the aim of Ernst Kantorowicz's landmark 1927 book The King's Two Bodies was to explore the relation in the middle ages between the king's physical body and his status as the embodiment of the kingdom. Kantorowicz describes one particularly uncanny historical tradition: when the king died, first he was buried and ceremonies were performed, and then a full-sized wax effigy of the king was created which was laid in bed, treated as alive, and which became "sick", then "died", and then was mourned in a grand public spectacle. It's not hard to draw the connection here with Michael Jackson, the king of pop. Michael too had two bodies: his own body and his spectacular body, his imaginary body - his image, which grew into gargantuan proportions, and which had roamed free from him, living a life of its own. This assumes that Michael Jackson the person only had one body, and not many, not a continuum of bodies, constantly morphing under the surgeon's scalpel. As if it felt traumatic to be one person when his image was already multiple, disseminated.
This distinction might explain why when I learned that MJ had passed away, I felt an uncanny feeling, as if this made total sense, because he was already dead. How can we say that MJ was alive to begin with? His image was omnipresent. In a sense it seems like only his image was alive and he had retreated into a Howard-Hughesian realm of the alienated superwealthy.
But in a counterintuitive way, maybe it's not that the king was already dead from the beginning. Maybe that assumes that all-powerful image MJ is fake and reclusive physical MJ is real. Maybe the opposite is the case. A star from the age of 5 years old, Michael never had a normal childhood, nor anything like a private life. Maybe we can't speak of a private Michael and a public Michael. Maybe only the image Michael is real, because he was always already a star, a celebrity, an image. Maybe Michael cannot die, because he was never really alive. Perhaps the reason his story is so tragic is because in this weird private-public inversion, he was like a person from the future, that the constraints of contemporary life could contain, and he was rent asunder, like a fiery meteor descending through the atmosphere.
1. "The Harmonic Convergence is the term applied to a worldwide esoteric-religious event which occurred August 16 and 17, 1987. The event was centered around numerous sacred places throughout the world from Stonehenge to the Golden Gate Bridge where individuals, many referring to themselves as "light beings", gathered to usher in a new age." [props 2 soph]
2. Dirty French Psychedelics is a new compilation by Paris' Dirty label, known for their edits of Frankie Valli, Elvis Presley, et al.
"On paper, “Dirty French Psychedelics” is a compilation for classic rock radio with names our parents would recognize. In reality, it is a hallucinated voyage through the land of French pop psychedelics to be listened to in one sitting, eyes half-open in the heat of the summer of 2009. Certain experts will tell you that Bernard Lavilliers or Brigitte Fontaine are not psychedelic, and they are probably right. Who cares? May the experts go back to counting their CDs. Psychedelics is a notion too precious and subjective to be imprisoned by such stylistic formatting; psychedelics are about perception, not “controlled appellations of origin."
the cheval fou track is one of the numerous highlights from this psychedelic gathering - a 12-minute minimal-afro-kraut epic, visionary remnant from a lost world.
3. Techno pioneers Amorphous Androgynous, aka Future Sound of London (FSOL) present this two-disc compilation of acid folk and heavy psych, hairy thunder and tingling lightning. Starts with Donovan, includes AC faves Betty Davis and "Rated X" by Miles Davis. "Blue Honey" by Pop Levi is a deep-clap head-nodder with Zep muscle and electric gristle.
I had the chance to see Nick Cave last night, along with several Bad Seeds. It was by turns aggressive, cathartic, confessional, incantatory. An invigorating performer and consummate showman ("What? No, we can't play that song. Too gloomy. So this next one is about a guy going to the electric chair..")
Cave has an exceptional understanding of all the different points that intersect in being a rock singer - how you're a priest, a magician, a lover, a storyteller, a healer, a vampire, a demon, all at the same time. This kind of shapeshifting energy is the subject of one of his most well-known songs, "Red Right Hand," which warns of a diabolical shadowy figure who operates traceless and sinister, and who's kind of a substitute Satan without being named as such.
It's a character not unlike the one at the center of Stephen King's Needful Things, who opens up a store in a small town for the sake of carrying out all manner of Faustian bargains with the townspeople - he's got IT, that thing you need the most, for a price, etc.
Now it should be asked, what is the artistic obsession with the devil, with devil-like or diabolical characters? Because, to put it simply, every artist is the devil. Artistic creation is always creatio ex nihilo, and every creative act challenges God's monopoly on creating.
Furthermore, what binds the artist and the devil together is that the artistic act, like any act of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is ultimately born of a power inferior to God's. The artist loves the devil because it's both their job not to replace the world of God, but to screw it up, to make trouble, to negate, to intervene.
