There Oughta Be a Law

This is what happens when you let a man who dresses like an extra from TRON design footwear.

And this is what happens when you let that same man comment on the so-called "right" to privacy.

YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO SELL A PICTURE OF ME WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. AFTER THIS LAW IS PASSED, WHEN YOU ENTER A PUBLIC PLACE LIKE A BASKETBALL ARENA ETC., THERE WILL BE A SIGN THAT READS..."ALL PHOTOS TAKEN HERE ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND CAN BE USED AT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS DISCRETION."

I'd hate to be the guy who tells him that, in fact, that is the legal standard in America: an appearance in a public forum provides de facto consent to documentation of a person's public image. That's why it's called the public image. Should a paparazzo "DRIVE RECKLESSLY ON FREEWAYS, JUMP OVER FENCES AND INVADE PRIVACY ALL IN AN EFFORT TO GET THAT 'MONEY SHOT'," well, Mr. West, there are already plenty of laws against reckless driving, breaking & entering, trespassing, and the like. Press charges, dude.

Ah, but there's no visible signage to inform people where or when they've exposed themselves to prying lenses! Because that's precisely what we need: more public signposts, placards, marks, emblems, and instructions that treat us like infantile numbskulls. Y'know, the same weak-minded entreaty to have our behavior policed by some legislative supernanny that labels paper-towel dispensers with warnings that "MISUSE OF PRODUCT MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH."

Some people call it a tragedy when, say, some dude dies in a motorcycle mishap because he was sending a text message with his feet up on the handlebars. I call it evolution.

Needless to say I won't be attending Kanye's Nov. 28th concert at Colorline Arena here in Hamburg. There's only "SO MANY POSITIVE UPLIFTING MESSAGES" shellacked in auto-tune I can stomach.

Duh-Duh-Duh-Deutsche Unit!

Dear Jessica,

Yes, Peter Fox is what passes for domestic hip-hop here in DE (not, however unlikely this may be, to be confused with Delaware). The pisser is that Fox is as good as it gets, and easily has the most musically sophisticated production. Here's the most popular *ahem* hip-hop group in Germany, Fettes Brot (Fatty Bread), from Hamburg:



And you thought anyone who still thought "Whoop! (There It Is)" is the bollocks was now confined to sharing a padded cell in a Miami psych ward with Luther Campbell. At least, contextually it renders the fact the Bloodhound Gang still have a career in this country a little less flabbergasting. But I don't give a shit if Thom Yorke rates 'em, Modeselektor are persona non grata on my stereo just for producing this tune.

Meanwhile, here's Berlin's godfather of gangsta, Bushido:



Ignore the fact that he nicked the backing synth pads from Madonna's "Power of Goodbye". And finally, here's Sido, who I've heard is supposed to be Germany's answer to both ODB and Jay-Z, but you tell me how that works. Actually, just tell me what the hell this guy's on about in the first place. Here's your RDA of WTF:



Of course, here I am slagging off Deutsche hip-hop when I'm about to move back to Japan. Bless the Japanese, man, 'cuz they can outdo anyone at garage-rock hissy-fits or brain-burning psych-noise, but they can not fucking do hip-hop:



So there's the second big backslap of the week, my Yankee comrade: y'all elected a liberal-leaning black intellectual, plus you're still the only nation on the planet that does hip-hop properly.

A Trey Parker Understatement

What better way to cap off a historic & reaffirming week than bitching about frivolous tripe?

Quick show of hands while you're still in the voting mood, people: who here would've ever thought that "Spielberg & Lucas gang-raping Indiana Jones" could qualify as a malefic piss-take not taken far enough? Well, then which of these bastard Frankenstein monsters do you find to be the greatest violation?

• A feature film adaptation of The Prisoner, starring Mel Gibson's Jesus as Number 6, which will no doubt wuss out on the gloriously anarchic climax, opting instead for a Shyamalan-awkward facile wrap-up.
• A permapouting pretty boy heading up what can only be a less-dazzling live-action adaptation of anime classic Akira, which will no doubt wuss out on the gloriously anarchic climax, opting instead for a Spielbergian castrado cop-out of a facile wrap-up.
• Spielberg - for real - and Will Smith tag-teaming (in the sleepover-at-Jenna-Jameson's sense) one of the heaviest gut-punches of cinematic genius this decade, Chan Woo-Park's Oldboy, which will no doubt wuss out on the gloriously fucked up climax, opting instead for some puscilanimous bullshit that treats the audience like pampered lobotomites and strips the film of any thematic cohesion.

