Bumping And Rolling

“Art is described as being illuminating, and the rest of life as being dark. Naturally, I disagree. If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive, and I rather think that contemporary music would be in the dark too, bumping into things, knocking others over and in general, adding to the disorder that characterizes life”. John Cage, ‘Notes on Silence’, pg45

Tom Ze – Dor e Dor 

The Dirtbombs – Kung Fu 

Del Rays – Night Prowl

Georgia Anne Muldrow – Wrong Way

Sean J Period – Places Everyone

This list is structured around a wonky, bumping, rolling sound: swung beats, loose drums, dropping rhythms. These are the songs that annoy my father, who always tells me that they just ’sound wrong’. Too right. 

Artwork: Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913 (180 Kb); Oil on canvas, 87.5 x 99.5 cm (34 1/2 x 39 1/4 in); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

“Salame” Tim & Eric – Mark Gormley Exposed as Hoax

Mark Gormley is a brilliant hoax created by Tim & Eric of Adult Swim/’Awesome Show, Great Job’ fame. The aesthetics, production equipment, characterization, transitions, use of green/blue screen, images combining still and moving footage etc. are improbably similar. Their continuing fascination with woe-some community television music videos is obvious to any frequent viewer of their show. To draw a quick comparison:

The screenshots below demonstrate some of the repeating tim & eric-ian aesthetics. 

 

The above transition, if you pay close attention, features an explosion of black triangular shapes which move and recombine in an identical way to the cat heads in the credits for Tim & Eric’s awesome show season one. The powerpoint style backgrounds and incredibly surreal digi-fx transitions are so ‘tom goes to the mayor’ it hurts.

Awesome show, great job guys.

The Cultural Politics of Difference

“Sameness and difference in relation to what?” (Hardt & Negri, 2004; 127). 

The two faces of eurocentrism: ‘they are utterly different from us”, or, “they are just the same as us.” We cannot escape the need to use a cultural defined Identity as a universal standard, the measure of sameness and difference – Difference can only be expressed in relation to a definite whole national imaginary. So how do we form this national imaginary?

Nationalism: the ideology of the modern nation state (Eriksen, 1993; 97). 

 

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Ernest Gellner, (1964: 169). 

The nation as an imagined community – Benedict Anderson

An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. Anderson proposed the following definition of a nation: “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”(Anderson, 1991 [1983], 6). 

Political movements based on cultural identity are strong in societies undergoing modernization. (Eriksen, 1993; 99). 

Anderson argues that nationalism derives its force from its combination of political legitimation and emotional power. Politics cannot be purely instrumental, but must always involve symbols which have the power of creating loyalty and a feeling of belongingness. (Cohen, 1974; b). The nation is not solely produced through large scale upheavals and war (or revolution), but through everyday practices, symbols and language. Banal Nationalism. 

 

What are some colloquialisms and symbols expressing national ideology in Australia?

“Australian values”

Mateship

Fair-go

The Aussie Battler

The entirety of Baz Luhrmann’s ham-fisted film Australia:

The Outback

The Red Soil

The Kangaroo

The Koala Bear

Ricky Ponting

Although nations tend to imagine themselves as old, they are modern. Nationalist ideology is a distinctly european / modernist movement. 

Norway/Scandinavia

The creation of Norwegian national identity took place throughout the nineteenth century (a period of modernization and urbanization). The country moved to full independence, leaving the union with Sweden in 1905. The formation of a national identity was in a large way driven by members of the middle class who travelled to the countryside in search of the ‘authentic’, bringing elements of their culture back, and presenting them in cities as expressions of authentic Norwegian-ness.

“Folk costumes, painted floral patterns (rose-mailing), traditional music and peasant food became national symbols even to people who had not grown up with such customs. Actually, it was the city dwellers, not the peasants, who decided that reified aspects of peasant culture should be ‘the national culture’. A national heroic history was established. [...] Certain aspects of peasant culture were thus re-interpreted and placed into an urban political context as evidence that norwegian culture was distinctive, that norwegians were a people, and that therefore they ought to have their own state.” (Eriksen, 1993; 101). 