There is a hole in the world, the world that God made, because there is a hole in God. This is the Gnostic interpretation, the kind that the institutions of Judeo-Christianity had to fight to contain throughout history. The artist goes to this hole and he picks at it like an eternal wound, and from there he makes new things for the world, out of this hole. Where else do you imagine new things come from?
Finally, when art dreams of demons, this is because it is thinking about its own origins, because it is reflecting on how it is born of what psychoanalysis calls the drive, the compulsion to repeat, the de-stablizing, addictive urge, of great power that consumes the one who undergoes it, who draws the artist in beyond his self-control.
The red right hand that Nick Cave sings about, that is the hand that holds the pen, that is the hand that is splattered with paint, it is the artist's own hand.
Another song that Nick sang last night was called "We Call Upon the Author to Explain," and its lyrics are a list of unjust suffering, contingent abuses, unexplainable sorrow, and the author is of course in this context God, whom you can call upon all you like but will not answer you. If God wanted to ever answer you, there would be no need for Nick to have a song about it.
I could not help but think as well of David Foster Wallace, the brilliant, exceptionally-talented novelist, one of the best of his generation, who recently took his own life - one whose writings so often faced hopelessness and despair with rare courage, I could not help but want to call upon him as well to explain, to explain why after all this it seemed that his own words had failed him. What use, I wanted to know, was writing after all, if it could not keep you alive?
Three killer soul-funk jams for the first day of summer. Edwin Birdsong is the guy that Daft Punk samples for "Harder Bigger Faster Stronger," a song called "Cola Bottle Baby. " This track, Rapper Dapper Snapper, is really nicely bugged and fun. It's slow and trippy and playful, like summertime, and sounds like Arthur Russell doing a funk jam. The crowning element is clearly the little girl's voice shouting I love it! repeatedly.
"Dukey Stick" is another classic deep weird one, by George Duke, and the lyrics are about how he has this stick, called a Dukey (pronounced "dookie"), and it seems like this stick can be of great recreational value to you, if you are a lady. It makes me want to hold a grown black man.
"That's What Love Can Do" is from War's album All Day Music, which isn't really about cutey singalongs like "Why Can't We Be Friends?" and more about moody voodoo burners ala Dr. John. Actually the whole side 2 of the album is pretty spaced and intense. This jam does that minor-major two chord vamp, sounding sad then happy then sad, that echoes lyrics about tumultuous emotions. You could make out with another person to it, or you could cruise around in the middle of the night by yourself and curse yourself for screwing up. Then after a while the song opens up into a drifty psych pasture where a saxophone frolics, like "Dark Side of the Moon" style.
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June 21st is my brother Bob's birthday, (happy birthday dude) and is also the first day of summmer. no other seasonal turning point merits such strong unofficial holiday status as this day. My brother and I have summer birthdays placed relatively close to one another, which meant that when we were kids it was often felicitous of my parents to organize a single mega-party for the two of us, placed strategically between the calendar days.
Such an event was aided by the fact that we always had a large backyard swimming pool, a glowing emblem of my childhood that I am now, sandwiched in Brooklyn concrete while the city melts without mercy, only too painfully aware of missing.
In contrast to this, there's a tradition in modern thought, beginning with Friedrich Hoelderlin, that teaches us we don't have to wait for the calendar to have a holiday. Personally I prefer the ones that sneak up on you and strike like lightning, so that you realize only in the middle of it, or maybe only the morning after, that the whole affair had been a kind of rupturous celebration, a giving-thanks out of nowhere.
Summer solstice on a saturday is a grand thing, to say the least, and this grandness was attested to by a widespread outdoor live music endeavor put on in williamsburg, which saw bands almost every block setting up on the curb. The act that struck me the most was needless to say a gamelan orchestra that set-up in McCarren park - they're called Gamelan Dharma Swara and are affiliated with the Balinese consulate. A dozen or so performers hitting exquisitely decorated tuned gongs. No dancers unfortunately, and no private press albums either. But they did allow onlookers to participate - I'll leave it to you to guess how happy I was to spend this glorious day sitting in on an improv gamelan throwdown in the park. Also it turns out my gamelan game is vicious - most playing I do on keys is fairly percussive and repetitive, so I was laying down Mick Ronson gong solos in no time.
Here is Gamelan Dharma Swara in full effect. If you go to their website you can ask if you can sit in on rehearsals or maybe play along with them. Can you imagine touring with a gamelan orchestra? You'd be like the fourth Sun City Girl.
Gamelan Dharma Swara - Legong Kuntul
"this court dance depicts the movements of white herons in the rice field."