Or, dare I inquire, is there some fresh filmic horror I've not yet heard of, waiting to bust aneurysms in film-lovers' brains everywhere?

Ah well. At least this gave me a good solid chuckle. (Via the AV Club's Friday Buzzkills.)

Bye, Boys and Girls

He was Jimmy Carl Black and he was the indian of the group. R.I.P.

Chilling So Hard My Ass Almost Froze Off

Man, I am gonna sleep like a baby on a morphine drip tonight...

Were the alternative results a fact, I'd simply have pointed you all ibidem to the master of bilious visual parody, Tim Krieder. Thank fucking god I don't have to do that.

Of course, what with all the discussion about "accelerationism" raging around a certain blogipelago, the question begs to be asked: wither all the McCain endorsements? Yesterday would've stood as the ultimate test of accelerationists' integrity. After all, if we're serious about running this crazy neoliberal corporate-militarist train right off its blood-slicked rails, isn't a McCain/Palin administration the shortest distance between here and oblivion? Or is that too Bakuninist a version of Give 'Em Enough Rope, one that invites a degree of violence we don't wish to see exacted on innocent civilians? Or is it that we un-Amerikaneren don't want to risk getting nuked on principle by putting Palin - better suited to Twin Peaks than DC - within reach of kick-starting a fission-feuled Rapture?

Last night, it crept into the pre-dawn hours here in Hamburg as the tallies began to trickle in. I called a dear friend at whose house I attended an election party four years ago - at which we all drank ourselves through the shellshock with an endless supply of Cuba libres. (The specific choice of drink, much like voting in the '04 election, was a defiant yet ultimately empty gesture that left us feeling gutted & raw the following morning.) This time, though my friend was in considerably better spirits, her celebratory mood was owed chiefly to the modest relief that the next four years won't be as totally shit as they could have been.

I'm not, nor have I ever been, under the illusion that, at long last, all the problems will be solved. Obama is several supersized strides to the right of where my ideal elected representative would be; nah, scratch that - my ideal political rep would probably refuse even to consider joining as compromised & cynical an enterprise as a late-stage capitalist democracy. In fact, given the genuinely weird array of soft-scabby Culture War-wounds that have been ripped back open in the last couple of months, I'm feeling bold enough to wager the Balkanization of America will come in my lifetime - a prediction seconded by the friend I phoned last night.

"I don't expect miracles, especially not from a politician," she said. "He's a charismatic guy with a good head on his shoulders and a hell of a learning curve; he's campaigning and talking to people better now than he was even three months ago. A messiah? Gimme a break. But he is a catalyst for all the ugly shit that's been festering within this country for the past three hundred years. Basically, he's the guy I think can best talk America through whatever tragic and difficult, but necessary schism is coming in the near future."

Three cheers for Barack Obama, divorce-counselor-elect!

Update (about 12 hours later): Y'know what? Fuck it. I'm happy. I'm fucking ecstatic. I am THRILLED that, thanks to the choice made by the American electorate, I can stave off point-of-no-return misanthropy for at least another few years. When was the last time the US told the rest of the globe that it actually gave a shit and kinda meant it? Have I revised my expectations for the coming Obama/Biden administration? Nope. My ideological differences persist, and blah blah blah... I don't care right now. As long as air strikes aren't launched against Tehran between now and January 20 (which *sigh* remains a distinct possibility), at the very least civilization will collapse at an organic rate of decay, as opposed to with all the grace & austerity of a shotgun blast to the face.

And to all those who actually cast their vote for the Republican ticket... suck it, losers! You had six years of unmitigated control in Washington, every one of Leo Strauss' oligarchical wet dreams came true, and what did all that get you? Small gov't? Fiscal responsibility? An end to "nation-building"? Growing wages? Financial security? Transparent domestic policy? The overturn of Roe V Wade? Federal protection of the sanctity of marriage? The capture of Osama bin Laden? Victory in the wars on terror, drugs, and poverty? The restoration of honour & dignity to the White House?

In the immortal words of Ice-T: y'all can eat a bowl of dicks. Good night and get fucked.

Many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages...