The Viking

Take for example the figure of the Viking as a symbol of scandinavian identity. More related to fantasy than fact, pictures representing Vikings with horns and other ornaments in their helmets became the norm rather than the exception. The picture of rude Barbarians was frequently perpetrated by artists of different nationalities and, since they were not Scandinavians, they might lack any proper knowledge of the Viking culture. Therefore, this new image for the Barbarian warrior would be made out of a collection of traits associated with prejudicial concepts in the minds of people who were ultimately foreign, that is, not from Scandinavian origin. And this image was often that of a uncivilized brute, carrying all the characteristics of a sub-human creature.  The warriors were mostly shown as if they were “cavemen”, troglodytes wearing animal skins to cover their bodies. 

The horned helmet, which dominates Viking imagery, was actually never worn by Vikings in battle (Langer, 2002). Rather the popular culture industry of the early 19^th century (painting) aimed to demonize Vikings by portraying them as beastly, brutal animals, and many paintings were stylized with this mythic, albeit false touch. “The idealized picture of the Barbarian became part of the artists repertoire of images… art was impregnated with history – but not a “traditional” and “correct” history: more of a mythical interpretation of an immemorial past.” (Langer, 2002: 5). 

This disinformation has reached so far into collective consciousness that what was initially a slanderous image (much like portrayals of Jewish people with horns), was later used to foster a national identity. Scandinavian tennis fans wear horns as a symbol of national pride, a symbol which has no real basis in their actual culture. The viking horns, or lack thereof, perfectly demonstrate the imagined or invented-ness of national identity. 

Sequence

“What is most monstrous is sequence. When we are there why do we withdraw only in order to return? Is there nothing good enough to transfix us? If she is truly worth fucking why do i have to fuck her again? If the flower is beautiful why does my baby son not look at it forever?” Book of Daniel, pg. 245

“A study today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties & forties would yield the following theology: 1. people are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living.  4. The Flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large, and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.  ” pg 287.

Vampire Weekend

Big up to the afrobeat white kids.

I’ve enjoyed their track ‘one’ (more annoyingly known as ‘blake’s got a new face’). So i’ve given it a edit/dub treatment: a laid back, spacey nod to tangorterje’s ‘diamonds on the soles of her shoes’. Cut out and played back for your enjoyment.

zShare

Zizek, the big bad monster

“The worst thing to play is this ‘we are all humans’ game that some intellectuals like to play. you project a certain intellectual persona, the cold thinker or whatever. but then you signal through the small details, you know ‘but basically I’m like you, i like small pleasures of life, i am human like you.’ I am not human. I am a monster, i claim. It’s not that i have the mask of a theoretician and beneath i am a more human person, ‘I like chocolate cake, i like this and like that’ and so on, which makes me human. I rather prefer myself as somebody who, as not to offend others, pretends, plays at being human.”

 When Zizek got married, he stuck with his guns, giving the cameras a surly, non-smile.

 

“The exemplary case of the “pathological,” contingent element elevated to the status of an unconditional demand is, of course, an artist absolutely identified with his artistic mission, pursuing it freely without any guilt, as an inner constraint, unable to survive without it.” (Zizek, 1998).

 Zizek, Slavoj, Kant & Sade: The ideal couple, in Lacanian Ink 13, The Wooster Press, 1998

Get your hands off me! a handcrafted essay question?

Essay questions – choosing one is like choosing your identity.

i’m finding it extremely difficult to seperate my knowledge into weeks, like the questions are listed. I’m also finding it difficult to focus solely on tv texts, because i’ve found the theory useful in any aspect of commodity culture.

I had an idea, an entry point into the theory, and that was an analysis of how ‘the hand’ is a super-commodified object, producing desire in particular, and how this is shown in screen texts. It’s a Digital culture (as in fingers.) The hand without fingers is the equivalent of the body without organs – the fist, the unified action of a flat palm.

It just piled up: all these examples of hands in a single day.

• Starting with ‘eyes wide shut’ - the hands being the only non-cloaked skin shown in the mansions, wedding rings, gloves being warn to hide the hands, leading by the hand, the whole film was like a dance of hands – of homunculus puppets.

                              

• Skins – start of season two, Tony is trying to write after his accident – cannot control his hands.
• J’dilla’s album donuts, and a friend commenting how he has stamped himself all over the record – he has put his little signitures: gestures, re-cueing records, mistakes, scratching.
• scratching itself – hip hop culture – is hands on – getting your hand ON something, stopping the record.

We all desire the authentic other – the non-commodified, ‘real’, which never actually exists but it used as a way of selling the ‘hand made’, as if it somehow bypasses commodity culture.

