Audial Interlude

As far as reliably good mixes go, Pontone ceased activity about 18 months ago. I've yet to find a comparable site, and have had neither the time nor the means to make and post my one a mix of my own.

But here's a good substitute: The latest broadcast from Mount Maxwell Radio, based someplace on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. A variety of electronic music both recent and vintage, some ambient "noise," field recordings, filmic tangents and miscellaneous manipulated audio flotsam. The selection's quite nice, and the thing is especially well-crafted in terms of editing, interlayering, and pacing. And accompanied by a lovely site, too.

Unbuilding, II

Returning again to the matter of ruins, there's the current exhibition at the Tate in London, titled "Ruin Lust." One of the exhibition's main curators is Brian Dillon, who's written a number of essays about the aesthetics of ruination in recent years. In fact, the Tate exhibit could be considered a straggling offshoot of an anthology on the topic that he edited for the Whitechapel Gallery's "Documents of Contemporary Art" series a few years ago.

The exhibition takes its name from the German term Ruinenlust, which hails back to the years of German Romanticism back in the late 18th century. In keeping with that Romanticist theme, the exhibit features works by Piranesi, Turner, Constable, and the like. From the looks of it, the selection is overwhelming drawn from the Tate's own collection -- including an assortment of works that include pieces by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Latham, and a later, seldom-seen piece by Eduardo Paolozzi. Then there's the allotment by the most contemporary artists of the bunch including Keith Arnatt, and John Stezaker. Here we get a sense of the thematic thrust of the exhibit -- what is the sense of ruination that we have now, the sort that seems to too frequently emanate from our immediate surroundings? There's a great deal of recent work to illustrate this theme, be it the photographs that writer Jon Savage took around London over the course of two decades, Rachel Whiteread's photographs of tower blocks, Laura Oldfield Ford's drawings of housing estates, or David Shrigley's grimly sarcastic "Leisure Center."

With these examples, the exhibit zags into more charged territory, into the politics of space (public, domestic, etc.) in the contemporary built environment -- the anomie that too-commonly results from both well-intentioned civic pragmatism or the vagaries of rampantly haphazard real-estate speculation. Whichever the case, each included gives off a foreboding impression, if only because there isn't a human figure to be found in any of them. It's like a neutron-bomb school of urban development, reflective of the estrangement that results in a societal environ predicated on the logics of perpetual, unbroken progress, innovation, and "creative destruction." On this matter, one could turn to Dillon's Whitechapel anthology and find an excerpt from Mark Lewis's 2006 essay "Is Modernism Our Antiquity?", in which the author muses:

"The idea of a modernist ruin in the making, while compellingly seductive, seems depressingly elegiac and tautological at best. Didn't the images and forms of modernism have ruin, decay and obsolescence written into them? Was this not meant to serve as an inbuilt apotropaic function, all the better to protect against the future romantic appeal of their ruining? And do I really want to male an elegy to something like 'modernism's forgotten promise'? There's the rub. For today it is fundamentally a question of what is to be done as the artistic signs and images of emerging and developing modernity are rapidly becoming historical."

Lewis's rumination are, by his own acknowledgment, prompted by Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, in which Latour argued that modernism was a paradox to begin with -- an a priori double-bind, like a blueprint with the terms of its own abandonment and demolition included as a preconditional contractor's clause.

Also included are excerpts from Jane and Louise Wilson's Sealander, their series of photographs of derelict WWII Nazi bunkers littered along the coastline of Normandy. The Wilsons have repeatedly dealt in this type of subject of the years -- ominous remnants of the Cold War era like underground military nuclear missile facilities, the East Berlin Stasi archives, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. The Sealander series of course follows after theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, his book of photographs of the very same bunkers; his own taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after he came across the structures while roaming the beaches of Northern France. In the accompanying texts, Virilio passingly compares the bunkers and the modernist functional architectural forms of Le Corbusier and Brutalism, but asserts that as structures their utility was the product of another logic altogether -- that belonging to the culture of total war. At one point he writes:

"Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime, the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach. It speaks to us of other elements, of terrific atmospheric pressure, of an unusual world in which science and technology have developed the possibility of final disintegration. If the bunker can be compared to a milestone, to a stele, it is not so much for its system of inscriptions as it is for its position, its configuration of materials and accessories: periscopes, screens, filters, etc. The monolith does not aim to survive down through the centuries; the thickness of its walls translates only the probable power of impact in the instant of assault. The cohesion of the material corresponds here to the immateriality of the new war environment; in fact, matter only survives with difficulty in a world of continuous upheaval. The landscape of contemporary war is that of a hurricane projecting and dispersing, dissipating and disintegrating through fusion and fission as it goes along."

At another:

"The immensity of this project was what defies common sense: total war was revealed here in its mythic dimensions. ...A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were indeed the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface structure, had shipwrecked at lands' limits, at the precise moment of the sky's arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space."

Curiously, the exhibit has its own set of accompanying workshops, the last of which is "The Unofficial Countryside," which focuses on "the modern edgelands that ring our cities and soft corners of the countryside," under the premise of asking "Industrial brownfields, landfills, suburbs: Are these the ruins of our modern age?" In the exhibition, this examination of terrain vague is exemplified by images from Keth Arnatt's landscape series A.O.N.B.(Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty); and by excerpts from Paul Graham's Troubled Land, his collection of photos taken throughout Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

Ruin Lust is also rounded out by selection of Tacita Dean's past work, and by the curious inclusion of a re-anacted version of Gerard Byrne's 1984 and Beyond -- a 3-channel video re-enactment modeled after an 1963 Playboy magazine roundtable discussion with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and eight other science-fiction authors, in which the participants were asked to give their speculative thoughts on what the future would be like.


* * * *

Speculative futures, ruination and entropy, terrain vague -- these things were a constant source of fascination and inspiration for both author J. G. Ballard and the artist Robert Smithson. It was this that provided the focus for Tacita Dean's recent film project JG. In a way, the film is reflective of a sort of aesthetic love triangle. Dean has long been inspired by the work of Smithson and Ballard. In turn, Ballard wrote admiringly of Dean's work (especially her texts). Smithson was an avid reader of science fiction, and was particularly taken with Ballard's work, which proved a huge influence on the artist in the mid-late 1960s. And Ballard was quite taken with Smithson's earthworks, no doubt recognizing that he and Smithson shared similar interests and ideas.

