Wild in the Streets - Garland Jeffreys (1973)
All respect to the Circle Jerks cover of this, but that the original is from 1973 makes it seem more appropriate for this particular historical moment.
From a collection of strange and often offensive things that kids have written. This however is neither strange, offensive, or inappropriate. Only awesome. I’d give this kid an A for life.
Terry Riley - You’re Nogood
I’ve been listening to this pretty frequently lately. If you listen to it on headphones, make sure to not be nauseous or intoxicated as you might feel the need lose it at several points. Here’s a great description of the track from the blog Dinosaur Gardens:
In 1967 Terry Riley was playing one of his “All Night Flight” concerts in Philadephia, featuring his soprano saxophone, keyboards, and tape delay devices, which went on for hours in the trance-inducing Minimalist fashion — as documented on the Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band “All Night Flight” Vol. 1 CD. (Later, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp would adopt similar methods for their “Frippertronics” concerts and LPs like No Pussyfooting and Evening Star.) After the show the proprietor of a local discotheque asked Riley to compose a piece to be played in his club, and Riley obliged — but with a version of Harvey Averne’s “You’re No Good”, a single off Averne’s 1968 Atlantic LP Viva Soul.
Riley took a Motown-inspired pop tune and transformed it into a twenty-minute exploded view, slicing the track into long and short bits and looping them, as Steve Reich had done a few years earlier with his “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” pieces. The Riley remix (“No Good” becoming “Nogood” to echo his Poppy Nogood character) is wonderfully perverse: beginning with a two-and-a-half-minute piercing sine wave drone, increasing in pitch to the point of unbearability before suddenly breaking into the Averne song, which becomes more and more fragmented and complex, towards the end adding Moog shrieks. Averne’s song refuses to die even under this treatment, determined to keep the good times rolling even as it’s being puréed.
“You’re Nogood” was rescued from undeserved obscurity by the Cortical Foundation, run by Gary Todd, which lovingly repressed a series of very well-received Riley CDs as well as work by Derek Bailey, Hermann Nitsch, and the Scratch Orchestra (whose “The Great Learning” has since been reissued by Deutsche Grammofon). In 2001 Todd was seriously injured, and there has been no further word of his health or the possibility of future releases on his label. We wish him all the best.
Make sure to listen to this on stereo speakers.
Franco Berardi aka Bifo speaking on a number of subjects related to his new book After the Future.
“ To be sure, one often has the sense that the crowd theorists rush to foreclose any destabilizing potential within their on discourse. The generative potential of crowds is anxiously pathologized; their mimetic dynamic is quickly banalized. But something similar happens with Hardt and Negri’s multitudes as well. Ironically, a theoretical discourse so deeply defined by its phobia toward mediation is nevertheless so completely pre-mediated by a political telos that, in its given form, it becomes all but analytically useless as a tool with which to explore the movement of any actually existing social formations. It always already has us hurtling towards a revolutionary climax, craning our necks to catch a glimpse of the receding place where our destination was predecided. Rather than galloping ahead in the name of politics, why not dwell more experimentally in the places where a social field rippled by the reverberations of embodied affects is mediated and re-mediated through more or less authorized narratives and practices? If the relation of the multitude to the crowd is about anything important, then it is, I think, about this: the relation between vital potential and the social mediations that at once produce and constrain that potential. The point is not to oppose ethics to politics; rather, it is to resist the trampling of the delicate ethical ground of social becoming and mutual making in the mad rush to the end of history.
William Mazzarella “The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd” Critical Inquiry Vol. 36, No. 4
Andy Warhol - Crowd, 1963
Jeffrey Schnapp reads Andy Warhol’s crowd photographs of the 1960s as marking the passing of “a model of politics based on the physical massing of bodies in public places or the performance of symbolic marches in real time and space” and the arrival of a new “politics of gestures that relies on virtual, indirect, and asynchronous forms of presence,
organization, and participation.” According to Schnapp, the figure of the crowd has currency today only in a knowingly aestheticized way: as a formation evocative of an older politics that can be quoted in contemporary mobilizations, “just as typewriting now continues to play a role under the regime of digital writing and printing.”- William Mazzarella quoting from Jeffrey Schnapp’s essay “Mob Porn”
“ The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user—the reader, the music listener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product “a place in life” (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of “creativity”; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.
Maurizio Lazzarato “Immaterial Labor”
15 Facts About Our Shrinking News Media
Breakdown from The Awl of some depressing (if you think the news media is important to a functioning society) statistics from the recently released FCC report “Information Needs of Communities.”
My favorite part:
“It has been tempting to think that Americans are paying less for content.”
But in 2003, people spent on average $740 a year to consume media and information—on cable and Internet service bills, for print, and on their mobile packages. In 2008, that went up to $882. Most of the increase comes from paying more for TV and radio—about $130 more, on average—as well as some from rising spending on cell phones. So it’s the mobile service providers, cable companies and Internet-providing cable companies who are getting the largest portion of the money for content.
“ If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the ‘virtuous Keynesian circle’ as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. now rather than speaking of the toppling of ‘supply and demand,’ we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the ‘realization’ of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.
Maurizio Lazzarato “Immaterial Labor”
Polvo - Fast Canoe on Exploded Drawing
I bought this albm at a used CD store in the summer of ‘96. My expectations for the first notes of a record heard through crappy headphones played on crappy CD players in weird strip mall used CD stores were never the same.
