The Beast is Back

216. So now we're encouraged to think of the world of the 1970s as glittery, but with the occasional off-colour joke, whereas in fact it was a world where the threat of violence seemed almost omnipresent. We might like to imagine that we've made progress, although never forget, this was the decade of petrol shortages and power-cuts. If the people of 2007 lost the use of their televisions, broadband connections and mobile 'phone rechargers for just a single evening, or were told that they'd have to leave their cars at home for the next week or so, then I'm fairly sure the riots would make Bloody Sunday look clean by comparison. Consumerism makes us less volatile, but only as long as it's there and it's working properly. Today, people tend to go berserk if the video goes wrong for any reason. So imagine what would happen if everything blacked out simultaneously, the way it often did, thirty years ago.

I have spend the last two evenings plowing through the - no less than - 243 snippets over at Beasthouse (indeed, my social life is non-existent; only when I choose to, of course) and I will continue to spread the word about this guy. If you have to be depressed and angst-ridden to write up things like this, I would like to be depressed and angst-ridden.

OK, that's stretching the point a little, I suppose (were it only for the fact that half of the time I actually am depressed and angst-ridden, though that is still a better average than most people in the Western world can claim), but this is by far my favourite blog of 2007. Culture-at-large, linguistics, psychology, politics, society and even health care are discussed and thoroughly dissected and... Deleuze, Lacan and Derrida are not referenced, not even cursorily. Ah! Those were the days...

It would almost re-point you to the all too often forgotten fact that funny and to-the-point should be near identitical. Or make that: it should be no crime to be funny and to the point at the same time. Which of course is mostly the case (I won't even add 'these days' to that last sentence, because I suspect from experience with pre-80ies fun-ness, that it used to be even worse).

And, more importantly, you might learn something. For example, did you know who Sax Rohmer was? Bet you didn't. Not that it does matter in the least. But still...

Have a Laugh

This guy is the single most funny writer in the blogosphere. He is also the writer of quite a few Doctor Who books, always a plus at the Fireplace. Because, make no fookin' mistake, Doctor Who is the epitome of sci-fi cool.

Nonetheless he also can put up a mean truth, too, as proven by sentences like:

"As a nation which only came into existence through the slavery of the blacks and the extermination of the locals, the US is the only country in the Western world that was founded on evil, and not only remains unrepentant but likes to turn its crimes into a kind of mythology."

or

"No country other than the US would spawn a writer like John Grisham, because no country other than the US would be daft enough to believe that the modern legal profession is really as manly and heroic as wrestling bears."

Suck on that, Jesuslanders!

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Afterthought: If those Americans are really that stupid, while at the same time ruling the world, then how stupid is the rest of the world? Something to think about, hey?

Antigrammatic

Do not miss the blogobrawl of all blogobrawls, in which a lot of people prove a point while arguing against it.

Neu und Besser

Frankly I do not know why I have taken so long to realize that to continue this blog as a musical critique would have been the death of it. Woebot is having quite a laugh with Paul Morley's piece in the Observer on Sunday, but is Morley not right? So many bloggers come totally unprepared, without the merest hint of any maturity into the world of online journalism that they vent one inanity after another into the blogosphere." As long as it's new, as long as it flashes in 40 million different colours", as Johnny puts it in Naked. The birth and death of the same thing are proclaimed in a few weeks time. Yeah, I guess you could call that the end of history.

I too was at first totally fascinated by all those people in the blogosphere who toss around references to Deleuze, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and whoever is the (wo)man of the day. It is why I decided sometime last year to finally start reading all those referenced authors and philosophers, so that at least I would be able to understand the difference between a K-punk and his many imitators.

More importantly, of course, it was to find out where I really stood amid all those different points of view. I have not really made a definite choice yet, I even suppose I never will. I could never fully adopt a Lacanian take (as Dejan does), because history has taught me that there are many different truths (cfr. Dejan and Zizek) and that it is best not to take a fixed point of view.