In a write-up of the film at the East of Borneo site, contributor Rachel Valinsky fleetingly references a tertiary text by Ballard titled "Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist." Not having encountered the Ballard piece before, I do a quick scramble to locate it. It's a short piece, only some 7-8 paragraphs long, the last portion of which reads:

"Fifty thousands years from now our descendants will be mystified by the empty swimming pools of an abandoned southern California and Cote d’Azur, lying in the dust like primitive time machines or the altar of some geometry obsessed religion. I see Smithson’s monuments belonging in the same category, artefacts intended to serve as machines that will suddenly switch themselves on and begin to generate a more complex time and space. All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.

:Reading Smithson’s vivid writings, I feel he sensed all this. As he stands on the Spiral Jetty he resembles Daedalus inspecting the ground plan of the labyrinth, working out the freight capacity of his cargo terminal, to be measured in the units of a neurological deep time. He seems unsure whether the cargo has been delivered.

"His last flight fits into the myth, though for reasons of his own he chose the wrong runway, meeting the fate intended for his son. But his monuments endure in our minds, the ground plans of heroic psychological edifices that will one day erect themselves and whose shadows we can already see from the corners of our eyes."

It seems the Ballard piece in question has rarely been reprinted, but the full text of it can be read here.

Pink Guitars vs. the Negative Dialectic, II (Slight Return)

Aaron at ATTT, once again, with the followed belated (very belated) observations about Daniel Lopatins’s “Eccojams”:

“...Most of the rest of vaporware, not so much. I understand the gesture, understand the nostalgia, miss the bright techno future-vision of the capitalism of the late 1980s/early 1990s, but a lot of the music seems to get by just on the mere gesture of evoking that era. As if simply the choice to compose in a certain style were enough all by itself, with the actual composition a mere afterthought.

"To the point that the critique is almost lost and the composer has just substituted demo tracks of late 1980s synthesizers for, say, Italo disco or 1960s garage rock, as the thing to sound like with no desire to communicate anything beyond the aesthetic predilections of the composer.”

Which precisely gets at some nagging suspicion I’d had lurking in the back of my head ever since all the discussion about defining musics of the hauntological or vaporwavey pedigree – works by artists whose efforts pioneered or epitomized the micro-/sub-genres in question – was being kicked about so heartily some 5 or so years ago.

Nostalgia through a glass darkly: The loss of childhood innocence, via deferred and unrealized futures, and something something neoliberalism. I actually thought of some of it in similar ways myself, upon initial exposure. But that was my own subjective reaction, based upon an impression based in a network of association from my youth. And admittedly I’ve contributed to some of that discourse mentioned above, having written down my thoughts on it a while back.

But to Aaron’s remarks, especially the bit about “getting by just on the mere [musical] gesture of evoking an era.” Dicey business, that; especially if the era in question is exists in the minds of most listeners as a vague impression or set of clichés, on account of it falling – by dent of their age – outside their own direct experience. Musically, its mainly an example of form becoming content in the most “meta” of pomo ways, inthat it’s music referring to itself, or to its former self as it may have appeared in a previous incarnation. Music that is now looked back upon – through ironic twists of canonical filtering, an upended hierarchy in which the kitsch and marginalia of the past are given top ranking – as definitive of a previous zeitgeist. (And really, what age doesn’t/wouldn’t want to think of itself as some sort of zeitgeist?) Mere style as a sort of semantic signifier. Skrewd, woozy, deliberately degraded – a corrupted signal, at once both allusive and elusive in its suggestion of a particular point in time. A moment that long ago unmoored from its particulars, drifted well beyond the gravity of its original context. But of course we know that context is usually the first thing lost in the data stream, the news cycle, the deluge of information in an information age. In this instance the instance at how we arrived at this socio-political-economic moment, a moment in which the idea of “the future” might provoke as much anxiety as optimism: the context is a not-so-distant past that might recalled in some hazy or second-hand fashion, but can’t be reconstructed, reverse-engineered, let alone reclamated or redeemed. That’s the nature of the past – what’s done is done. And memory – be it personal or collective – is of little remedial use in such matters.

Canon Fodder, Pt. 2: Farewell to an Idea?

David Maljkovic - Retired Form,  2008-2010

As far as the possibility of a condition of art being lately preoccupied with its own past, Dieter Roelstraete made the stronger case back in 2009, with his e-flux essay "The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art":

"In the present moment … it appears that a number of artists seek to define art first and foremost in the thickness of its relationship to history. More and more frequently, art finds itself looking back, both at its own past ...[A growing number of artists] either make artworks that want to remember, or at least to turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or they make art about remembering and forgetting: we can call this the 'meta-historical mode'" [...]

Elaborating later:

"In their cultivation of the retrospective and/or historiographic mode, many contemporary art practices inevitably also seek to secure the blessing (in disguise) of History proper ...Time, literally rendered as the subject of the art in question, easily proves to be a much more trustworthy arbiter of quality than mere taste or success. Hence the pervasive interest of so many younger artists and curators in the very notion of anachronism or obsolescence and related 'technologies of time' ...meant to convey a sense of the naturalization of history, or of time proper."

Unlike Cotter, Roelstraete provides specifics, citing a number of projects that illustrate the argument. What’s more, he theorizes that this condition might be indicative of "the current crisis of history both as an intellectual discipline and as an academic field of enquiry." As such, he describes the retrospective tendency as being melancholic in character, adding the caveat that it might be "potentially reactionary," as well.

* * * *

A similar argument emerges in Claire Bishop's "Digital Divide" Artforum article from autumn of last year, overlapping particularly on what Roelstraete describes as the "technologies of time." Bishop writes:

"The fascination with analogue media is an obvious starting point for contemporary art's repressed relation to the digital. ...Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or 16-mm film reel."

By Bishop's reckoning, this deference of the present amounts -- in some respects -- to an an abdication of responsibility, a failure to fully engage in contemporary cultural modes of social relations. But as far as this matter or interventionary agency and cultural imperatives is concerned, there might just as likely be someone lurking in the wings ready to issue the counter-thesis: Art is not a gadget.¹

* * * *

Tacita Dean, from the series The Russian Ending

Amid all this talk of returns and regressions, I find myself experiencing a sense of déjà-vu, like I’ve heard all this discussed and diagnosed somewhere else at some early point. Sure enough, Bishop mentions in passing one of the texts I have in mind – Hal Foster’s 2004 essay “An Archival Impulse.” In that essay, Foster examines the work of artists Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Thomas Hirschhorn, and how the work of these artists often coalesce around a similar theme; how they “share a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history.” Artists working this vein are “drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” In this way, such work points to lapsed, overlooked, or abandoned histories – failed or unrealized futurisms, endeavors left in limbo. Or obscure artifacts and objects which, in the case of Tactica Dean’s film about the sound mirrors of Dungeness, “serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.”