What, do they think we're stupid? obviously it depicts white herons in the f*cking rice field. Jesus.
new tech-centered Bowie tribute album on Rapster/k7 Records, which I am happy to report features alot of Berlin-era material.
clicking on the link will lead you to a microsite where you can hear a stream of our friends Au Revoir Simone covering "Oh You Pretty Things." (I was going to post the mp3 but technical difficulties inhibit me at the moment, and I didn't feel like waiting to go get a new burner to post.)
* * *
“The crack is in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes –your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked –it’s the Grand Canyon.”
- "The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a simple twist of fate, my college girlfriend of three years broke up with me on Sept. 3rd, 2001. This puts the matter in a highly schematic fashion which is as loose with the facts as it is appropriate for my concerns at the moment. It's enough to say that I was in Prague, I had skipped out on the homeland in a post-college euphoria/malaise, and she was in New York, hooking up with a good friend of ours.
The panic, the imminent sense of disaster, the loss of thousands of lives and the deep collective trauma which unfolded a week later were for the most part phenomena that remained on the other side of the ocean, alongside the life that I had been putting on hold or had left behind, it wasn't clear.
Not to say I wasn't stunned as well, or that I didn't hole up in a friend's apartment for a lost weekend of substance abuse and steady consumption of burcak, that not-yet-wine orange juicey substance which comes of age early every fall and whose advent the Czechs are wont to regularly celebrate, selling the stuff in two-liter bottles. It's a pleasant frothy delight, but it can gave you the shits.
But while my memories of the subsequent events that befell my home country in that time are largely televised, and while I still as a result cannot trace the psychic scar of that day in such detail as some can, those memories of my own personal life, which was running a seriously parallel trajectory, are fairly brutal. If the attacks have often labeled, rightly or wrongly, the rude reintroduction of America to the vissicitudes of history, the concurrent young-person break-up that I underwent, and not the transatlantic adventure itself that I was on, which nicely ejected me from the fantasy-world of undergrad life.
It was a staging of such great personal coincidence that, had there been a God at the time, it would have been a perfect opportunity to congratulate him on the infinitely strange contours of his humor.
This is my own perhaps embarrassingly personal example of a nice aesthetic strategy: the transfiguration of individual personal problems into scenes of historical rupture, and vice versa.
This has to me always been the lynchpin of Bowie's 'Oh You Pretty Things', in which the chorus goes Oh you pretty things, don't you know you're driving your mommas and poppas insane, let me make it plain, gotta make way for the Homo Superior. And throughout the song the lyrics mix discussing the quotidian dirty laundry of a relationship gone south alongside images of the arrival of "the coming race." Within the lyrics, this isn't just fantasizing or hypothesizing, this arrival has the force of an event: "all the strangers came today, and it looks as though they're here to stay."
"What are we coming to? No room for me no fun for you" And while we're at it, what's the whole human race coming to?
In the end it's a great fantasy, isn't it? That when you had a break-up, the whole human race would have to break with you. In essence, that's very much like what Nietzsche said, when he envisioned enacting a "grand politics" that would "break the world in two."
Years later, I recorded a wee demo called "Dresden City Hall," my own cover not of "Pretty Things" but maybe of its psychological-historical short circuit, after seeing this photograph:
It was taken from atop the aforementioned city hall, just after the city was firebombed. An angel casts its eyes over the destruction. BTW if you know of a better real-world example of Benjamins' famous Angelus Novus than this one, let me know...My own chorus to this song that I am not posting on purpose was: Never thinking about you and I, just that day in Dresden City Hall 1945
This German space rock group's sixth album, from 1976, one of their greatest achievements. Blissfully clangy/reverbed out guitars that are precursors to the sounds of Television and Sonic Youth. Beauty of the ethereal Orient. Serene invocations, otherworldly power and tranquility.
"Last Days, Last Nights" is how you would say this title in English.
We know a sort special optics which these sort of last times can throw upon a world: a lens of holy twilight. For example, when a stay of some duration comes to an end, and, against the backdrop of their imminent disappearance, the things of one's world are cast in a glow that must be a glimmer of that which covered the earth the day that its creator came to rest.
That's why so often when I have made somewhere my home for a season, the last one or two weeks are inevitably suffused with this kind of light, tinged by melancholy, by innocence, joy, and by the fading warmth of unrealized promise.
In the world of men, this light only shows up around the edges: during beginning and ends, and those moments of grand interruption. It is forever dimmed by engagements, projects, the "yeas and nays of busy people."
But the epic fade-out is not the only way things can end. There are countless ways. Another way something can end is when its participants have no idea which way this is, or even finally if it is a way at all, or if the end is really happening. This is the case of Beckett's Endgame, which I saw recently at BAM Theater, with John Turturro as Hamm, the central character.
