The futurist-torpedo-guidance-cell-phone complex

From the wikipedia entry for George Antheil - composer of Ballet Mecanique and numerous film scores for Nicholas Ray among others:

Antheil wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper relationship advice column, as well as regular columns in magazines such as Esquire and Coronet. He considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as "The Glandbook for the Questing Male".[1][48]

Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr, who sought his advice about how she might enhance her upper torso. He suggested glandular extracts, but their conversation then moved on to torpedoes.[citation needed] Lamarr had fled her Austrian munitions-making husband, and coming to the US had become fiercely pro-American. Together they conceived and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system. Lamarr contributed the knowledge of torpedo control gained from her husband and Antheil a method of controlling the spread spectrum sequences using a player-piano mechanism similar to those used in Ballet Mécanique.[48][49] Despite the initial enthusiasm of the U.S. Navy, the importance of the Antheil-Lamarr discovery was only acknowledged in the 1990s.[48] The creation of ​​the device designed by Lamarr and Antheil was not implemented until 1962, when it was used by the U.S. military in Cuba.[citation needed] Later it served as a basis for modern communication technology, such as COFDM used in wi-fi connections and CDMA transmission protocol for cellular telephones.[citation needed]

wtf? going to have to check those sources

The persistence of love; the time of love. If you love something - really love it - do you want to stop loving it? Aren't there ways - perfectly natural, non-neurotic ways - of just wanting more and more 60s bebop, or 70s funk, or 80s metal, or 90s jungle. And feeling that new forms aren't just unlovably different but actively destructive of the love object (because often of course, that is precisely the polemic charge new forms come loaded with). You could think of it as musicla monogamy - is it so deplorable?

Again, the pace of technological change, as with each shift the new reconfigured medium reconditions the message, creating new forms and makiung new fossils of the old forms. (There's an instinctive understanding of how the medium is the message in the way that people resent and dread upgrades of social media & its user interfaces, the stifling effect of having to re-adjust even to minute changes in how your communiques, whether status updates, tweets, DMs, emails, texts, posts, are shaped). Looking back through the last two centuries is to witness an unprecedented compression of technological paradigms, a pressure crushing cultures flat to destructively create space for thrilling new forms, while the newly-old, the survivors of the previous paradigm, stagger around like peculiar living fossils, dazed by their sudden world-historical irrelevance.

Alex Williams once wrote of culture running out like a natural resource, but the problem in reality is very different, its chronic, almost insupportable overabundance. As Reynolds discusses, what seems to define 2001-2010 technologically is rather underwhelming: a technology which has 'mastered' not matter but culture. Interstellar space remains unconquered, unless you mean you want some Coltrane on MP3 and you want to download it out of the cloud in the middle of nowhere. And meanwhile music history just keeps on accumulating and accreting, not just because of the passing time and increased levels of output (home recording online distribution) but the ongoing excavation of its every corner.

The optimist view on this is celebratory. More of everything. No excess is absurd. And it rejects any suggestion that this plenitude might lead to a flat plane, and any negative reflections on glut/clotted music. Partly this is to do with a very strong cultural reflex towards the genre-transcendent. Music-writers are prone to getting excited about certain kinds of juxtaposition or hybridization. I remember reading with something bordering on disbelief a writer rhapsodizing over a footwork track that sampled The Lion Sleeps Tonight because - what a thing to sample! the writer was raving. Except it has been sampled, years ago by Shut Up & Dance's Rum & Black on either ESQ or Slave [it was Slave]. See also writers getting excited about auteurs that break genre rules, crossing Genre X with Genre Y: because it feels like you're hearing something at once a little bit transgressive, a little but sublime in its exceeding of borders; to mix X with Y puts artist and listener in a 'meta' space and promises a kind of procreated newness. It allows the listener to hear the words (and declare at the same time), My Mind is So Open! Oh, the Interconnectedness of All Things! [NB I have certainly succumbed to this relfex myself in the past]

But genres depend on the negative. The whole grammar of genre depends at least (if not more) on what the genre isn't as what it is. And the more densely populated the cultural context, the more bristling with sub genres and subdivisions, the harder it becomes for things to *signify* on the same scale. And again, to insist on the exceptional, common-sense defying conditions of the present era, it's not a crisis so banal as the old panic about finite notes, meaning finite melodies and finite songs; its rather a question of semiotics and space: space to make your mark. Imagine a crude binary of prog - punk, then imagine punk happening in a late 70s which was already heavily populated with bands already mining the fine gradations between Topographic Oceans and Ramones.

