Full disclosure: All the other contributors to this blog are cool guys but I'm the sole law student nerd. Most of my days are spent in quiet contemplation of property law and the like. My only creative outlet is my musical taste and I take my library listening very seriously. Most days I'm the guy in the stacks rocking out to Rumours and making Mick Fleetwood faces while reading about substantive due process.
Today was different. After reading SFJ's New Yorker blog, I decided that today was the day that I would try some "lazer bass". After all, I had specifically brought my coin-filled Mason jar from home so I could visit the Coinstar machine at Food Emporium and get some cash together for tuna sandwiches for the week. It was good time for a long and intense listening experience. I downloaded Megasoid's Tank Thong Mix with somewhat limited expectations and headed into Midtown at a brisk pace. Megasoid is the Canadian duo of Speakerbruiser (formerly Sixtoo) and Hadji Bakara from Wolf Parade. It didn't exactly seem like the recipe for rap greatness (all respect to Maestro Fresh Wes and Main Source but Canada doesn't have the best track record in that particular field). But lo and behold, my ears were assaulted by, um, lazer bass. Basically it's midtempo hip hop beats and acid house-styled 303 bass squelches. During the hour long tape, each of the marvelous bass beats is matched with a classic rap a cappella (e.g. Masta Ace's Born to Roll, Clipse's Mr. Me Too, Blahzay Blahzay's Danger). The music was surprisingly suited to Midtown powerwalking (kind of like how My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sounds great during that Charlie Sheen stalking scene in Wall Street). In the end I redeemed my change for $75.03 and damn near blew out my earphones.
Now I'm back in the library with the bass still bouncing around my head, debating which is the better Fleetwood Mac-related project--Buckingham/Nicks or Christine Perfect.
Following the enormous financial success of “Easy Rider”, Peter Fonda was given full creative control with his directorial debut, “The Hired Hand”. Starring Fonda, Verna Bloom, and the ever-grizzled Warren Oates, the film rested on the dusty shelves of unsung classics for a few decades until Sundance released a DVD version a few years ago. The soundtrack, composed by 60’s folk musician, session guitarist, and one-time member of Dylan’s cortege (he is thought to be THE Mr. Tambourine Man) Bruce Langhorne, is sublime.
The album drifts along like a lethargic river-ride towards a dusty horizon that you’ll never return from. Spare, haunting, and elegant…
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.
Intro: The Wire, episode 59 Pylon – Danger Ebony Bones – We Know All About You Liquid Liquid – Optimo (JD Twitch Edit) The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Mix) Ghosttown DJ’s – My Boo Kano – I’m Ready Paradise – In Love With You The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path (Ewan Pearson Extended Vocal) David Bowie - TVC15 Dondolo – Dragon (Shit Robot Remix) Montell Jordan – Get It On Tonite Gui Boratto – Like You (Supermayer Mix) Supermax – Love Machine Love & Rockets – So Alive Playgroup – Number One Lindstrom – Another Station (Todd Terje Mix) Grinderman – Honey Bee
The Borgata hotel, Atlantic City, NJ
Why f*ck a re-up? Don't we like re-ups, because that's where the goods come from? Aren't re-ups necessary for life? If we diss the re-up, do we still get to listen to Clipse? In episode 59, The Wire's police officials break out from simply catching drug dealers conducting re-ups. Had they remained in the re-up, it would have been like a grey, existential french drama. Re-up after re-up, with no end in sight.
On Friday night at the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City (AC), after having driven down with several close friends of mine for a long night of bro-ing down, I personally had to say f/ck a re-up, and I was all the better for it. Let me say here that if you are to visit the lovely Borgata hotel, and you want to know who there is not on your side, his name is Joe Vanderslice, the manager of crowd control. Mr. Vanderslice, a stocky, stoic man, refused, even after an extended well-argued and even-tempered plea from me, to admit my passport (issued to me abroad, at the US Embassy in Prague) as a valid form of ID, thus allowing me to drink alcohol and to gamble on the premises. While I respect the relatively unpleasant and joyless labor of maintaining order at a busy New Jersey casino, and the attendant lack of human sympathy that I imagine is an invaluable tool in such a career, I remain convinced that I suffered an injustice as a result of Vanderslice's painfully limited knowledge concerning legitimate forms of government-issued identification.
In a casino, while gambling, one's drinks are re-upped periodically gratis by the house. Denied the re-up, I went for re-supply: sympathetic to my situation, my friends agreed to retreat to our hotel room, where room service was entreated to produce a bottle of Absolut, the contents of which were then enjoyed with gusto, the remainder going into a clear plastic water bottle I had procured earlier from an in-hotel Starbucks. I treasured the fact that I would be the only one that night who could get in trouble for drinking, high-school style.
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On scanning the tracklist, the attentive reader will notice that several of the pieces do not make their debut appearances here, but have in fact been utilized in at least one, perhaps more than one, previous mix. It's possible that the reader will greet this observation with a twinge of disappointment. Why this persistent attention to these particular songs? Should today we not look forward, are we not, as it is said, in an era that craves and deserves change?