This could be perceived as ideological cowardness, but, frankly, are we not way past that? Most contemporary thinkers - sometimes I think everyone after Heidegger - just deal in hermeneutics and refuse to offer a fixed point of view. Rightly so? I am in doubt.

One side of the story tells me that by focusing solely on hermeneutics and declaring the end of all great stories and concepts thinkers have opened up a Box of Pandora of intellectual nonsense that gets employed by the intellectually less gifted (by that I do not mean people with a low IQ or such stuff, but writers who have not taken the time to consider which tools they should use and, even more importantly, have not taken the time to absorb the lessons these tools offer them) to show how clever they are by mentioning such or such 'big name'.

The other part shows that almost no-one any longer dares to do anything other than hermeneutics, i.e. just offering tools and methodology to analyse post-modern problems.

This mere hermeneutic approach, I suspect, will only bring up more post-modern problems, a sort of post-to-the-power-x-modernism, while all the while the question should be how we are going to escape from post-modernism into something new that is truly worthwhile.

The link between this hermeneutics-for-philosophy and the sorry state of blogging may be a thin one, but I think there are at least some parallels. Because in the blogosphere everyone can at least pretend that he is a specialist in his given field. You only have to look at the by now very old and very sad mentionings of "the eighties" in relation to today's musical scene.

It is a bit of a shame that James Murphy does not really live up to his own point by blatantly ripping the 80ies himself, but he sure had a point with his "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties". Damn! With The Klaxons we even have our first case of unremembered nostalgia for the unremembered nineties. At the present rate of dilution of thought next year we will surely experience the first symptoms of borrowed nostalgia for the remembered noneties.

It is why I felt a bit uneasy at the lengthy column of text dedicated to new rave (which as a "style" is completely devoid of any meaning) by the always so sharp Philip Sherburne. K-punk dismissed the phenomenon and its presumed attributes in a short post and very rightly so. It is a sorry state of affairs when journalists and writers have to dedicate a piece to utter nothingness, just because their editor wants his magazine to be in tow to the latest fad on Myspace or other extended nitwitworks.

I will never forget the mail I got from my editor at the end of 2006 in which he stated that our predictive article on the next big musical things in 2007 might as well contain absolute off-the-map bullshit, because no-one would remember it at the end of the same year. He was right of course, but does that make me feel good? I mean, how much difference is there between such a text and one that is puked out by the infamous post-modern lingo generator that someone put on the net a few years ago?

All these analyses are nonetheless offered up as inventive, original and learned news items, the newer and the less thought-over the better. And, of course, real journalism has been infected by this development along the way. If then someone, like Morley, admittedly someone from the old school, dares attempt to bring the phenomenon back to its real dimensions, i.e. as a mere avalanche of shit clogging up your brains, eyes and ears, he is all too readily dismissed as an old fart. Instead such remarks should lead to a deserved mea culpa and some reflection.

Nonetheless, since I have a positive attitude and am - hopefully for some time longer - still hopeful, I expect that one day out of this sea of muck may arise a blogosphere that truly lives up to its promises, a sort of direct democracy that is really worthy of its name. So we have a K-punk, we have a Cultural Parody Center, we have a Steven Shaviro, but it is not nearly enough to posit a true renaissance of thought. Time to get our hands and minds dirty.

Pluggin'

I'm not too big on plugging other blogs, even less when I am detecting Lacanian dynamics (although that may be a little prejudice based on ol' Jacques' methodology). But it is an undeniable fact that people like K-Punk and Dejan are infinitely more interesting than your average blogger, being more directed at ideas and real critique instead of offering the usual bloated 'I like this' or 'I think that'. So I'd like to signal the latter's Cultural Parody Center for all your critical cultural needs. The writing is sharp as a knife, it's totally irreverent of whichever reputation and the scope is definitely multi-dimensional, ranging from Madonna and porn (or is that the same?) to the Efteling and Zizek. And that is how I like it.