It is characteristic of Beckett's writing that it always circuits between great metaphysical intensity and the banal preoccupations of the profane world. This is how allegory works, by moving between two dimensions without ever reconciling them, without ever fully carrying out a translation between them.
In other words, while Endgame confronts grand concerns of human significance and the depths of metaphysical nihilism, it is also about a couple breaking up.In exactly the same way that "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" by The Clash is about a break-up.
One exemplary passage of this:
CLOV:
So you all want me to leave you.
HAMM:
Naturally.
CLOV:
Then I'll leave you.
HAMM:
You can't leave us.
CLOV:
Then I won't leave you.
(Pause.)
HAMM:
Why don't you finish us?
(Pause.)
I'll tell you the combination of the cupboard if you promise to finish me.
CLOV:
I couldn't finish you.
HAMM:
Then you won't finish me.
(Pause.)
CLOV:
I'll leave you, I have things to do.
But it's not at all that the break-up is used to explain the metaphysics, or the other way around. It's about both, and the play produces an endless cluster of echoes by allowing sound from one world to strike the contours of the other.
Clov never leaves. The play ends with Clov, having retreated to his room to dress himself, reappearing in the door dressed in his travel clothes, which in their formality appear all the more out-of-place considering he's about to venture into a "The Road"-type post-disaster world of endless gray where all nature has been extinguished. My friend pointed out that this final scene strikes an ambiguous tone, because as the curtain falls, from the standpoint of sheer gesture it seems like Clov could also be returning from a long voyage, and that the scene is actually a beginning instead of an end.
What doesn't come into play in this play is the problem of afterlife, which would be like a ghostly inversion of Endgame's scenario: this would be when you think you've made an end of something, but it stays around, the end is not an end but it persists, it has a life of its own, it has a story of its own, an afterlife, to be explored and borne forward.
In this case however, Endgame's insistent dialogic refrain still holds weight:
RECENTLY OVER PIZZA a friend expressed the latent fear that she had been born too late. While attending an academic conference featuring several luminaries of 70s radical feminism, my friend felt a melancholic twinge - nowhere could there be found today the same kind of pervasive revolutionary energy, the kind that sweeps the mob together into the movement, the kind that serves as a north star under whose ceaseless light all things gain new contour. She was speaking, it seemed to me, of the problem of the aftermath. Of the fact that after the revolutionary event, life stubbornly insists on inching forward, on outgrowing whatever smooth new cloak we thought we could wrap it in.
It seems as well that one needs more heroic strength in the aftermath than during the time of the event. Anyone can follow the mob up the stairs of the Bastille. Or shoot out those clock towers. Anyone can choose sides. But to keep a lonely vigil once the ecstasies and tumult have quieted, to keep looking for a way forward when there are no more bearded kings to come down from the mountain, their mouths full of prophecy.
This is a big problem for successful artists, what to do after you've hit your peak. The documentary called 'Comedian' is a striking example of this: it follows Seinfeld in the wake of the glory surrounding his massively successful television show, as he trudges onward and returns to the standup circuit, figuring out what to do next. German note: the name 'Seinfeld', Sein-feld, might be read as 'field of being'. Such is the existential problem of the aftermath - its protagonists wander free in a field of being, lacking orientation.
This artistic aftermath is a big problem for rappers, whose street-tough personas start to appear somewhat ill-fitting once they become 'rappers of a certain age', no longer with chips on their shoulders (they've been brushed off). The aftermath is such a problem for rappers, Dr. Dre went and named his record label after it.
RZA's latest track, 'Can't Stop Me Now', seems to reflect this miasma. Why does RZA need to tell us now, twenty years after 36 Chambers, that we can't stop him? Where does he get the idea that we would want to, or think we could?
RZA - Can't Stop Me Now
In honor of the aftermath we present four songs that gain their strength from the aftermath of David Bowie. The four songs here are particularly indebted to the works of Bowie's Berlin trilogy. "I Don't Remember", from Gabriel's eponymous debut solo record, captures the spare, icey funk and paranoid lyrics, "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" serves a condensation of the whole first half of the album 'Low', (noting that one of the songs on this Bowie record is called 'Breaking Glass', and that Nick Low-e's restrained white-boy rhythms distinctly evoke "Sound and Vision"), Billy Idol channels the swaggering posture and flamboyant urban romance, and William Judd jacks in to the ambient eno-produced instrumentals that take up the second halves of 'Low' and 'Heroes'.
Bowie, it should be said, is a bit like Goethe - every new genre he decided to try his hand at, he reinvented. When there's an event, like the Bowie event or the Goethe event, it tends to have traumatic effects for those who come after. Sometimes, those who come after are jilted lovers whose paramours have always-already been gone, who mourn for days they never knew. Other times, they are carefully keeping the way open, preparing for tomorrow, continuing to do the steady, loving labor of the apostle, spreading and pronouncing the word, again and again.