Much of this, by Foster’s account, takes the form of projects that strive (in Hirschhorn’s words) to “connect what cannot be connected.” However “tendentious” or “preposterous” such an undertaking might seem, Foster sums up the character of the exercise thusly:

"This not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate – to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs (sometimes pragmatically, sometimes parodistically), to ascertain what might remain for the present. ...By the same token,...the art at issue here does not project a lack of logic or affect. On the contrary, it assumes anomic fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through, and proposes new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional, to this end, even as it also registers the difficulty, at times the absurdity, of doing so."

Gabriel Orozco, Island Within an Island, 1993

But perhaps the more incisive text to refer to in this instance would be another Foster essay, written several years later, "This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse".²  At this point, Foster expands on the thesis of "An Archival Impulse," steering its focus away from various wayside microhistories, and toward the legacies of modernism and art itself, as they've been addressed in the work of recent artists. To this end he discussed the versions of an "end of art" scenario as declared in the past half-century by various parties (e.g., pluralistic, post-structuralist, Marxist), arguing that these accounts – out of "triumphalism, desperation, or melancholy" – perhaps "concede(d) too much too quickly." And that if we see a backward-gazing trend in some strains of contemporary art practice, it might be the result of different attempts at reclamation for a critical enterprise that had not fully run its course before being issued its last rites.³

What then comes after death, after all these alleged ends, when certain forms and legacies and discursive modes continue to linger in a supposed "posthistorical" limbo? Foster lists a variety of practices that constitute a type of "living on" or "coming after," which he categorizes into four designations, each serving as a type of "mnemonic strategy." These strategies Foster delineates as: the traumatic, the spectral, the nonsynchronous, and the incongruous – each engaging the past via practices involving methods of recovery and re-engagement, "ghostly" shadowing, juxtaposition, or hybridized "dislocation and dispersal" or the highlighting of temporospatial disjuncture.

It is in the third of these strategies – the nonsynchronous – that we find the use of outmoded technology (a la Bishop) come into play. To some degree, Foster allows that the use of such things (film, say) might be intended merely as a material riposte to "the presentist totality of design culture." Otherwise, he considers it a practice more in keeping with Surrealist tactic of utilizing "displaced forms." Making his argument by way of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Foster offers:

"Such a weird array of things is not the stuff of a renewed medium; on the contrary, it is part of the Surrealist project to 'explode' conventional categories of cultural objects. ...There is the further dilemma that 'the outmoded' might now be outmoded too, recuperated as a device in the very process that it once seemed to question – the heightened obsolescence of fashion and other commodity lines. Yet one aspect of the outmoded is still valid…and Surrealism is still a touchstone. 'Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie,' Benjamin writes... 'But only Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled.' The 'wish symbols' here are the capitalist wonders of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie at the height of its confidence, such as 'the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas.' These structures fascinated the Surrealists nearly a century later – when further capitalist development had turned them into 'residues of a dream world,' ...According to Benjamin, for the Surrealists to haunt these outmoded spaces was to tap 'the revolutionary energies' that were trapped there. But it may have been more accurate (and less utopian) to say the Surrealists registered the mnemonic signals encrypted in these structures – signals that might not otherwise have reached the present. This deployment of the nonsynchronous pressures the totalist assumptions of capitalist culture, and questions its claim to timeless; it also challenges the culture with its own wish symbols, and asks it to recall its own forfeited dreams."

In contemporary work that engages the nonsynchonous, Foster asserts that the use of outmoded form and tech serve as a reminder that "'form' is often nothing more than 'content’ that has become historically sedimented."⁴

Secondary Action

A curious something not worth filing away in the "hauntology" drawer, but definitely engaging a set of heavily retro-/throwback aesthetics and technology…

A couple of weeks ago I couldn't help but notice a flurry of hubbub coming from the coverage of the 55th Venice Biennale, particularly that surrounding a particular work – Mathias Poledna’s installation, entitled Imitation of Life. Poledna originally hails from Vienna, and – despite the fact that he's been apparently living and working in Los Angeles for many years now – was chosen by his home country to be their primary representative artist at the Biennale's Austrian national pavilion this time around.

Upon its debut, Poledna’s work immediately became one of the more gossiped-about items at the expo. A reviewer at Art Info offers a breezy description:

"At just over three minutes long, 'Imitation of Life' should feel like a slap in the face to the hulking structure in which it sits (both literally and figuratively). But the single animated scene, which reproduces to exacting detail the process used by film studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is a joy. It’s simple, light (at least on the surface), heartwarming even, and then it ends leaving one wishing for more.

Content-wise, a dog [donkey] in a sailor costume trots back and forth across the screen singing a tune by Arthur Freed from the ’30s. The hook, 'I got a feelin’ you’re foolin' ...foolin’ with me,' points at both the absurdity of the Disney-esque display — production on this was run by Tony Bancroft, whose animation credits include Aladdin, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast among others — and the trompe l’oeil of the medium itself. Around 30 hand-drawn and colored sketches flick past the screen each second on their 35mm spool, which along with the full orchestra commissioned to record the score, made this a massive undertaking in hours of work alone."

The screening room for Poledna's short film is housed in a temporary extension to the pavilion, designed by the Kuehn Malvezzi architecture firm. The accompanying song, “I’ve Got a Feelin’ You’re Fooling,” was a widely popular and often-covered tune from the 1930s; attributed to a pair of noted songwriters who frequently worked with MGM Studios. For the project, Poledna had the song rerecorded, making a new version that closely adhered the style of the original. The artist also created a series of original drawings and sketches for the project, which he then had developed into the requisite series of hand-drawn cels by a crew of veteran animators.

None of which comes cheap these days; considering that certain old modes of production have become so rarefied, rapidly dwindling to a specialty that involves a shrinking pool of skills, expertise and know-how. Which is why the Poledna's in Austria had to (reportedly) summon together a generous sum to fund Imitation of Life. The money involved being part of what has fueled the baffled reception of the project. The other part being that all that funding only amounts to – by all appearances – a cartoon that runs roughly three minutes. Befuddlement ensues, with one critic finding it delightful while another one waxes incredulous. Must be some "conceptual" thing – something having to do with all that money being funneled into getting swallowed up by a few moment's worth of fluffy, gen-audiences escapist entertainment; and thus some ironic comment on the "culture industry" and all that it involves. Or something along those lines.