I used to think of this abominably vast and persistent cultural store as like Swift's Struldbruggs in Gulliver, - his thought exercise in careful-what-you-wish-for addressing eternal life. The Struldbruggs are immortal, but not immortally youthful, and so end up doomed to decline into eternal senility. This cultural situation is like a Struldbrugg in full possession of their faculties, with perfect recall, never sleeping, ever more frantically twitching with nervous exhaustion as their synapses fire and fire and fire.

We move through time like bodies with the heads sewn on backwards: the future is, if not impenetrably dark then thickly fogged, filled with mirage-like images of our current path straying in different directions, forking, circling, eddying. The past by contrast is a sunny valley: surveyed and mapped by historians, archivists, scholars, we can return and wander through it, with a sense of solid moorings, fixed cultural geography, with the added excitement that you never know it completely, its terrain can suddenly and irrevocably change, while remaining recognizable. Plus it takes such effort to live in the future: it never quite bloody arrives.

Critical Beats

Hot off the presses of lived reality! Two week old thoughts on Critical Beats at Stratford Circus with Joe Muggs, Lisa Blanning, Simon Reynolds, and moderator Steve Goodman!

My question, which I didn't manage to ask - would have been about negativity in music. The panel discussed positivity/negativity in music-writing a lot, but I wanted to hear their thoughts on negativity in music.

Negativity in two senses, one being the destructive impulse to trash and render obsolete your forebears (classic example being punk vs prog, but also to be found in the Dance Continuum in its broadest sense, with grime's hoods & trainers turning out the lights on UKG's champage & smart shoes aesthetic, or with less of a scorched-earth animus, in hiphop/jungle passim, with the urge to outdo & supersede competitors... is it possible you just don't get moments of opposition/irruption as abrupt as punk because of how structurally & formally wedded dance music and (almost all) its subgenres are to continuity: they depend on the Mix, and this programmes in continuity (or Continuumosity (oh god) if you like)

The other kind of negativity I had in mind was that of formal absence: the way a genre is defined as much by what it's not as what it *is*. Take footwork - which came up repeatedly as an example of the New. This did come up via a different Q, as SR talked about its narrow formal range and the way in which its isolation, as a scene largely unto itself, ticking along under the radar of international appreciation networks for so long, had allowed it to blossom.

There was a question from the balcony approximately a paragraph in length which baffled many. I think it boiled down to this: there's a discussion regarding innovation in dance music which should acknowledge that it's coming from a particular group - a predominantly white middle-class group - and that this discourse should therefore be carefully scrutinized. *If* that was the question, it was a fair one: think of the tradition in the indie music press to valorize a certain kind of 'conscious' rapper for 'avoiding gangsta cliches' about 'drugs, guns and hoes'. You should check your privilege and then check it again just to make sure. But it felt as though the inflection of the original very long question was towards the idea that the blinkers of race/class had perhaps misidentified where 'innovation' lay, and I'm less convinced by that. I think those blinkers have their effects elsewhere. This issues also came to mind listening to Joe Muggs. It was great listening to someone so devoted to being a reporter: absorbing 100s of tracks a month, crunching through international scenes and trends, getting out in the field. But: although I wouldn't go so far as to say he's the dubstep Pangloss, it did feel as though JM's view left a fair bit out through a reliance on the utopian metaphor of the Melting Pot: the club as melting point (all races, classes, creeds etc) and music as melting point (chuck it all in, stir it round). Depending on your position you could say this evades or suppresses or simply passes over for others some fairly important discussions. Like the profiles of eg the American dubstep audience or the UK grime audience. Or more technically/formally, the fact that footwork only exists as this startling outcrop of ideas because it *doesn't* fold in as many genres as it possibly can, and that its hungry absorption (gentrification) by other scenes will inevitably alter it, normalize it, flatten it.