"Getting some skin exposure to the blackout (get some protection) Get me on my feet (get some direction) Oh get me on my feet Get me off the streets (get some protection)"
There is a list of blog subjects, an unacknowledged but not indiscernible list, which, were the patience of our readers not a factor, we would happily and endlessly indulge in every week, in much the same way that a fat kid loves cake. Regarding the list ranking, Bowie's Berlin period, indexed by the trilogy Low, Heroes and Lodger, we confess, handily maintains its pole position. We do not enjoy these records. We live among them, among all the little sounds, like fish among the coral.
The most narcotized out-there track in Bowie's discography is the title track from Station to Station. It's the album prior to the Berlin era, and the song is a zenith-point for a bombastic, drug-addled, near-schizoid art-star ego. It's a distillation of the L.A. world that Bowie left for the melancholy experimentalism of Berlin.
From interviews and criticism it's possible to read 'Blackout' as both about power-cuts and about personal blackouts, the one-man shutdown, from drugs, exhaustion, madness, excess. The lyrics index someone exposed during a battle, caught in a cross-fire, in need of shelter, of defense. This exposure on a shared, communal level is what interests me about the political dimensions of electrical blackouts.
In her essay on Martin Heidegger’s reading of Friedrich Hölderlin’s late hymn Andenken, Avital Ronell writes
“Holiday not only means the negativity carved out by the interruption of work, it also implies a pause, a rupture with work, which allows one to pause for thought, to ask, to look around, to await something else: it indicates the wakeful presentiment of wonder—the wonder, namely, that there is a world around us that worlds, a world that is being and not nothing; that things are, and we are in their midst; that we are, yet we hardly know who we are, and we hardly know that we hardly know…. “
A consideration of the holiday in Hölderlin is part of a larger project of mine concerning the rhetorics of event in political theology. Why theology? And how can theology be political, especially today, when we might feel that we’re so over it, when we’ve been told so many times about religion, about its evils and its illusions Political theology confronts the impossibility of an immanent foundation of political life. It confronts the fact that in order to keep ourselves together, to preserve a political intensity among us, it is necessary to look outside, to turn to the forces we feel will anchor or ground us.
The way that, in the last century, political theology avoided being an outdated or perversely anachronistic prospect was by having to consider an event as a political ground. That something happens, something greatly strange and unpredictable, around which political life must organize itself.
A black-out is an event that hovers on the edge of politics. Historical accounts of black-outs illustrate how it simultaneously incites and disarms the impulse to radical political action. It remains instead a space that opens onto the political without being able to enter into it.
When the lights go out across town, the blacked-out city becomes host to a multitude of redemption tropes. Most recently, the New York black-out of 2003 was threaded into the contemporary apocalyptic Christian discourse of the popular fiction series ‘Left Behind’: the black-out passed for the rapture, and some of the believers who witnessed it were convinced they were not among the holy elect: “The saddest part of this story is that millions of supposed Christians’ lives have nearly come to a halt, as they lament being ‘left behind.” “I haven’t left my house for weeks,” said Kathy Brighton. “What’s the point now? Eternal damnation isn’t much of a motivator.”
Another trope of the black-out is the romantic communion with nature, derived from Rousseau, which emphasizes what it sees as the spontaneous return of communal bonds, neighborly compassion, and rediscovery of those experiences veiled by the roar and frenzy of a spectacular metropolis. It was evident in accounts pertaining to the 1965 New York black-out:
"That first night, I joined one of the many impromptu parties that sprang up on the front lawn of a low-rise apartment building. A young woman brought out a guitar and played some ballads. We laughed and talked, then someone mentioned that without the harsh glare of the streetlights, we might be able to see thousands of stars in the sky, a sight that is rarely seen in most metropolitan areas because of the relentless spotlights, streetlights, and automobile headlights, as well as security lights around parking lots and businesses. One man out on his roller skates said that people were free to live their lives, instead of watching other people live theirs on television."
Finally, of the three black-outs to hit New York in the past hundred years, (1965, 1977, 2003) looting was most prevalent in ’77, when 3,500 people were arrested during a rampage which saw hundreds of fires lit and thousands of stores ransacked. This particular black-out best demonstrates the quality of the event as a spontaneous or insurgent holiday out-of-joint – during the power failure, “Christmas in July” effectively happened twice. The first was in the ghetto: “When the black-out hit in ’77 the cry echoed through the ghettos: ‘It’s Christmastime, it’s Christmastime!’” Commodity lust during a power failure can reach a fever pitch, a consumer death drive, in which the acquisition of unguarded objects becomes gleeful, senseless, done for its own sake – reports from the time note that hundreds of prayer shawls, bibles and other useless accoutrements were looted as well.