* * * *

Poledna’s had an interesting number of projects over the past fifteen years or so. Interesting, in that these projects reveal an evolution in the artist's working methods. First there’s the preference for analog technology – especially in his habit of eschewing video in favor of working with 16 and 35mm film. Secondly, there’s his fascination with pop culture and his choices of artifacts from the realm of entertainment, which he then uses to explore themes relating to the nature of artifice, escapism, and concept of “authenticity.” And thirdly, there’s his working methods, which involved deeper levels of cultural research with each successive project; the resulting work alluding to esoteric cultural/historical parallels or connections.

For instance, a few of his projects from recent years:

Things Were So Much Simpler Then

Brilliant.

A humo(u)rous take on this sort of thing, obviously. Surprised I hadn't bumped into it sooner.

Implanted Memories

Bumped into this recently -- "Memorex," by some Brooklyn "music video" outfit calling itself Smash TV.

In which the the Dan Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never/Sunsetcorp hauntological "eccojam" modus of a few years ago gets reduced to a mere mannered style or aesthetic unto itself. A sort of design-minded, winkingly-ironic megamontage, amounting to extended celebration of the technology of the 1980s; of bygone entertainment and its obsolete delivery systems, its means of presentation. (A parade of empty signifiers. What would the Spectacle be, after all, without all those logos and animated graphics?) Without the skrewd'd, glitchy, hypnagogic quality -- mostly scrubbed of "noise," whenever possible. Quasi-nostalgia hinging on nothing more than novelty and quaintness, sans any supposed socio-cultural ambivalence or melancholy. Not that that sort of thing wasn't inevitable, I suppose; but there you have it.

Big teased hair and padded shoulders? Check. White people trying to breakdance? Check. Mel Gibson running? Check. Ronald McDonald seems to be the main recurring motif, throughout. I suppose if I'd stuck around long enough, the California Raisins would've put in an appearance, but I didn't.

File under: retro-kitsch.


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Belated afterthought/footnote: I reckon the incessant appearance of McDonalds (& etcetera) in the above could be considered unintentionally ironic, especially considering the decade in question. The year of 1980 saw a comprehensive legal relaxation of restrictions on television advertising to children in the U.S.. Naturally, a boom in advertising to children followed, with marketing firms devoting larger resources to researching and developing strategies for target-marketing to younger and younger viewers. So in a way, I guess the above could've just as easily (and perhaps more accurately) been titled "The Making of a Consumer."

The Half-life of Ephemera

Or: That which we have now, having never been (Slight return)


Something that used to happen to me fairly often, but hasn't in a long while...

Acquiring a book from either a library or a second-hand bookstore, books that had passed through other hands. A photograph found between the pages, or falling out from someplace therein. A photographs no doubt having been haplessly placed there as a bookmark many years or decades previously, before the reader had returned the volume to the library or sold it off to whomever.

One of these I can remember quite well. A black & white snapshot, with the blank white frame of a border. A man and a woman leaning against the side of a broad and bulky car. Behind them, beyond the car, a few homes marking the point where a short stretch of residential block gives way to an open vista, the road receding to the horizon over a terrain of rolling hills. The model of the vehicle and the man and woman's hair and clothes suggest that the photo was taken no later than 1952. The landscape and the sky have me thinking the location might be the outskirts of San Francisco or possibly Seattle -- some place like that, someplace coastal and right off the water, in California or the Pacific northwest, back when large portions of that region were still thinly and spottily populated, when many of the roads had only recently been laid down.

 Despite the fact that someone had them stand against the car -- to stop just here for a moment, so that someone could capture an image of the occasion -- they position themselves toward the camera quite loosely, but can't really be bothered to fully, formally face the camera. Their posture is relaxed and casual. The man grins, the woman appears to be on the verge of laughter. The way they are interacting suggests that they are something other than lovers or man and wife. Perhaps instead an old dear friend or sibling was visiting from elsewhere, making the rare trek across a large expanse of the country, for a few days of catching-up and spread over several days. With the photo having been taken in that last hour before the visiting party had to say goodbye, departing homeward.

At one point a had a small collection of these photos, amounting to only a few. Don't know at what point -- in which move or purging -- I lost them, but I had them for a while. I kept them as I had encountered them, as physical objects; as flotsam from other people's lives that had been unintentionally (one assumes) set into indeterminate circulation. The sort of photos you look at and deduce what you can from the information they contain. The sort of photos you look at and wonder: Who are -- or were -- these people? What did this moment mean to them? Where are they now?



* * * * *

Somewhere Between the Empirical and the Essential

I guess at this point it's a given that the whole hauntology matter has run its course, becoming a rapidly shrinking speck in the rearview mirror. In a piece over at 3AM, Liam Sprod offers a backward glance, and it's a fairly strong overview of the matter.

As to the point of whether the esthetes misconstrued or misappropriated the gist of Derrida's original argument, it all makes for a moot point, since Derrida offered it in his unpacking of Fuliyama's "The End of History?", which in itself may or may not matter since (as I understand it) Fukiyama later claimed that everyone -- Derrida and neo-con triumphalists alike – had misread his original thesis.

At one point says of hauntology as a musical aesthetic:

"...For in falling into the trap of repeating an anachronistic desire for a future that is lost, this form of hauntology misses the essential nature of this future as always-already lost."

I don't recall anyone ever asserting otherwise. Which is why so much hauntological fare harkens back to source material of a certain vintage and ironically flirts with evocations of nostalgia and childhood. If anything, it serves as a deeply skeptical and circumspective response to the fatalism embodied in the end-of-history verdict as it has been bandied about in recent decades.

At yet another part of the essay, Sprod offers:

"The answer lies not in repeating lost gestures, methods and sounds or calling for a failed utopianism, but in rethinking the very possibility of the lostness of that temporality itself."

Which is how I understood it all along. It's the nature of that form and of the type of circumspection I mentioned above; of a certain type of wariness or gnosticism. The sort that brings to mind something I recalled and starting thinking about a few days ago. For an unrelated reason, I recalled Homi K. Bhabha's notion of "the Unbuilt" from some years ago, and it's basis in some remarks made by Wittgenstein in Culture and Value:

"Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress.''Progress' is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end it itself. ...I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings."

Bhabha, when he first put the notion forward, was speaking in the context of discussing possible memorials and monuments. Which may be fitting in a way, since nothing usually spells death and decline like an ideology that proclaims itself as having achieved its own teleological aims.

Some Last Words on 'Collage Culture'

Not mine, but someone else's. Uncannily paralleling some ideas from the Aaron Rose essay I was talking about earlier...

Q: How long did this new sonic aesthetic take to come together? And was there a particular trigger that inspired the shift?

