The Death of the Media

The last few weeks there have been some - belated to say the least - discussions in Belgium about the quality of the media. People are grumpy about the quality of the restyled national radio, that has lately been oozing the kind of Fun! Fun! Fun! approach to the medium that people (I purposely do not include myself, because I have not been listening any radio now for at least ten years) find irritable. I do not need to listen to the radio to know that they are right (because, as a working person with a desk job I am obliged to at least unconsciously listen to the barrage of bullshit music that is streaming out of the office radio's).

Another thing was the constatation that the television news is spending more and more time on violence and crime, let's call it the belated Americanisation of the European media. Of course, again the critics are right.

These are both truisms, so I will not comment on them. What really bugged me, though, was the sheer poverty of the arguments with which the executives, editors and programmers defended their respective stances (about turning radio into 'a nice passing time for nice people' and showing more violence and reporting more about crime). As always, they were argumenting that 'the people want this' and that they 'are only reflecting what happens in society' and other unholy bullshit that was stale 30 years ago. They do not even bother to construct a sophism or two. No, they just stick to the old and proved untruths.

Who said that we want more fun on the radio? Who said that we want more crime reports? Nobody said that of course. Because most people just do not know what they want. They merely take what is there. The real reason of course is that the traditional media are losing more and more ground to new media like YouTube and the internet in general. So these marketeers* (i.e. people who know what YOU want), instead of producing the kind of quality that is lacking in these new media, resort to pitiful lies that are as empty and transparent as the head of Paris Hilton (another 'brand'?). You cannot possibly hate these people, you can only pity them. And that is just what I will do to my last second.

Just needed to get that out of my system.

Trivia Belgica

To be honest I do not in the least feel inclined to write a post about the so-called troubles in Belgium. Not only because it would require a post as long as a slim novel, but more because I am convinced that eventually the Belgian political caste will do what it does best, that is: compromise.

In case I turn out to be wrong I will have to move house to the French-speaking part of Belgium, because I am most certainly not going to live in what is one of the most rightist regions in Europe, by which I mean my beloved Flanders, also known as The Country Beneath The Church Tower. I also think people outside Belgium are making a lot of fuzz for nothing. If you are born and bred in this country, like myself, you will have seen and heard a lot worse than what is happening these last 100 days.

Another typical Belgian thing I just read somewhere: it would seem that Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian who shot Franz Ferdinand and consequently ignited the first world war, bought his gun, manufactured by Les Fabriques Nationales in Herstal, from a Belgian deserter who fled to Belgrade. Because guns are, beside chocolate, one of our finest achievements. If they are fighting a civil war anywhere on this godforsaken globe you can be sure there is an FN gun in play. The difference is: we do not use them to kill each other. For the time being that is.

Nazi France Fuck Off

It would seem that these days in France they have an institution that goes by the enlightened name of The Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. Am I the only one who thinks this rather crass?

Shit where you eat

Revealing, if not terrifying, post by Carl over at The Impostume. Interesting because I have seen this kind of political behavior already happening in Belgium and The Netherlands. The bottom-line is of course (and how this makes you sad!) that the formerly oppressed all too frequently join the ranks of the oppressors when they themselves are no longer oppressed. This way a situation becomes apparent in which something like 'being oppressed to the second degree' becomes reality. The Jamaican guy with whom Carl and his mate had a talk is most probably still being treated in a racist way fairly often. For some people he will always remain an Other. Now this Other reaches a mindset with which he, in turn, behaves in a racist way towards other Others.

Still, there should be no doubt that this kind of political behavior is entirely new. In the past immigrants migrated to what they perceived as a kind of Promised Land. They wanted jobs, they wanted to assimilate themselves culturally (naturally not in an absolute way, but relatively: one always retains at the very least a nucleus of the culture from which one springs). Now, we have a immigrant population who no longer view western culture as something to strive for (with, sadly, always one exception: when there is money to be made). Frequently they even view it as evil, something to reject and oppose.

And so you get the kind of situations like the one Carl describes, where those who used to be strangers treat others like undesirables. And then some people dare talk about globalisation and multiculture and all the good things those will bring us. Where, in fact, it would seem that for the greater part our (western) bad habits have been globalised.

Folie à la française

So it is Président Sarkozy. As if I care. As if policy makers today are anything more than commissaires du capitalisme. As if the world would have stopped turning if Mme Royal had been elected, a new French Revolution coming our way. Yeah, right!

Nevertheless those French lefties are a strange bunch. Libération could not wait a day to report that nasty boy Sarko spent his pre-presidential retreat on the yacht of a business friend (the scandal of it!). So what? Do presidents have to spend their retreat in a cave or something? Furthermore the newspaper is already comparing Sarkozy to mobster Berlusconi. Bottom-line: this guy must be the Antichrist in person.

Next, two lady writers report in a suspiciously timely new book that Royal and her husband-not-husband François Hollande did have a quarrel during the presidential campaign. This quarrel would then have subverted her abilities to campaign. Yeah, right! As if the French are not and have not always been one of the most rightist countries in Europe, where, as everywhere else, the villagers and farmers always vote for the rightist candidate.