burning down the (glass)house: The Architecture of Failure

Just started reading The Architecture of Failure by Douglas Murphy and finding it fascinating so far. I won't attempt to paraphrase it all, I haven't even got to the bits about Derrida yet, but if you like the sound of reading about nineteenth-century structures of iron and glass, eg the Crystal Palace, as inchoate modernism with added meditative discursions on transience, this is the book for you. This passage in particular caught my eye:

of all cultural forms, architecture is the one that requires the largest amounts of capital to produce; not only the huge masses of material that must be assembled, but also the huge amounts of labour that go into the erection of buildings. If we (not unproblematically) think of architecture as an artform, then it is the art form that is still most directly tied to its patrons, with all the ideological problems that entails.

...as it reminds me of a theory I put forward about film, which suggested, pretty crudely, that as it required massive lumps of capital to make a film, film-making could reasonably be alleged to skew towards capital and serve its interests. (With the obvious caveat that there is also money to be made, or at least money in the possession of people willing to spend it, from attacking or threatening capitalism and the established order of things, whether from genuine principle or from a cynical desire to ventilate build-ups of radical pressure).



But it also struck me how thoroughly the spectacle of Die Hard depends on the destruction of a steel & glass C20 descendant of precisely the iron & glass forms discussed by DM. And that the destruction of these architectural great-grandchildren is quite a trope, almost an obsession, within 80s-90-00s action films: Terminator 2, the Transformer films... Is it just coincidence? just the case that in films that rehearse and glory in the destructive sublime, they are naturally going to destroy the urban environment closest to hand? is it that there's something visually captivating about the transformation of a smoothly geometric series of lucid panes into chaotic cloud-bursts, galaxies of dying twinkles? (This must come into it, the physical fragility of the iron & glass structure naturally inviting thoughts of its own potential for spectacular dissolution, and as a visitor to Kew Gardens I've often daydreamed of how its glasshouses could be used as the setting for a Bourne style shoot-out sequence) or practically speaking that blowing up a glass-house is cheaper, easier to fix, easier to rebuild? or a latent hostility to the modernist genealogy these buildings represent? I don't know: I nominate Douglas to research these burning questions and report back with relevant findings.

Retromania notes 3: the critique that disappears?

Thoughts prompted by Retromania's sheer quantitative scope. The first is that, arguably, the more examples of retro Reynolds marshals from the aesthetic width, geographical breadth and chronological depth of pop music, the more it begins to seem an inherently retro form: always and already nostalgic, from Chuck Berry's rehearsals of teenage lust, and the 'high school' genre as discussed by Nick Cohn in Awopbop onwards. In other words, it threatens to move beyond being persuasive and into a zone where the critique essentially disappears and you almost have to disavow pop music itself as a futuristic form except in a very small number of strictly exceptional cases.

There's a lot of truth in that model. One of the things that troubles me about it is the way it seems to acquiesce or feed into the strange complacency or faux wisdom of the twas-ever-thus brigade. People who, when challenged with the moribund state of genre X, insist everything moves in cycles, the critic must just be too old or out of touch to enjoy it, as if there is always a fixed and stable quotient of good/innovative music out there, like some kind of mathematical constant. Even though genres and forms do dissipate, dismantling themselves entropically, as the energy of their original algorithmic arc plays itself out completely. Even though pop music as we understand it simply did not exist in 1932, and we have no right to blindly assume it will continue to exist as we know it indefinitely. At almost every level the means to produce, distribute, obtain, and consume/absorb (and then discuss/dissect) art has been transformed in the last half century. This now is new, and we have to talk about why its music might not be (or if it is, then talk about how to articulate its newness, and why it should be that this new-newness requires explication and advocacy at all if it's so fresh and unprecedented).