JF: I was drinking a V-SMOOTHIE, in West Hollywood, at this place called Earth Bar. The ambience was like cold, moist air-conditioned Eco-space, digital ringtones tweeting off, smoothie blenders, laptops. And then a blue-haired man walked up to the counter in his five-finger shoes, texting on his Blackberry. The space felt so online. I was in a diverse online rain forest of $60 eco-smoothies and flat screen TV menus. I just wanted to make music that sounded like this, something these people could blast on their iPods. The ideas got deeper then this later, but this was the initial starting point.

Q: So how much of an inspiration has the internet and the digital world been on [the Far Side Virtual album]?

JF: The Internet is dispatching everything in our globalised mega-city. People are essentially wearing the Internet, eating it, hearing it, talking about it all the time, because everything is like a symptom of an Internet driven society. It's really obvious, though it's not the main attraction in FSV's story. FSV is a still life. Everybody's music sounds like the Internet right now, from Top 40 to underground. Fashion looks like the Internet. It's this weird impressionism that everything embodies. I think there will be more and more artwork resembling this. Digital clarity has given us another perspective on humanism.

Q: Do you think it's possible to avoid making art that doesn't reflect the intenseness of the internet's involvement in modern society?

JF: If by chance somebody does achieve this they are truly avant garde.

James Ferraro, interview in The Quietus, Dec., 2011.

Nobody Here (The Marinettis Bring Home a Computer)

So, after months of wanting to read it and sounding off on the topic myself, I only recently got around to reading Simon's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Thoroughly enjoyed it, of course. Simon's book covers its topic from a variety of angles, and offers a lot to mull over. Far too much to go into here, actually. But I might have a point or two to address.

But one surprise, for me, was the few pages devoted to highlighting the artist Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) in the early stretch of the book. I'd long been taken with Lopatin's music, but am even moreso now that I learn about Lopatin and the ideas that inform his music. Quoting from the book:

"...Yet the speed of technological advance means that each beloved machine is rendered obsolete with ruthless rapidity. With individuals and businesses throwing out info-tech every two to three years, obsolete computers are a huge environmental problem. ...'I'm super into the idea that that the rapid-fire pace of capitalism is destroying our relationships to objects. All this drives me back, but what drives me back is a desire to connect, not to relive things. It's not nostalgia.' He argues that the idea of 'progress' itself is driven by the economic imperatives of capitalism as by science or human creativity. In a 2009 manifesto-like article, he decries the fixation on linear progress, proposing instead the opening up of 'spaces for ecstatic regression. ...We homage the past to mourn, to celebrate, and to time travel.'"

The cited article, "synthemas and notes 1", can be found here and it offers a deeply interesting read. As a manifesto-ish text, it provides an explanation as for a specific semantics of sound. Lopatin begins by describing his attraction to synthesizers, particularly those of a certain vintage, due to their sonic capacity for suggesting "allegorical landscapes." This ability, he states, is the result of the instrument's own limitations -- the "grain" of its sound being the product of the instrument "striv[ing] and fail[ing] at mimetic representation." The act of creation becomes the act of exploring the abilities (but chiefly the limits and flaws) of the gear's "closed-circuit universe." "The more you enjoy process, limitation and defeat," he muses, "the more potential there is for chance and adventure."









The idea or aim of achieving any degree of originality in this process isn't a factor, since the notion of originality is little more than a threadbare modernist notion, a notion that too often is found riding shotgun with the problematic idea of dynamic and relentless progress. "If our generation can be defined artistically in a single way," he offers:

"It is that of the collector-archivist. We are naturally disposed towards nostalgia, and deep freeze cultural informatics is our greatest cybernetic feat. To understand the euphoria and confusion of my generation is to loop the part of Bill & Ted’s in which Beethoven rips a decisively Steve Vaiesque guitar solo on a synthesizer, and thus we intrinsically understand the nature of the eternal rip."

The reasons for doing so being that:

"The lessons of the past are moments in time that are eternally engaged, and the ability to transmit and interact with ~previous systems~ is evidence of the deep melancholy which arises from our inability to stop time just long enough to experience it."

Which perhaps sounds a bit bleak to some, if not like conceding aesthetically bankruptcy in the face of a cultural/creative impasse -- endlessly staring back down the avenue that led to a certain "postmodern" dead-end. About which I have some further thoughts, but they'll have to wait for another post.

On memory and the politics of nostalgia

"The curious thing is this: although there has been an enormous proliferation of work on memory studies in the last quarter century—not only in English, but also in French, German, and Italian—it seems to me rather strange that no one has really set out to explain why exactly during this particular historical period, from 1980 or so on, there has been such an obsession with memory studies. I don’t think this can be understood via any single factor, but it could possibly be explained by the confluence of three powerful forces coming together. The first could be described as the long shadow of World War II, which continued to exert its impact even as late as the 1990s. Think for example of the celebrations in 1995 of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Another factor in the emergence of memory studies has been what I would call 'transitional justice.' And by that I mean to say that in the 1980s and 1990s there were transformations in various countries—in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, in the states of central eastern Europe—that had had a very difficult past, on the whole a totalitarian or authoritarian past, and had moved toward a more democratic form of government. Precisely because they had had a difficult past, they had to take up a position about it, they had to examine their memories. They had to think about what attitude they should take toward the previous perpetrators and victims of injustice. And the final significant factor has been the process of decolonization, which had very significant repercussions—not only for the previous colonizing powers, in particular Britain and France—but also for the previously colonized powers, in particular Africa and India, who have sought, so to speak, to re-appropriate their own memories, whereas for the previous colonizing powers, what has emerged is what might be described as a politics of nostalgia. In fact, the famous three-volume work edited by Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, is an interesting case in this regard because although it is presented as a gigantic and cooperative academic exercise, it seems to me that there is a very powerful undercurrent of nostalgia in that volume."

In the most recent edition of Cabinet and currently up on the publication's website, "Historical Amnesias," an interview with University of Cambridge social anthropologist Paul Connerton. From willed collective & selective suppressions of historical memory, to the acceleration of forgetting in the service of "planned obsolescence," there's a number of fascinating ideas scattered throughout.

That which we have now, having never been

As some readers already know, before moving to my current locale, me and my wife lived in Chicago for many years. The last five of those spent in an apartment on the southside. Making the decision to vacate wasn't an easy one. My wife wanted to be closer to her family, which I definitely understand on account of them being such warm and wonderful people. I'd previously been very much averse to the idea of ever returning to the South; but in the wake of the grand financial meltdown of a few years ago, I was finding that there was no job market to keep me in the city I'd long considered "home."