I'm going to be otherwise detained between now and next week, but rather than leave this blog as blank as a blink, I wanted to just share a few words of discouragement about an event over which I have no tangible control and probably won't have another chance to comment on before it comes to pass. *Ahem*

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin has decided that the accessibly ideal leaders of the global power-locus nation are a hypocritical crank & rent-boy to Wall Street whose greatest claim to fame is dropping napalm on men, women, and children; and a psychotic millenarian separatist with a double-digit IQ who couldn't successfully manage a Gap store if her life fucking depended on it.

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin is an irredeemably selfish & myopic cunt who, by all standards, will have proven themselves unfit to participate responsibly in a legitimate democracy (not that America is such a thing).

Anyone who votes for McCain & Palin is a poster-child for forced sterilization who ought to be ineligible for a driver's license or passport, and is a psychic sponsor of a budding sociopath strapping on a suicide bomb.

America, if you vote for (or if SCOTUS installs) McCain & Palin, the next time anything bad happens to your damned county, the extent of international sympathy will make Stockhausen's reaction to 9/11 look as syrupy-sweet as a Hallmark card.

For those of us powerless to prevent this potential disaster, we can always turn to Patrick McGoohan for comfort - that is, if this 40-year-old TV episode weren't so depressingly prescient.

Modern Militarism

This one's for you, Owen!


(All moving images public domain, courtesy of populuxe, the automakers of America, and US military hegemony past & present.)

Amid all the claptrap about xenoeconomics & accelerationism (I'm catching up, but househusbandry takes precedence over blogging), K-Punk blithely tossed off a response to Splintering Bone Ash's indictment of hauntology that was as helpful & illuminating as a do-it-yourself lobotomy:

...a terminus, perhaps temporarily, has been reached - "that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible". Much as I with [sic] it weren't the case, it isn't possible to bring back modernism by force of will alone.

Boo to that. What a bunch of lazy bollocks. If someone's idea of cultural progress is "to bring back modernism," that speaks more to their own limited sense of aesthetic possibility than a real dead-end. Yes, I know he doesn't mean "modernism" strictly as the historicised aesthetic philosophy with a midcentury heyday, but the very reliance on the term speaks of a self-satisfied defeatism, or at least a languid incuriosity. Anyway, if I recall my adolescence with any accuracy, isn't having burned back through modernism already what got us onto this nostalgic hamster wheel in the first place? Or are we waiting until a new -ism has been codified before we stop complaining and get off our fat asses to join in the artistic adventure?

I've long been convinced that *ahem* structurally efficient art - minimalism, noise, ambient, hauntology, post-whatever - sponges up such critical adulation because it's a palimpsest upon which the higher-minded members of audience can graffiti their own assumptions. This is why SunnO))) have been readily embraced by the art world: their black-matte fogginess is tastefully obtuse set-dressing, allowing plenty of elbow-room for an individual's imaginative ramblings without betraying the truth that they're actually just two dudes who wanna fuckin' rawk. The problem therein is that, when left such generous margins to fill in with our own fantasies, the art becomes a feedback loop that merely reaffirms what (we think) we already know; it reflects only what we show it, without refraction, transformation, or challenge. And, shit, before you know it, you'll be so far up your own mollycoddled ass you'll be lauding the "milky, watercolour diffuseness" of Coldplay - isn't that right, Mark?

If knowing nothing about art while attempting to create is like the old monkeys-at-a-typewriter axiom, then allowing cultural parameters to be defined by people who aren't artists themselves is like asking a 40-year-old virgin addicted to internet porn about sex.

NO Music, NO Life...

Sure, we're kinda crap at distribution, what with four albums (and counting) collecting dust, and we may be temporarily splintered across continents, but we're TCB on the A/V front.

Post-Millenium Tension

Here's what I don't quite understand about blogging: how does anyone get around to writing anything whilst wading in this swamp of digital distractions? (And I mean writing, not this blockquoted, hyperlinked juggling of other people's words as a substitute for content generation.) By now, I should have been done this post three days ago, nevermind folding the laundry and scoring a trailer. But how the hell am I supposed to ignore Onion-worthy headlines like "People run for lives as flames explode around them"? Or this Ed Wood-worthy non-sequitor that was so gloriously awkward, I actually rented the movie to see how bad that shit was? I mean, even the really good flotsam in this horizonless sea of 0s and 1s is keeping me from some real-world responsibility.

In a similar spirit, though it's a little late for thanks by now, big up to Carl for pointing everyone in the direction of this fine (though apparently abandoned) blog. Right off the bat, I was taken by the incisive stance Alex adopts whilst pissing on graves:

Hauntology's ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument... link[ed] to a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics.