And all the while extreme-left sympathizers are torching cars and destroying whatever comes their protesting ways because they suspect Sarkozy is the new Hitler.

Will someone please put some tranquilizers in the French drinking water and tell these people to get a grip.

"Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job."

Don DeLillo

La Tristesse Postmoderne

A few weeks ago I finshed DeLillo's White Noise and now I have started reading Underworld and what strikes me about both books is that, despite the subtle humor that pervades them, the strongest undercurrents are quite different from the initial outlook. It is the aching distress and deep sadness that typifies postmodern man.

The sentence that keeps on returning again and again in White Noise is the existential "What does it mean". DeLillo's protagonists seem to be wandering a theme park where fun, fun, fun is the ultimate goal. But in the end (and sometimes that 'end' comes all to quickly) they always realize that fun, fun, fun only conceals the ever continuing search for a meaning that eludes them. They are not even sure (and we with them) that there is an ultimate meaning. To me they are erring souls, forever striving forward while all the way they do not know if there is something to be reached in the end. Irony seems to be the only way out when truth has been lost.

It makes a joyful reading of these books very difficult. Sure, you laugh a lot, but what, in the end, are you laughing with? There is no salvation, no real conclusion. Maybe Lyotard was right after all. There is no longer any belief in meta-narratives. But what has been constructed in their place leaves all to the imagination and painstakingly avoids any meaning whatsoever (cfr. David Lynch's latest films: sure, they are imaginative and alienating to an absurd maximum, but what does it all mean in the end?)

So we all flee into the detailed and the ultra-particular while never seeing (or should that be: unconsciously a-void-ing) the bigger picture that emerges. That is, total despair and the need to fill in the void regardless of what is being filled up and what we fill it up with. We have everything, but no direction. And the real danger is that when desperately looking for a direction, you choose the wrong one and end up doing very stupid things. You see, for postmodern man, lacking meta-narratives, it just is not necessary any longer to do the right thing. Frequently it seems already enough to do something.

It leads me to think that even the renewed fanatism of muslims as well as christian fundamentalists is no more than a cosmetic affair. After having relinquished religion and having chosen uncritically for wild capitalism, they find out that the chosen path leads to nowhere. But the return to faith is a case of self-deception at its worst. Because in the end they never entirely refute the principles of capitalism. In its place comes an ugly hybrid that combines everything that was wrong about both systems in the first place. So the so-called moral renewal becomes in the end no more than a moral fundament for laissez-faire capitalism. "New", all too often, is just a remodelling of the old forms.

If there were one word with which you would have to sum up our current civilization, it would be unsurprised.

Criticial Conservatism

Theo is complaining about the continuing unacceptance of electronic dance music by mainstream journalism. He is right, but as always there is a rather simple explanation. You see, electronic dance music is highly abstract music. As such it mirrors the ever increasing abstraction of our environment (which is of course in turn - as always - closely related to capitalism's ever forward marching stride). And most people just do not want to be reminded of that when they are 'enjoying' music (as I have stated many times before the music that most people are subjected to from daily radio transmissions is "music for people who do not like music"). They would rather rely on the eternal formulae of pop music with its recognizable lyrics about so-called everyday life.

It is the by now dreary postmodern story of people not wanting to accept the society they have created themselves. So when it comes to entertainment they instinctively shy away from the mechanical and cold aspects of electronic dance music, not realising that nostalgia always leads to sameness and ultimately fascism (that last one I have nicked from DeLillo's profetic White Noise I think, but I am convinced it is true nonetheless).

Worse is that those who call themselves underground journalists also continue to gobble up the structural hypes that are forced upon them by record companies and big broadcasting companies. You just have to casually read two or three so-called independent magazines to realize that week after week, month after month they, too, fill up their columns with the same artists and currents. The critique may be different but the names are all exactly the same. That way a lot of really good music is hardly visible and gets ghettoised toward niches and fragmented interest groups.

There may be, as Theo remarked, a market for niche-music and indeed there is. But the fact that they will forever remain niches also entails that the margin for true innovation continues to grow smaller and smaller.

But then again, true innovation does not let itself be stopped off by the narrowness of its manoeuvring space. It thrives on exactly that. So, in the end, there is always hope.

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Addendum: I am wondering though why Theo thinks it is that much different in other countries than Holland. I think this has ultimately more to do with the wider public they are reaching, because most of the magazines he is - I think - talking about are written in English. Relatively speaking I am guessing the difference will not be all that great.

More Thoughts on the Revolution

Is art still able to change society? Can art bring on a revolution? Is art useful against capitalism?"

I have been pondering this question some more, for it is indeed an important one, and I had to conclude that in the end there is not that much revolutionary about art as such at all. Or, let me put it another way, revolution in the arts is appreciated at a much slower rate. When art in the past was truly revolutionary it was not labeled revolutionary at all. When Duchamp presented his famous urinoir as a work of art, it was at first thought of as completely ridiculous, a statement of anti-art. Little did the intended audience know that many years into the future this way of presenting art would become a fixture of contemporary art, even of culture in a broader sense (reality becoming entertainment). It is even doubtful that Duchamp himself thought that far ahead.