"'Prices have gone too high. Now we’re going to have no prices. When we get done there ain’t gonna be no more Broadway.” Said a man in his thirties grasping a wine bottle in one hand and a TV set in another: “You take your chance when you get a chance.” Added Gino, 19, a father of two: 'We’re poor, and this is our way of getting rich.'"
The second instance of Christmas in July occurred when Shea Stadium went dark at approximately 9:30 p.m., in the bottom of the sixth inning. To pacify the crowd, the organist played Jingle Bells and White Christmas.
‘Christmas in July’ is a very fitting formulation for what I want to call an insurgent holiday – the arrival, out of joint, of a holiday-like suspension of time which has a marked political-theological intensity. My central question in reading the black-out together with Hölderlinand Benjamin is the problem of putting the holiday to work, of recuperating or otherwise making-use of such a caesura. This is as well the central problem for the poem by Hölderlinthat inaugurates the modern engagement with the holiday, Wie Wenn am Feiertage, (As on a Holiday), the first of his late hymns.
The language of ‘Feiertage’ is powered by electrical rhetoric: the poet is a kind of political-theological electrician, overseeing in a Promethean register the transference of sacred light, the Blitz, to the people. He’s got to be a current converter, though, wrapping the blitz in song, so that it can become a binding political force. In the midst of this celebration, the poem shudders as the plug is pulled on its capacity to testify: a blank space punctuated by ‘Weh mir!’
Right as the lights are about to go on and mankind is to be newly infused with divine knowledge, there’s a black-out, in which the cause for the shutdown has itself been blacked-out, redacted, effaced. In his exemplary reading of the poem, Peter Szondi argues that what is missing in the gaps of the incomplete eighth stanza can be found expressed in the original prose draft, in which Hoelderlin writes that all is lost when he approaches the divine not as a pure vessel but still bleeding from an inner ‘selbstgeschlagner Wunde’ [self-struck wound]. Ultimately, Szondi’s hermeneutics operate in a manner parallel to the tropings of the black-out: it aims to fill in, cover over, or write off the caesura.
A critique of the drive to fill-in the black-out, and to set the holiday at work, is at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on History. Despite the repeated engagements with technology, caesura and political theology, Benjamin never directly regards an electrical black-out as an object. This is undoubtedly partly due to historical circumstance, but also, I want to argue, because the stakes of the black-out lie to some extent at the limit-point of his thought. While the black-out would serve as a remarkably fitting allegory for the kind of interruptions in power and history that Benjamin has theorized, the actual experience of a widespread power failure opens onto an experience which cannot be wholly subsumed within Benjamin’s thought as much as this thought seems so strikingly to point towards it.
There is in Benjamin’s work a subterranean convergence between his earlier descriptions of a communal technological ecstasis and his final writings on the explosive discontinuity of history, although he never fully accounts for the possible role of modern technology in a radical politics of history.
In the concluding section to One-Way Street, Benjamin writes:
“man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and unavoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.”
By the time of the theses, the engagement with communal ecstatic experience will have shifted towards a rhetorics of cessation, standstill, and temporal interruption. At the same time, the explicit technological themes will have mutated: in the theses, technology is figured as domination of nature and is coupled with a belief in historical progress. Furthermore, in contrast to Hoelderlin, who on the holiday seeks to receive the divine Blitz, in Benjamin, the electrical energy that appears in holiday-time is reduced to sparks and flashes that are in danger of disappearing as soon as they appear.
To fully circuit between technological emergency and historical rupture would necessitate a new thinking of being-together, and I offer the example of the electrical black-out as the index of such a circuit. The black-out’s technological dimension interferes with the formation of a ‘we’ indispensable for progressive political action, because the community that appears fleetingly under its sign shares nothing other than a mutual alienation from the world of projects, work and intentionality. Benjamin’s thought does not explicitly recognize an opening for this kind of communal experience: for him, the central problem is the communal alienation from history and tradition. This essentially political experience is depicted in the Theses on History as a kind of holiday which takes place unpredictably, if I can say, insurgently.
“The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guises of holidays, which are days of remembrance [Eingedenken].”
For Benjamin, only the apocryphal event of the shooting-out of tower clocks during the July revolution in Paris has participated in this historical Eingedenken.
Rebecca Comay writes that “Eingedenken inaugurates repetition as the return of that which strictly speaking never happened: it announces the redemption of a failed revolutionary opportunity at the moment of most pressing danger.” This cessation of happening is a radical recapture of the past which at the same time marks how the past does not belong to us, how we are abandoned by it. In this way it is a work of mourning which pronounces its debt to the past by attempting to fulfill the potential of past failed revolutions.