There is a kind of change associated with upheaval, radical disjunction, and the jolts of sudden difference. And then there is the change of modular repetition, of unfolding, of infinite permutation. The former is what is hungered for by an appetite trained by the rhythms and intensities of industrialized entertainment. In this context, technology is used to deliver the promise of the first change, while a deeper potential lies in its capacity for exploring the second.
The most intense exploration of this capacity in sound is in electronic dance music, and in language, the French postwar nouveau roman, exemplified by the repetitive narrative techniques of Alain Robbe-Grillet (who passed away less than a week ago) and others.
What R-G shares with techno is the engagement with modular repetition as a phenomenological lens on the world. A mental object, be it a condensed literary scene or a four-bar loop, is held, bound, suspended, rotated, its possibilities and potentials unfolded and ignited, again and again, without progress, without tragic arc, without end.
This world is marked everywhere by the permanent tension between possibility and determination. Each object or event carries in itself more possibilities than can ever be realized, all of which make equal claim to the right to be manifested. Modular repetition stages the interruption of the process of determination, holding the object up the light of potentiality and engaging in infinite inspection.
One of the benefits of a blog is that its disposable character, its off-handedness and comparative instantaneity give it a workbench-like atmosphere. The reader is not a tourist in a museum of finished masterpieces, but a casual visitor to a craftsman's studio during work hours. Hence the reworking, the investigations of alternate drafts, discarded revisions, and the compulsive return to old favorites.
final episode 60 of The Wire now available from HBO On Demand. As if you're not so deep in it right now.
"when soldiers spoil your sleep / and writers haunt your dreams / don't strain to hear the screams / when the lights go out.....pain was all you knew / but I think you're coming through /like applause inside a zoo / when a lion gets out...when shadows take your hand / and mist is on the land / hold on to your mind / til the Christ comes back.."
From Bill Fay's concept album about the end times, his second LP from 1971
It's worth noting the opposing theological dimensions of Bill Fay and Nick Cave. Fay's song is eschatological, that is, it waits for the end of the world, the return of the Christ. The shape of Western Christian understanding of history is that life on earth happens in an interlude time, between the birth of Christ and his return. It's bracketed, bookended. Additionally, when Fay talks about 'holding on to your mind' until the return of the Christ, he's interpolating a key theological theme with regards to Christian eschatology, namely the role of what in Greek is called the kat-echon, the Restrainer, a figure who makes a brief but enigmatic appearance in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. Here, the apostle Paul says:
"Let no one deceive you in any way; for [the day of the Lord] will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that wehn I was still wtih you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming." (2:3-8)
What's remarkable about Paul's formulation of the Restrainer is that while he's a figure of protection and defense, his power is finite, he's only supposed to keep the 'lawless one' at bay until the right time, until the time of the Christ coming back. Jacob Taubes makes an important observation about the kat-echon, namely that it's the only force that can provide room for both eschatology and human freedom. If there isn't a terrestrial force keeping the end of the world from happening until the 'right time', if there's just an apocalypse that's going to just suddenly take place at any moment, it's hard to get up in the morning.
In other words, the kat-echon is an important mediator between the terrestrial and heavenly realms, because it addresses the question of, why is there a terrestrial realm at all? if the divine sphere is perfect, omniscient, etc., why is there a finite, fucked up world below? The only properly philosophical answer, which German Idealism with Hoelderlin, Hegel, Schelling begins to formulate as a modern parallel to Kabbalah's image of God as a broken vessel, is that God is ailing, weak, in trouble, and needs us to keep him alive, just as he needs the help of the Restrainer from keeping the apocalypse from happening until the right time.
Most of the time in political theory, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, the Restrainer is understood to be the Leviathan, or the sovereign, some unifying and grand political force. What we want to add here is that from a critical point of view, the Restrainer is Bill Fay. Keeping the lawless one at bay is the artist's job, because the work of art is a instance of self-legislation, of auto-nomy/nomos. The madness described in "Til the Christ Comes Back" is kept at bay by the work of art, which doesn't overcome or destroy this lawlessness but grants it a law, a nomos, by aesthetically figuring it.
Cave's story, centered around the pronouncement that Jesus will not return, is about an absence of eschatology. The two modern lovers move to a cozy house and forget the demonic annunciation. The scope of their lives begins to occlude or obscure the knowledge that if Jesus isn't coming back, the world can no longer be understood in terms of an expected final judgment. Cave's story figures an important problem of secular life: with the loss of transcendent ritual, there is no force to keep in place the knowledge of this loss. The circular time of ritual keeps the conduit between earth and heaven open. Without this circular time, there is nothing to mark the dreadful loss of this conduit, so this loss itself is lost, and the misty greyness of earthly life continues to perpetuate itself without salvation.
