active now to be doing anything other than postmodernism. The Taliban were a postmodern version of Islam, not (as often depicted) a contemporary group who were, somehow, also living in the Middle Ages. The Stuckists are a group of postmodern figurative painters who hate mainstream postmodernist art, but whose reaction against it also falls within postmodernism. Oasis and Matmos are both postmodernist pop groups. One is not 'more' postmodernist than the other. Postmodernism is the name of the cultural period we're all in.

But I see people's attempts to 'transcend' or 'deny' this as a form of bad faith. And I think postmodernism will not be superceded by denials and reactions against its core values, but by a complete embracing of them. That's why I like pop records like Cher's 'Believe'. By embracing postmodern production, by showing that there's no contradiction between the human voice and an electronic harmoniser, between technology and emotion, between contrivance and sincerity, or confection and belief, or the engineer and the humanist, 'Believe' brings the end of postmodernism closer because it brings closer the day in which to be postmodern will be as natural as breathing. Postmodernism will disappear by becoming so accepted that it's invisible and omnipresent. Whereas all reactions against postmodernism (Stuckism, rockism, fundamentalism) only serve to make postmodernism more visible, more important, something distinct from us, ahead of us, rather than written all through us.

Personally, I think Japan will be the country which first embraces whatever comes after postmodernism, because Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism. They also know a thing or two about the fun you can have with ropes.

You're a smart feller, Me A Couple of Years Ago, but you're a bit behind the times. Things have changed.

does altermodern mean writing your own strawpeople, who are almost-in-agreement?

what happened to rockism? i feel like the elite are sick of postmodernism because it has reached the mainstream. young black america is a prime example, as exemplified in kanye west. when young blacks and white hipsters look the same, the whites are going to have to change, to look for the "next big thing."

don't get me wrong - i'm excited for what's next as well. but (and i'm just using the values that you have instilled in me) i temper these elitist ideas with a recognition of my relation to the world in an economic and cultural sense. as you would say, appreciating african music is more comfortable for the white listener, because it is the other, whereas black culture is so prominent and surrounding that we feel a need to distance ourselves from it.

^^gosh, i don't like this comment!

.


http://rense.com/general83/next.htm

i keep seeing so many young couples starting families.. not sure why any one would want kids in the state we're in?
the thing that will be a little weird, if this depression turns out to be worst than the great depression,
is all of the technology we have, like if people have iPhones but they can barely afford to eat.







I'm watching that Adam Curtis (The Power Of Nightmares) series The Trap at the minute, it's well worth a watch - it's all up on Google video. It was screened a couple of years ago, so it's pretty out of date as far as recent developments go, but from what I've seen so far, the whole meltdown was totally inevitable and nationalising banks/an end to free market reign will probably be, eventually, a good thing, but not before decades of depression, recession and general misery. I'm not a financial expert by any means, and think one of the most annoying things about the current situation is the way everyone suddenly thinks that they are, but yeah, that's my limited understanding of it. Maybe time to start keeping your money under your mattress...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March 2007. The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085&ei=-XrySNjoOovEiALyiKTsDg&q=the+trap
Part One: Fuck You Buddy
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly. Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1087742888040457650&ei=bXzySInXJpCsiAKByujDBg&q=the+trap+2
Part Two: The Lonely Robot
The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by checklist based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in the previous programme.
...
Film of Richard Dawkins propounding his ultra-strict "selfish gene" analogy of life was shown, with the archive clips spanning two decades to emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour have been absorbed by mainstream culture. (Later, however, the documentary gives evidence that cells are able to selectively replicate parts of DNA dependent on current needs. According to Curtis such evidence detracts from the simplified economic models of human beings.). This brought Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the "robotic" description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society's engineers.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7581348588228662817&ei=oX3ySMKGBIewiAKq4qXgDg&q=the+trap+3
Part 3: We Will Force You To Be Free
The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin's essays on the topic and wrote to him[4] in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his death bed. The programme began with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty, reviewing Berlin's opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the 'safer' of the two. Curtis then explained how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it.
...
In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves.


really interesting stuff. the sound is a little out of sync in places, but i could get past it - his style is great, heavily Godard influenced. lots of rapid fire archive, slogans and vignettes.

Well, not to boast or anything, but Adam Curtis sent me a DVD of The Trap himself!

We'll be needing more from Curtis very soon.

Scientists are making major advances in genetics and in brain science. Ideas derived from these advances will affect the way people look at everything, including politics, economics, culture, the arts. These approaches offer a way out of PoMo relativism. Nature, in the form of Biology, sets limits on Culture. Studying gene expression in different human groups feels more objective than studying hairstyles in different human groups. I can see the appeal. Expect more theories which talk about Mitochondrial DNA, and fewer which talk about "the other".

Curtis shows how these types of theory lose touch with reality. He concentrates on Game Theory, but B.F. Skinner's lab rat based behaviourism is another example of an idea which seemed to be scientific, but which was deeply flawed.

I loved Alain Resnais' film, "Mon oncle d'Amerique", in which a drama about three people was inter-cut with documentary footage of Henri Laborit discussing his experiments with lab rats. We'll be needing more of that, too.

It's 1863. Do you side with the Jurors of Le Salon de Paris or with Cezanne?


That's really all this comes down to.

Nah, mate, what it comes down to is: it's 6pm this evening, are you at the AA or are you somewhere less interesting?

No, what it comes down to is what fresh insights we will gain if we attend versus reading your notes with The Hairstyle of the Devil playing on a loop in the background.

units are moving