Unaccompanied Music

What is to be said in the case of a re-recorded song, reinterpreted by the same artist – at a much later date?  I am thinking of Randy Newman’s Songbook I for example.

The Jurisdiction of Modern Physics

Today’s Important Thought: “We are still under the jurisdiction of the physics that ruled the dinosaurs.”  (Fred Flintstone)

Postmodern Light Switches

A postmodern light switch, typically a ‘rocker’ switch, is a light switch that doesn’t have a specific click for off and on; instead the switch position is unreadable or ambiguous.  Even the act of looking at the switch yields no information.  On or off? – woopsy woops.  Suppose in the dark I want to turn the light on.  I press it but nothing happens.  Mm, maybe it’s broken?  I press it using the other half but still nothing.  Perhaps there is a two second delay; but in my impatience I have already opposite pressed again and now remain doubly uncertain – the situation continues and so perhaps it is broken?  Perhaps I didn’t wait long enough?  But which way didn’t I wait long enough, was it the first time when I pressed it up; or was it in fact the second, the time when I pressed it down without waiting sufficiently for the system to connect with itself?  After about five attempts at this, finally the light is on – on but I remain uncertain as to which action effected this result.  Muttering frustratedly to myself I wander off into the room and leave it all be.  Clearly, what we have is a light switch for which the function of turning the light off and on is too simple.  All that is clear is that things are not obvious; there is no old-world bi-polar light and dark diffusion; where on is on. 

Trainers (2)

One can see the popularity of wearing trainers as part of the common impulse, which we share in through a kind of cultural indavertence, and which can be seen with other things too, for getting back in touch with our instincts.  Since we seem to be ‘out of touch’ with the body ways are sought of reaffirming its importance but (and here is the difficulty) within a context that is not very real, which is dominated by televisual and magazine images and corporate iconography: identity that is quintessentially disembodied being its embodiment. 

The Weather

“nobody ever rioted for austerity”  [George Monbiot, Heat.]

But have nots have rioted against haves (at world political summits) so ostensibly that is their object.

Global warming is the ultimate postmodernist thing.

It is not – seemingly – a thing but a dilemma: an – ‘is it or isn’t it a thing?’ – thing.  “It is a thing” – “But no it’s ectoplasm yet.”

It has become the play-thing of advertising (see Monbiot’s chapter ‘The Denial Industry’).  Adverts dictate the ‘reality’.

There is no solution.  I once read an interview with William Boroughs in which he asserted that action was useless in the attempt to change any of this.  That politics is like the weather.  That the decline of the Roman Empire couldn’t be avoided.  Just as the decline of the American Empire cannot be.  One way or another it is going to happen.  Like the weather.  One way or another it is going to come about – true enough, I admit sadly; I would say because of our homelessness and absolute incapacity to admit this. 

The Concept of Place

Auge’s Non-Places argues that the concept of place has ceased to have a context identifiable with the place itself.

Out of South London, under the river via the Blackwall Tunnel up through the Lea Valley soon bowling through the maze of sunless flyovers and underpasses towards the M11, voyaging, the concrete triple lanes, the slab-sided walls patterned to a sense of movement but creating stasis – everything is the same.  Litter covers the verges, the hedges, and trees, flutters on the meagre grass and the branches.  In all directions lie industrial parks, giant Fitness First centres, Multiplexes, Halfords, Comet.   Here is a landscape that has ceased to be a place.  It has become a brute interlude to elsewhere. 

What it is it isn’t

Call it the ”postmodern moment.”  Is it true to say that it is to the instrument and not the thing in itself or the end in itself that the expression now most applies: It isn’t what it is -? 

That is, to what used once to be art’s territory, almost exclusively.  Once, only art said this.  Now (we might say) human reality is beginning to utter it back, unprompted.