And in the run-up to that meltdown, we'd been increasingly being priced out of most neighborhoods in the city. Ah well, I eventually shrugged, why not? The place had been losing some of its prior appeal for me anyway -- a couple of exceptionally long and punishing winters in a row, the homogenizing effects of the mayor's years-long "Giuliani Lite"/disneyfication of the city, the neglected infrastructure...there were a lot of factors in the equation in the end, far too many to list, but ultimately they amounted to a decision that perhaps it was time to move on, see how things fared elsewhere.

But most importantly we had to get out of the path of the bulldozers.

Y'see, our entire block was scheduled to be razed at the end of summer of 2010. The original reason for this had been to make way for a hospital expansion. But after the economy cratered, many institutions around the country had halted such projects as they watched their funds and endowments shrink. But supposedly the nearby university was looking for other ways to leverage the effort. Or that's how one story had it.¹

The other story, one that began circulating in the community as the clear-out date approached, was that it had to do with the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. The main stadium that the city had proposed building for the games was to go up in the park directly across the street from our building. So rumor had it that we were suddenly in a real estate hot spot, that developers were moving in with plans on what all could be done with properties in the area.² So everyone get out right now -- no dawdling. At the time the city was pretty certain that the Olympic bid was in the bag. Within a few months of having left the city, news went out that the games were being awarded to Brazil instead. Which made me wonder: is there such a thing as a Schadenfreude Samba?


* * * * *

I only mention this because it connects with something that popped up today over at the Things Mag site, in which the editor muses over the mixed response to Iain Sinclair's latest effort, a quasi-psychogeographic tour of London as the city prepares and refurbished itself for the 2012 Olympic games.³ Things describes the book as "a sprawling trawl around the undeniably banal and venal regeneration surrounding the Olympics, haplessly mired in a stubborn nostalgia," further noting:

"Happily, we’re not alone. A recent Fantastic Journal post takes Sinclair to task: 'Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.' ... What emerges from all this is more evidence of the steep valley that lies between history and nostalgia, wherein a penchant for the latter tends to shape one’s attitude and interpretation of the former."

From there, the author broadens the frame...

"The Internet exacerbates this condition, building up our perception of the past through the endless reproduction and celebration of past ephemera. The past is filtered through a lens of celebration, a perpetually art directed world, be it the gritty black and white world of life sold from a suitcase in these images of Brick Lane in the 80s, or Soviet ruins, or abandoned lunatic asylums, rusting machinery, filleted libraries, caches of Eastern European match box covers, esoteric ephemera from long-forgotten Olympic games, boring postcards, found photographs, passive aggressive notes left on refrigerator doors, weird LP records, shopping lists, ticket stubs, or even our own almost entirely context free Pelican Project.

Collectively, we've managed to make a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal, mashing them together with the Utopian and the celebrated until the edges are blurred. Whether its the decline of manufacturing and urban centres or nuclear catastrophe or the collapse of the housing market is all rendered flat and equal by the vivid resonance of the image. This is where the overwhelming emotional content of a carefully filtered past meets our nostalgia for now ('...a mourning for the transience of a moment when you are still in that moment'), and the result is a state of being that appears to seek out the romantic past in every captured moment."

I suppose this "a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal" has been a recurring theme here, if only because--it seems--it's been a fairly common fetish, of late. It takes different forms, and the reasons for this are numerous. Running a broad spectrum, some of it's fueled by the more mundane pursuits of collectors and enthusiasts, some of it is just the po-mo modus of cultural retro- appropriation siphoning out into a uncritical kitcshification of the past, while yet another variety of it it is the product with a certain aesthetic ennui with the present. But there's a portion of it that (I detect) that suggests by a deeper sociological narrative, springing from a sense of dread or impasse with where we've arrived in recent years.


* * * * *

Chicago is, as far as its population is concerned, a very Polish city. One cliché has it that in the years immediately following WWII, there were more Polish residents in the city of Chicago than there were in Warsaw. Owen Hatherley has apparently spent a good portion of this past year in Warsaw, and writes...

"The thing about Warsaw that everyone knows is that 85% of it was destroyed in 1944, and that it was then reconstructed to the letter after 1945. ...Accordingly, for a certain type of architectural critic or historian, Warsaw is irresistible. It is, for traditionalists, the road not travelled -- a city where, instead of modernism, we got a dignified reconstruction of the old world. In fact, neither of the statements is exactly true. Recent research makes clear that the 85% figure includes much that was more damaged than irretrievably destroyed, and it's also clear that the reconstructed city took frequently huge liberties with the historical fabric -- how could they not? And after some acquaintance with it... it's also clear that the modernist objection to the place -- as a Disneyfied simulacrum of interest only to tourists -- isn't quite right either."

The "road not traveled" theme is a recurrent topic in Hatherley's work, be it his defense of UK post-War neo-Brutalist architecture in his book Militant Modernism, or his more recent A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. About the core inspiration for the latter title, Hartherly remarked:

"The short explanation is that I have become intrigued by the fate of "urban regeneration" in the light of the financial crisis; what the speculative redevelopments of inner cities look like after the debts have been called in. They have become the new ruins of Great Britain. These places have ruination in abundance: partly because of the way they were invariably surrounded by the derelict and un-regenerated, whether rotting industrial remnants or the giant retail and entertainment sheds of the 80s and 90s; partly because they were often so badly built, with pieces of render and wood frequently flaking off within less than a year of completion; but partly because they were so often empty, in every sense. Empty of architectural inspiration, empty of social hope or idealism."

For the uninitiated, Hartherley's blog can be found here and his regular Guardian column here.


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1. As it was, our end of the neighborhood -- the one facing demolition -- was home to an odd assortment of residents, not the least of which was a lot of pensioners and elderly (with fixed incomes and capped rents) that the University had moved there due to its prior expansions and displacements into other parts of the community over the years.

2. Add to all this that the neighborhood I'm talking talking about was also gaining a lot of media attention at the time on account of it being the home of the newly-elected POTUS. To see the news reports in national outlets, the community looked vibrant and idyllic. All of which was ironic, because during the 'Noughties we'd watched the neighborhood go into sharp decline because of politicians and developers inept and hapless attempts at making it attractive to potentially gentrifying northsiders. (For instance, over half the shops on the main drag being forced out of business by real estate speculation, and still sitting vacant some 18-24 months later.)

3. Admittedly, this isn't something I've followed, but I have on occasion bumped into the odd caustic bit about it over the past year.