This is an idea I've stewed in until my hands got pruney and my hair stank of chlorine, but never really got around to writing about. I'm grateful someone finally put it publicly with such immediacy.

As many savory sounds have been channeled via this necrocultural seance (I especially like the notion of "ghost genres"), the obvious term that no one has so far applied to hauntological music is Dead End. The overarching message seems to be, "Give up. Sounds are neither created nor destroyed, they simply change form. Everything's already been done - probably by Eno*." This hasn't sat well with everyone: almost two years have already passed since this suicide of the imagination and insistence on being bored was ruefully dubbed "Transcendental Miserablism" over at Hyperstition. But if the Fukuyaman "End of History" proved patently false in the political realm, why can it not be an equally invalid prognosis for culture?

Where hauntology is as bankrupt as any other stripe of post-modernism is: can a creative philosophy be called such when it lacks the essential act of creation? There's obviously a creative aspect to reconstitution, translation, and deconstruction, but nothing that crackles with the shock of the new. As I've touched on before, part of the blame has to do with the available tools: the focus has shifted from hardware - between the instrument and the amplifier - to software; consequently, sounds are less created now than they are reformatted, simulated, and sampled. Sounds that are not born of air technically do not exist - they are undead, bastard vibrations exiled from their essential medium. This orphaned, unphysical quality is essential to most hauntological music, (re)constructed as it is from ashy samples & decayed soundwaves**, but it also requires hauntological music to be trapped in some bereaved fantasy of "utopias that never were***, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism." In this regard, hauntology is less a meditation on one's own scars than some sadomasochistic chimera about the fresh, stinking-meat wound that produced someone else's scars.

Am I selling short the opportunities offered by music software? I don't think so. Once the novelty of time-stretching and pitch-correcting wore off, the digital domain didn't actually epxand the sonic palette by much. Random-access, nondestructive editing is undeniably convenient, but how much further can nanosecond splicing be pushed beyond "Windowlicker"? (Don't answer that.) In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of an unheard-of sound produced since the digitally-elongated bellow at the heart of "Come To Daddy".

I wonder if the pervasive pre-millenium tension of the previous decade hasn't led to a serious case of apocalyptic blue-balls. Amid the growing din of millenarian fundamentalists, technophobic survivalists, numerological fruitcakes, and rubbernecking cynics, it was impossible not to anticipate - with some degree of excitement - the systemic aneurysm & subsequent pandemonium of Y2K. It possibly came as a greater shock that nothing happened. The lights stayed on, nothing exploded, and computers only crashed if they were running Windows 98 (and so was par for the course). Since then, people have been desperate to declare every new disaster as the Day the World Changed Forever. Granted, the mere seven years of the new century have already accrued an impressive catalogue of catastrophes: September 11, the Iraq War, Katrina, and the current economic meltdown. But as of yet, very little has fundamentally changed about the way the world works. Hell, Bill Hicks could rise from the grave and (much to his apopleptic chagrin, I imagine) do a verbatim rehash of his early-'90s routines. Could it be that we're all just a bit... disappointed?

(*) - I'm a bit surprised that no one's cited the "Eno mix" of Massive Attack's "Protection" as an obvious precursor to Burial's diffuse, stray-transmission aesthetic.

(**) - Some artists who've been lumped under the hauntology banner, like SunnO))), are a little ill-suited to the "genre," given that they actually originate sounds by tangible means. In this regard, they're better suited to the "post-" (i.e. reductio ad absurdum minimalist deconstruction) prefix.

(***) - Need we be reminded that Burial himself is "too young to have ever gone to a warehouse rave."

Non-sequitorial postscript: Oh, Marnie... Marnie, Marnie, Marnie, I hear you, I dig what you're saying, I can relate, and you're a motherfucker of a guitar player, but... goddamit, just stop singing in that fuckin' cat-in-heat bleat and we can hang, okay? Please?

Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong

I'm DJ'ing a wedding today.

Don't quite know how it happened, but at least the happy couple have uncommonly good taste in music, so I can't get away with any jive bullshit. Chuck Brown, Archie Bell, and Slim Gaillard for all! Anyway, that's my excuse (well, that and getting distracted by those 9/11 fruitloops) for not having been too bloggy this week. I've got a couple o' things on the boil for next week, so hang tight.