Two immediate examples …

1. An Amnesty Interntional flyer with the Guardian carries the instruction: “Throw away this flier.”

2. On the back of the Guardian, a Nigel Slater ad.  He is standing with a knife and carving a roast.  That’s all.  Couldn’t be more direct, factual, straightforward: it is an ad for the service he is providing.  Except that closer inspection shows that this professional act of carving belongs to a woman; as if they are his, a woman’s arms are reaching inside Slater’s almost invisible black-sleeves, so that, yes, it’s clear that he is not actually doing what he is ‘doing’. 

In The Village

* The postmodern object is an object that isn’t one.

* Like an advert.

* A story that isn’t a story tells us a ’story’. 

* “You are Number Six” – like the rest of us: he is not a person but an imposter among his fellow imposters.

 * “It does exactly what it says on the tin.” – It does exactly what it says in the advert.

* The advert says exactly what it doesn’t say. 

* Exactly what it doesn’t say it can’t tell.

The Prisoner

Maybe it is possible to describe the essence of an advert  … In so far as it is about using the viewer rather than finding imagination, so that the viewer becomes its instrument; or in so far as it is a kind of video tool for anaesthetising a mass audience, for purposes of merely occupying their time in a way useful to it rather than you, tv (advertising) is a kind of divorce.  It presents life as of a moment other than the one that is actually being occupied; just as a person might treat one thus.  You are not in their world; or you have ceased to be in their world.  It amounts to the same thing.  You are persona non grata; a person not in the world that is; in a place that isn’t because actuality has to be elsewhere.  One of the things that struck me about The Prisoner when quite by accident I happened on it, when it first came out, was that it incorporated the event of viewing television into its plot and made it a questionable and also a mysterious act.  The other resonance was the boundless mockery the series made of the concept of normality, rendering the ‘real’ as actually merely a kind of manipulative tool for enforcing passivity.  As a child I found all this subversively reassuring in the face of endless adverts and their contextless, storyless ’scenes’.

Disaffection Chanel 1

Motherless, Fatherless

The object of one’s affection, through whom one’s world – effectively the world – was sustained, is gone; he or she has been revealed to be an instrument of other forces, foreign to all affection.  Would it be absurd to look at tv in this way?  Specifically, for children.  Spiritually, a child is a fully formed human being.  A child is a quick study.  As much as to anything and everything this ability in the child applies to its perception of tv and the picture of the world that comes through it and the effect that this picture has on the ideas and feelings of the child regarding sense.  An advert for a toy requires, through the child’s liking for the toy, that it participate in an act of commerce, money, debt and exchange.  It knows on some level that it is being used.  That these tv adverts are about the use of the viewer more than – say – merely providing information about availability.  It divorces the child from its innocence: teaches it that this is how things are got, through manipulation, cajoling and pestering: all the things that an advert does.  An early cynicism is thus created.  Disillusion rapidly sets in about the reality of a world other than this place of adverts (since here is everything!) – especially if the things advertised remain persistently out of reach.  “The world is not interested in you; on the contrary, it is only interested in what it can get out of you.”  This is the message that’s put across.  Affection finds itself pushed into the margins, a secondary consideration at best.  Affection is not good enough.  It becomes grubby.  You find yourself willing to search it out in the cold interstices between demands, a furtive, ashamed, inadequate shadow of the first illusion, given that here nothing works as an end in itself.  Nothing is reasonable!  Everything is an affront!  An outrage!  A steal!  “Not what I was looking for.”

Perhaps it’s like that line from David Thomas.  He tears everything out of his house in a rage.  Leaving only the four bare walls standing empty.  What is it that remains?  What is it that remains when nothing remains?  “I searched around for something else to tear out … I reached – deep.”  The world wont go.  You stare at the tv and the place that’s real remains.  You can’t divorce that place.  It is always going to be there.  So what is there to be divorced?  What remains when one can’t divorce that thing that makes one crawl all over the ceiling – ?  Can a divorce from the self be instituted – ?