You Can't Go Home Again (Not Even If You'd Stayed There)

Finally getting around to reading Lucy Lippard's On The Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place. It's more or least an extension of her prior book The Lure of the Local, ultimately having more to do with sociology that with art criticism or art history. Representation, myth and mediated encounters, space and place, the "disneyfication" of certain cities and "false unities" of how town or locations present themselves for outsiders, plus many of the economic and sociological issues that arise from all of these things. Quite refreshing, really.* And yielding (no pun intended) plenty of points of interest, including these passaged from the book's first chapter "The Tourist at Home":

"Viewed from the perspective of the places 'visited,' even in those disaster areas that are victims of downsizing and deindustrialization exacerbated by NAFTA and GATT, tourism is a mixed blessing -- sometimes economically positive, usually culturally negative, and always resource-depleting. ...Tourism leads to summer people leads to year-round newcomers leads to dispossession and a kind of internal colonialism. As an increasing amount of the world's acreage is 'opened up,' the search for the 'unspoiled' intensifies, exposing the most inaccessible places to commercial amenities and barbarities, from vandalism to jet-skis."

A few paragraphs later [emphasis added]...

"One of the obvious contradictions in tourism concerns what is being escaped from and to. Absence (sometimes) makes the heart grow fonder. If we live away from native ground and then go home to visit, we can see the place anew, with fresh eyes. Some return to their hometowns to find the mines and factories they escaped now glorified as museums. ...Long popular in socialist countries, industrial tourism is catching on again in the United States. And edifying example is the themification of the history of tumultuous labor relations in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and in Lowell, where the first national park devoted to industry has caught on. Are the visitors simply the curious, the history buffs? Are they those whose worked in factories or remember their parents' and grandparents' experiences? Are they lefties looking for landmarks of rebellion? The ways in which places and their histories are hidden, veiled, preserved, displayed, and perceived provide acute measures of the social unconscious. Yet their relationships to broader economic issues seldom surface overtly in daily lives. We live in a state of denial officially fostered by State denial.

Such grand-scale abdication from the present does not bode well for the future. One can only wonder what our hometowns will look like when the fad passes. Will the ghosts of fake ghost towns haunt the twenty-first century? Or will our places be ghosts smothered in new bodies we would never recognize as home?"

How like hauntology, that last part.


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* I say that because each of these books appeared in the late 1990s, and seem (in retrospect) prescient of certain economic trends that would kick in hyperdrive in the decade that followed. Also, it was a welcome break from all the "viva Las Vegas" nonsense of the '80s and '90s -- from the celebrations of "colloquial" architecture so common in doctrinaire post-mod architecture circles, to the blinkered "analysis" of Dave Hickey, Baudrillard, et al.

Unmediated

In the course of Simon's NYT yarn this past weekend on the topic of "atemporality" in contempo pop, he mentions something that reminded me of something that I recently stumbled across, and which touches -- somewhat tangentially -- on a matter I was riffing on earlier. Simon mentions the matter of "dead media," a term that he attributes to Bruce Sterling, who originally proposed the compiling of a collaborative Dead Media Handbook back in the latter half of the 1990s.

Which probably explains this item I encountered a few months ago: the Dead Media Archive, a wiki created in conjunction with a class taught at NYU's Department of Media, Culture, and Communications.

Even with its list of criterial qualifiers, the archive sports an odd array of entries, with a broad and almost random sampling of topics falling under its thematic canopy. As such, it makes for interesting reading. Sure, 8-tracks and Smell-O-Vision and town criers are all there, as well as a number of other obvious entries. For instance, I was previously unfamiliar with roentgenizdat dubplates (or "bone records") of post-WWII Soviet vintage. Of the more literal hauntological persuasion, there's an article on EVP, which provides a some deep background information about the Spiritualist Movement, "spirit photography," research into paranormal phenomenon, before finally winding down with a citation of Slayer's Hell Awaits. There's a long article on "dirty media," where the author very pointedly refutes the idea of "immaterial labor" and lengthily discusses the ecological side-effects of e-waste. There's a truly odd (as in esoterically incongruous) art history piece on "absorption" in 18th-century painting a la Michael Fried's writings on the topic, one of underground missile silos as relics of the Cold War, as well as a theoretical post-mortem on the concept of "terra incognita."

There are no shortage of gadgets and such that turn up on the thing, from the Tamagotchi to the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Of course, this is straying on well-trodden turf since there are numerous sites elsewhere for such stuff -- for outdated computer systems, video games, and vintage recording technology or whatever, usually collected and compiled by enthusiasts. More rewarding, perhaps, are the dossiers that venture into more conceptual and theoretical terrain. And there's a listing for proposed dossiers, which includes such random and speculative entries as: barcodes, canon, depondent verbs [sic], elevator attendants, errata, myriorama, the photographic gun, the subjunctive mood, truth, and the 8-hour work day.

The archive appears to be a salvage job from the original Dead Media Project mailing list, supplemented by student entries. The field notes from the original project are extensive, but focus primarily of a literal application of Sterling's idea, never venturing off into more theoretical or conceptual arcs. Between the versions, its intriguing to think of where such a project could go if it had some editorial guidance and a strong and varied set of contributors.





* * * * * * * * *

Having just tapped out the above, another belated connection comes to mind. The author Ander Monson wrote one of my favorite books of recent years, Other Electricities. Based on Monson's own childhood years growing up in a samll town in the uppermost frozen reaches of Michigan's Upper Penisula, it's a very bleak yet beautiful book that harbors its share of ghosts (technological and otherwise). At any rate, the town where Monson grew up had previously built around copper mining, but when the price of copper declined so much that it wasn't worth the expense of extraction, the mining companies abandoned the place and the town reputedly became a dim shadow of its former self. Perhaps its for this reason that Monson carries a lifelong fascination with the discarded, the diminished, and the obsolete; since these are the things that have provided topics for a number of his essays and poems. Monson's prose poem/essay "Failure: Another Iteration" mentioned Sterling's Dead Media Project, as well as the online Museum of E-Failure (which seems to have, ironically enough, been offline for some years now). Then there's his essay "Solipsism," which more or less deals with the technological relic of the typewriter (as well as pointed toward his more recently obsession with the "unstable I" of the first-person narrative and the contempo boom in "memoir lit").

Vinyl Reckonings

Some months back, Mark "K-Punk" Fisher curated a guest podcast over at Pontone. Beginning, ending, and threaded by the leitmotif of crackling vinyl surface noise and featuring tracks by the likes of Philip Jeck, William Basinski, and The Caretaker, the mix played out like a musical séance for moribund audio media. By way of accompanying liner notes, Fisher wrote about the spectral (there/not-there, presence versus absence) nature of phonography in relation to Derrida's ideas about the "metaphysics of presence," adding:

"With vinyl records, the more that you often hear is crackle, the sound of the material surface of the playback medium. When vinyl was ostensibly superseded by digital playback systems – which seem to be sonically ’invisible’ – many producers were drawn towards crackle, the material signature of that supposedly obsolete technology. Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. For crackle is of course a noise in its right, a ground becomes a figure."