In art, as in most cultural and social matters, the revolutionary aspects of the event are most likely to be felt long afterwards, while a revolution in the sense that it is mostly thought (like the American independence, the French Revolution, Khomeiny taking over in Iran, that is, a political revolution) is almost instantaneous, a moment in time, an event.

So, in that sense art can never be truly revolutionary. It can only be revolutionary by subverting the common codes. Then after all, Lynch's movies could be called revolutionary. But it remains to be seen whether his way of making movies will have a lasting influence on cinema in general. Maybe Lost Highway or Eraserhead will be considered revolutionary in 50 years, but the point is that we can hardly judge that fact hodie et nunc. And even then it remains a question of knowledge and interpretation. But, and this is the imminent danger, a slower rate of influence can also result in the fact that by the time you start to influence you will be forgotten.

I remember that a former flatmate of mine had watched Citizen Kane, which is in all respects a truly revolutionary film compared to the movies of that era, and that she did not in the least appreciated those aspects that make it a forward-thinking and influential movie (and she was a film buff!). So many generations of habit have gone over those innovations that they are no longer recognized as such and the possiblity for subversion has gradually been erased. It is even more likely that is has been appropriated by the system and turned into a harmless everyday gimmick. As such David Lynch's now famous and idiosyncratic dreamy interludes (as in Twin Peaks and Mullholand Drive) may in the future become an integral part of pop video technique. A long shot maybe? Eisenstein made a revolutionary tool out of D.W. Griffith's editing techniques. Hitchcock grabbed them and made them a staple of shock horror. Now people may remember Hitchcock's Psycho, but who, apart from the most obsessed film students remembers Birth of a Nation or Battleship Potemkin?

Even worse is what happened to Brecht's famous Verfremdungseffekt. As Kinofist's Owen showed in his brilliant piece the powers that be quickly smothered it, because they saw its revolutionary potential. Godard, who was one of the few successful directors who tried to ressurrect it has been indeed very influential, but even then you will see that his inventions have been turned into commercial Hollywood fodder. And I honestly do not think that one episode of Buffy will remedy that situation.

Then there is another factor playing. As I have remarked a few posts below it is in this age and time extremely difficult to still be influential at all because these days almost every movement is condemned to be limited socially, culturally and even geographically. This coincides with society's extreme individualism where it is no longer needed to belong to a large group to construct yourself an identity. These days an identity does not even have to be group-related.

If in former days, let us say the fifties, you were a rocker, you belonged to a rather large group that probably shared a lot of social and cultural characteristics. These days being a rocker can imply you liking punk rock, indie rock, post-rock, hardrock, black metal, noiserock and what do I know. And it is very doubtful that people who like indie rock feel an affinty with people who like black metal. But - and this is the important fact - at the same time it could very well be that those two people, the one liking indie rock and the one liking black metal, do indeed feel an affinity on a cultural and social level. Nothing is sure anymore. That same fact, by the way, accounts for the endlessly shifting and changing ways perceived groups are targeted by advertising.

I mean, just look up a random Last FM page and check out the so-called 'neighbours', that is, the people who supposedly have 'the same taste as you'. Even within the group of neighbours the differences are extreme and even greater than the similarities. Even if I compare my own musical taste with the people consider to be musically like-minded, there can be a huge gap in listening habits.

So it is not at all unthinkable that even if a work of art were truly revolutionary, that the revolution will pass by the majority of the public. The niches are so small, the groups so fragmented, the stimuli so overpoweringly numerous that these days you are bound to make a choice. And maybe in making your choice you will miss that one true revolution happening.

And if you continue this reasoning to its conclusion it is, on the other hand, equally possible that in 50 years someone will discover a particular artist and decide that, in retrospect, (s)he was incredibly revolutionary. Need I add that this future revolutionary artist may just as well be an artist that is now considered by the cognoscenti to be marginally artistic, even rightout shite?

But is it not equally possible that by that time we will have succombed under the myriad of new stimuli and have long forgotten about what happened 50 years ago? Some may have proclaimed the end of history but that seems to carry the implication with it that people start forgetting about recent history much quicker. Today, what happened 10 years ago might, because of the incredible amount of information that is fired at us at a daily basis, just as well have happened 30 years ago. And influence, let alone subversion, is all very well, but you better hope that by that time you will not find yourself buried under the endlessly exponential growth of information that will have passed by since.

And there we go again

Today learned that half of the pupils in secondary school in Belgium no longer can perform mental arithmetics. Further on in the day I found out that when entering university these days people have to be subjected to extra lessons because they simply do need meet the intended standards to start university courses. And, still on the same footing, I learned a few weeks ago that there are hardly any future medievalists who understand Latin, which is a bit of a problem if you consider that Latin was the lingua franca of the Middle Ages. Add to this the already mentioned one in six Flemish people who cannot read, write or perform a simple mathematical calculation and you know there is something horribly rotten in the state of today's scholar system.

The problem is of course that people these days confound knowledge with information. They think that when they have been informed about something (and, let us be honest: who is not informed in this age of information overload?) that they have knowledge about it. But that would imply that the information delivered is also correct (in a scientific way, if you will) and complete.