The three interpretations of the black-out can be characterized as seeking the payment of a debt, a recuperative return of something missing, or the redemption of an alienated life. Each witness understands the black-out as a coming to what is due to them – as humans, as oppressed, as children of God. In Benjamin’s approach, there is a debt to be paid, but it is we who pay the debt to the past, in a moment which does not memorialize the past or render it legible as tradition, but attempts to contend with the potential of past failed revolutions.
Now the question of the agency of this encounter and thus of political action is a difficult one in Benjamin, considering his repeated deconstruction of positing as such. The ‘real emergency’ that he speaks of would constitute not the emergence of a new political force, but rather something like an interruption of emergence as such. Additionally, and crucial for the juxtaposition of the now-time of the theses with the electrical blackout, he as well does not enunciate how this radical encounter with the past in its non-actualized possibilities directly affects the constitution, the being-together, of those addressees produced by the past’s insistent claim. It’s possible that within the theses’ own logic, there can be no us, that the us is cancelled out or held in abeyance. This holding of community in abeyance would be exemplified by the black-out, which contrary to the accounts we have heard, exposes only the sharing of our nothing-in-common…
1. Let me about what interests me concerning the aesthetics of menace, doom, portent, suspense and so on (in both music and movies). This is a mode of art dealing with rendering to the senses something that is on its way. Something is coming. Most likely, it is coming for you. It's not here yet, if it were here, there would be no need to present it aesthetically.
In this mode, the work of art speaks of something that is going to happen. Or more specifically, can possibly happen. When we say or represent that the arrival of something, a werewolf, or the devil, is imminent, what's meant is that the arrival is really possible.
If we stop here for a second we can hear how kind of strange it is to say that something is really possible, or that a possibility is real. I can't say much more about it here. It's enough to consider that it's a paradoxical coupling. Because if something is real, we think, it's not possible. It just is.
In other words, if something is possible, does it exist?
This is the question that all art of doom and suspense is engaged with. Art doesn't seek to answer this question, but to unlock the multiple opportunities for its deployment.
(It is enough to stop and consider the seven years during which we have lived under the sign of a 'war on terror' to realize that this question is not only an aesthetic question but a political one. You can say, for example, that the great twentieth-century German political theorist and Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt built his entire philosophical edifice around this question, or rather, around a particular way of answering this question - the only force, Schmitt argues, that is capable of addressing the full political weight of this question is a strong sovereign. Only he can face and decide on the real possibility of war, killing, destruction, and so on.)
Now the reason why this territory, of menace and suspense, is so fertile for art is because of the field's fundamental ontological tension, that is, its disjunction between what is, and what is not, or what is coming to be. Whether or not the representation of this tension is filed under doom, or under institutional theology (when it speaks, above all, of the coming or return of the Messiah) depends on how the representation understands the resolution of this tension.
In other words, if there is a strife between what-is and what-is-not, and eventually what-is-not is going to prevail, and what-is is not going to be in very good shape once what-is-not comes out on top, then you're squarely in doom country.
The opening track to Section 25's album Always Now, "Friendly Fires", is a very strong example of what we're talking about. Section 25 were something like Joy Division's little brother band, also produced by Martin Hannett and also on Factory Records. The insistent, tribal drums sound out a warning. The relevance of the lyrics, "they're on their way....they're coming to you...no one can escape...this kind of war..." is clear.
Plus I mean, holy shit is this song dope.
2. It's quite possible that music is most fitting for representing doom because our ears hear further than our eyes can see. Sounds are able to project the imminent arrival of something not there at a grander intensity than images. Plus, images, movies for example, have to reckon with not actually showing the arriving horrible thing. Their strategy is limited to showing its effects: think of the trembling glass of water announcing the arrival of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Burning Witch is a proto-version of Sunno))), consisting of Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, the core of Sunno))) and the founders of doom record label Southern Lord. The Southern Lord, it should be said, is Satan.
Banks Violette, a contemporary artist/sculptor known for his heavy metal/satanic-themed work, cast SunnO)))'s backline in salt for this work. The backline is the series of amps used to produce the band's uniquely punishing, overwhelming sound. The effectiveness of this piece lies in the tight psychological/aesthetic connection between the event of SunnO))) performing, and the sound produced by the amplifiers, such that, cast in white salt, the huge amps produce something like a negative photographic image of the concert. It's the artistic technique of subtraction: take away the effect, leave the cause. Leave the cause and visibly suspend it, strip it from its context and purify it. In a sense Violette's work participates in this aesthetics of thrill and suspense: they're coming...the work says....they're coming and they're going to play punishing grinding death metal....while wearing druid outfits...