The concept of spectrality and haunting was a central theme in The Caretaker's project from the very start, with the artist having derived both his moniker and his creative premise from Kubrick's The Shining. Basinski emerged on the scene some years ago with his acclaimed requiem cycle The Disintegration Loops, which deals with mortality and entropy by way of the material and sonic degradation of timeworn magnetic tape. And Jeck's work owes it melancholy creakiness to the notions of obsolescence and abandonment it invokes...








Many of these tropes harken back to the work of noisician and artist Christian Marclay, who himself began working with LPs and record players back in the late 1970s. From the beginning, Marclay was fascinated the materiality of recorded media, especially with the record LP as a physical object – as document of a performance, an ephemeral and intangible moment in time, arrested and affixed in material form, commodified and mass manufactured in serial units, circulating in the cultural domain of commercial society.

Plasticity aside, there was also Marclay's affinity for "the unwanted sound." Primarily this was the sound of technology being intentionally misused and abused, but it was also the sound – or the combination of sounds – of all the bygone and discarded musical products of previous years and decades, now amounting to only so much landfill fodder or cents-on-the-dollar clutter in the bins of second-hand music shops. All of it – the exemplars of former zeitgeists, even – rendered equal by its outmodedness, its use-value amounting to little more than the part it plays in a layered cacophony. Same too with Marclay's later works involving album sleeves or other formats such as audio tape – in the end it comes down to the utility or stylishness of last year's model seeming so remotely quaint or clunkily alien when seen from just a little further down the evolutionary chain.




Sure, LPs and turntables were the dominant technology for home listening at the time that Marclay first started working with them. And he wasn't the only one messing about with gathering and manipulating these items for the sake of making noise in the late 1970s.

Some quotes...

GRANDMASTER FLASH: At the time, the radio was playing songs like Donna Summer, the Tramps, the Bee Gees – disco stuff, you know? I call it kind of sterile music. Herc was playing this particular type of music that I found to be pretty warm; it has soul to it. You wouldn't hear these songs on the radio. You wouldn't hear, like, 'Give It Up or Turn It Loose' by James Brown on the radio. You wouldn't hear 'Rock Steady' by Aretha Franklin. You wouldn't hear these songs, and these are the songs that he would play.

TONY TONE: I was working in the record shop, so I used to know all the records....but I didn't know the records Herc was playing. So now it's grabbing me, now I'm trying harder to order them for my record shop, but I can't find them 'cause they're not records that are selling right now – they're older records, jazz records, whatever.

So "digging" always involved hunting and unending quests to excavate the rare and the funky, but it also – once upon a time – meant sifting through the unwanted and the forgotten. Used bins, "cut-out" bins, thrift stores, or even – in the case of Grandmaster Flash – running the risk of catching an ass-whooping from your pops after being told, "Don't ever touch my records."

By now it's a little trite to make a case for framing the creation of cutting and scratching (and eventually sampling) as a street-level, mother-of-invention version of musique concrète. But one may as well make one for the first-gen practitioners of hip-hop DJing – Herc, Bam, Flash, and many others – as being early pioneers of some musical equivalent of salvagecore, if only for the sake of "keeping the funk alive" in the face of the monocultural sweep of disco.

* * * *
But: Surface noise as sonic patina – as signifier of the music's physical format and vintage, as a deliberately skewed figure/ground relationship. That's a later and different development. Initially, it was something to be avoided at all costs – only so much noise contaminating the signal, or undesirable syntagmatic slippage.

* * * *
If the nature of the "hauntology" rubric has been difficult to nail down with any sense of certainty, it might be due to the facts that (a) it was never that firmly formulated of a concept to begin with, and (b) the term and corresponding concept suffered a denotational shift as soon as it began to circulate more broadly. At first it referred to something slightly intangible and impressionistic; something not too different, in certain ways, from Freud's notion of the Uncanny (especially in that both involves varieties of cognitive dissonance and a sense of dislocation or "dyschronia"), and how it plays out aesthetically.¹ But soon enough discussion of the hauntological began to focus less on the nature of the sensation or condition, and rather on the mere things that might bring the notion to mind. And by things I mean just that – books, toys, films and TV programs, photographs, and various other ephemera from one's childhood, from prior eras. In the end – objects and the associations projected onto them. Which, in many ways, borders on mere, mundane nostalgia of a sort. Not that nostalgia doesn't factor into this in the first place, but that's a whole other line of theoretical speculative – a line that could draw from a rich backlog of philosophic ink that's been spilled on the topic over the past century and a half.

And I'm fairly certain that aspects of all of this overlap – however tangentially – with the topic that Simon addresses in his new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its own Past. I haven't read or even gotten a copy yet, so I can't say for sure. But Alex Niven recently posted some thoughts on the book's focus that struck an intriguing note...

"Moving quickly into the realms of massive theologico-cultural conjecture, the whole retromanic thing seems to me to have something to with the occlusion of death in a modern technocratic society. Death has replaced sex as the great taboo. We just don't know what to do with death – the one thing a culture of pluralism and excess cannot find a space for: the absoluteness of an ending. Hence, things that are obsolete become weirdly fetishized. The sobering fact that the past is absolutely no more is replaced with a sort of adolescent inability to let go of childhood toys and move on."

An "occlusion of death" perhaps, a way of stacking some barricades against the door in an effort to hold off a particular type of existential dread. Or what happens when a schizophrenic economy of scarcity and surplus flatlines into one of equally-available "pluralism and excess," and – sensing it may have hit some teleological impasse – suffers an extended spasm of insecurity in regards to where it was all supposed to lead in the first place, and compulsively doubles back on itself in a frenzy of archiving, retrofitting, taking inventory and what-have-you.

Static, surface noise and signal interference, however, is more bluntly about the big D. It ultimately points to the corporeal fragility and impermanence of it all, a nagging momento mori that nothing will ever ever be as it was despite whatever effort or technology is employed to stave death and degeneration away. If, as K-Punk once phrased it, the history of recording constitutes a "science of ghosts," then the metaphysics of crackle (or of the sputtering, atomizing digital glitch) serves as a reminder that it's an imperfect science. Or as he stated early in the discussion, the figure and ground are inextricably linked by the sheer materiality of the medium...

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed.

The rest, as they say, is just noise.


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1. Or I suppose another way that this could be discussed, given the excretal economy of consumption and waste that all of this points involves, might be by way of Kristeva's notion of the Abject.