This is the Beatnik Horror (1960)
8 hours ago
08 March 2012
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.
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8 comments:
Did you write this? It's great!
Thanks Alex. Yeah, I try to write all my own blogposts!
hang on - apart from the ones which are big block quotes from Graham Greene or Patricia Highsmith. (But I usually remember to cite the sources for those.... having said that the Greene ones weren't exactly exhaustively cited were they? so er, anyway...*changes subject*)
Ah right good man. Increasingly I just italicise or link to good stuff other people have written. You've been warned.
Speaking of gradual decline of the world in general, is it just me/my age, or has music actually now ground to a total standstill?
Sorry, that may not be a very intelligent question. I'm aware of all the Retromania arguments and such. It just hit me viscerally this morning that, not only had I not heard anything even faintly innovative in months, I haven't even heard anyone try to argue for a new development in, oh, at least a year.
Property enclosure, cuts, recession and repressive licensing laws killing nightlife, music education and live music? Seems to be the case in UK/US right now.
Aren't these the sorts of conditions supposed to give rise to something interesting?
there's the recession/oppressive politics = good music theory
music education; actual tuition is increasingly scarce in schools, but there's a bottomless pit for adolescent auto-didacts to delve into online
live music / nightlife... hard to say, maybe onlinelife has atomized scenes to the detriment of a cetain kind of interpersonal sparking off & refinement of ideas
I'm sure the unrelenting donward pressure on JSA, unemployment benefit of all kinds, as well as on student finances, whether HE fees coming in and going ever up, or EMA going... this stuff has a deadening impact for sure. less money means more work, less energy after work etc etc
it feels like at some point in recent past we hit, if not a singularity, then a point where the technological leaps got so close together they merged with a bang, like soundwaves compressing in a doppler effect, and maybe this is the sightly dazed & deaf aftermath... maybe we need another 5 or 10 years to hear this era properly at all. Maybe it'll all just be incremental jostling and adjustment for another few years until something wholly inconceivable comes along... Reculer pour mieux sauter.
það er brilliant. imho.
*i dont have much time and i tend to get wordy so i'm gonna bullet*
- singularity. see October 28, 2011 Underworlds 9 theory/calendar/system. I personally attest for personal revelations since.
- new music. DubStep, imho, though not quite refined nor universally accepted - is genre/style neutral in the sense of melodic structure - but de and re constructed vis-a-vis "bass wobble" that could almost be seen/felt as data transfer. man<>earth<>life<>creature<>man (ie)
- agree with image of pending future hologram ! an ongoing weaving of metaphysical what ifs.
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