We all desire contact, real touch - yet we fear the touch of strangers. Zombies are highly corporeal – they pretty much ‘feel around’, sense only by touch, hands held foward. Hand’s outstretched like the feelers of some massive community BwO.

Medical TV always with the ‘doctors life saving hands’ this touching, feeling, tempreture reading, pulse counting, blood stopping (saving private ryan), gloves, getting your hands dirty.

Palm reading (literally reading the hands). Hands as a sign system – waving, shaking, ‘peace’, ‘fuck you’, ‘thumbs up’ that superseeds verbal communication.

Andre Breton wrote:

Tu cuerpo se ajustaba al miouna mano se ajusta a lo que quiere ocultar…

(Your body was consistent with my own, As a hand fits what he wants to hide…)

Our hands are producers of becomings.

There is a commodified ‘hand-made’ aesthetic – used to sell high and low end goods.

Commodity culture serves hands – ergonomic pens, walking canes with shaped handles – these define politics of the hand. The double glove (below) challenges the hand as a single entity.

The hand is a metamachine: nearly all human/machine couplings are mediated by the hand machine.

Only one question left: what the hell kind of essay question does this fit into? If anyone can help, ill promise you a lovely handmade mix cd.

C’mon, give me a hand.

 

 

Ejaculation Machines

I watched woody allen’s film ‘everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask’ last night.

The scene above is a great example of micro machinery running the male: creating desire, responding, creating flows (erections, sperm, digesting food, consuming, fucking). The micro machine iteself comments on the working of culture macro machinery when they talk about having to hold off ejaculation because it is ‘too soon’. “Do you come too soon? Or too late?….what an idiotic mess” (Guattari in ‘The adolescent revolution’, 68). All these micro machines run to the rhythm of macro machines and pornography machines. We are all in this mess together.

Sweding in ‘Be Kind, Rewind’

 ’Be Kind, Rewind’, Dir. Michel Gondry, 2008

In the Deleuze & Guattari reading, Strauss’ concept of Bricolage is mentioned and defined in a footnote as:

“Bricolage: The tinkering about of the Bricoleur, or amatuer handyman. The art of making do with what’s at hand”.

 The be kind rewind website explains the sweding process as:

“Sweding is re-making something from scratch, using whatever you can get your hands on.”

 Pretty similar, huh?

The sweding process utilizes basic, luddite technology employed in often inventive ways that makes use of genre machines. Gondry seems to echo A&H’s pessimism in the way the culture industry fits all aspects of life through commodified channels. The genres in the shop which are initially diverse are stripped back to ‘action/adventure’ and ‘comedy.’ All films are slotted into one or the other.

Initially the characters intend on keeping themselves apart from the film “shoot it from more than ten feet and she won’t be able to tell it is us.” But they increasingly insert themselves into the process, becoming ‘celebrities’.

The involvement of the audience in the production is romantic, but an interesting reference to the way audiences usually have no knowledge of the terms of production. Be Kind instead promotes a kind of image literacy.

The film comments of traditional paradigms of narration: consistently breaking continuity and mocking special effects. When assembling the Fats Waller film, the producers debate the order, referring to citizen kane and questioning whether or not it is acceptable to start at Waller’s death in the documentary. Jack Black then questions if the audience will be able to understand this, and jokes that the film may have to run literally in reverse.

A point of difference in Be Kind relates to the way in which an old media format is seen to be more inclusive. Technological determinism has it that advances in media technologies bring greater chances for development: particularly as far as the category of the ‘prosumer’. But Be Kind creates a binary between the cold format of dvd, a format which cannot be recorded over, and cannot be wiped by magnets, and the VHS, which whilst less advanced, is more participatory. Gondry sees the older format as less intimidating and human. And when his characters must ‘change’ to DVD, the make do by simply glueing the disk to the outside of a VHS tape.

I enjoyed the film, but I think overall it lacked coherency and ended up being overly sentimental and romantic. But I’m willing to forgive Gondry because the Sweded films themselves are wonderful. And because he directed Science of Sleep.

Fox’s Classic Samples Mix

This mix showcases what i think are some of the most blatant and clever examples of sampling in popular music. If you have ever liked Daft Punk, Will Smith, Eminem or House of Pain, you should listen to this mix. You will never hear their music again in the same way.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/87486356128c8f/ 

40 mins, 35mb, 128kbps.

Did anyone pick what track three was? It contains the most sampled drum break in history, used to create all jungle music, advertisements for cars, and levis. For a HIGHLY recommended explanation, see the clip below.