3. Lastly a note on the religious in contemporary music. Putting aside Christian rock. Because well. Bands like Justice and Sunno)))) engage in an abstraction of religious iconography.
Now there is a long tradition in philosophy and theory that conceives of music as something like 'de-sacralized prayer'. So that music is something like prayer without prayer, without words or content. An opening that doesn't go anywhere. An opening to nowhere, maybe that's all that can be said of art, and the greatest thing about it.
So when band alter religious icons, appear in robes or install the cross on stage, it's in part an index of the way in which all music traverses the religious impulse. They're engaging with the spectacle of the stage show, and all spectacle at its core is religious.
Zombie-Zombie are a French electronic-rock duo. Who have a new album coming out on March 3 called A Land for Renegades. "Driving This Road" is the lead track.
They play portentous synth-discoey or electro-rock jams with militaristic beats. The soundtracks Carpenter composed to his own low-budget 70s & 80s exploitation films seem like a big influence.
I heard 'Driving This Road' a while ago and loved for its ring-modded minimal synth riff and general minimal sinisterism. I kept waiting for the album to stray from the formula that makes 'Driving This Road' so effective and it never did, it remains very much in the pocket, very tight and concise. There's a broad parallel to be drawn with Deerhunter, actually, as they both take certain brooding, stiff joy-divisiony elements and stretch them out into spacier jam formation.
I downloaded the album from itunes with fingers crossed. The same 'please don't suck' fingers that were crossed when, after several days, I finally listened to the remainder of OK Computer after being blown away by 'Paranoid Android'.
The release of OK Computer has something structurally in common with zombies, and I'm not referring to the ones that have been created in the decade of its wake, those who stalk around in the stingy ghettos of the internet world with bleeding mouths, who eat one another's brains and have aching, starving stomachs that crave the next little Radiohead morsel (Thom singing 'Cabaret' on the toilet? Some helicopter sounds played backwards and overlaid with thin, brooding guitar?). No, both the album and zombies, specifically their movies, by which I mean movies concerning zombies. They're both events, in the philosophical sense. That's to say that in both cases, something intense happens to you that catches you off guard and compels your complete and urgent attention, and you then turn to look out the window or ring up a friend of yours, only to find that this phenomenon is going on outside as well, or over at your friend's house, and then it's going on in the whole neighborhood, then all over town, then spreading to the hills...
Full Disclosure: we here at the AC have a mild case of catastrophilia.
A Land for Renegades might be a concept album. It certainly feels like it. On the track 'What's Happening in the City', disorienting pitch-shifted voices make ominous statements about the state of things...they could very easily have been lifted from "Dawn of the Dead's" claustrophobic, panicked media transmissions: "I see all the people leaving in the city. Can you tell me what's happening in town? You will feel pain in your body...Your nose will bleed every time you think about it."
AC says:
We are psyched about these guys. We bet they totally like 80s horror movies and synth jams.
It kind of sounds like if Superstudio did set-design for a horror movie.
That would be awesome. You should look up Superstudio, you would like it.
It would be cool if ZZ came to play the United States.
But you see, while I would hesitate to call ZZ disco, I think a certain affinity for spacey-experimental disco can be found in their kraut-goth jams. (Kraut-goth, does that make it like, Nosferatu? It's not really vampire club music, though, that would be way more erotic and alluring. ZZ's music really does have that perpetual lurch of the brain-hungry undead).
I think this is a rather European phenomenon. If disco is to euro what rock is to the US, that's because they're also both the respective nomadic musical forces that can mutate and permeate all kinds of other styles and micro-styles. That's why in Europe and France in particular you have disco-metal (justice), space disco (Dirty Sound System), etc. While on the other hand if you want to communicate to american ears, particularly New York ears, you have to speak rock. Whatever you want to say, say it in a rock accent. That's why LCD Soundsystem is so effective because it's navigating between these two powerful nomad forces, disco and rock.
AC remains perplexed as to why techno (aka minimal beats) remains a distinctly european force. Why does America resist? is it some metric-system shit or what?
Seriously though, Tear Da Club Up (Dragged and Chopped). DJ Black is the Saint Paul of Houston rap, spreading the word after the death of the savior. He doesn't call it 'chopped and screwed' out of respect for the father, and as well 'dragged' is fitting because it's slower than screw. It literally sounds like you're dragging something, like a body. The beginning of the track could be a ghetto zombie soundtrack. TEAR DA CLUUBBBB UP TEAR DA CLUBBB UPPP. Northface jackets, bling and brains, smashing tables, knocking drinks over, blood on the dancefloor. PS check out Black's myspace page, it is ill.
