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buzzing world
"All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis. We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience."
--Alfred North Whitehead |
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
7:31 PM
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eros and magic in the renaissance
Ioan Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987) argues that modern science is born after the Renaissance, and represents an entirely new manner of acquring and working with knowledge. As such, Couliano argues, modern science does not represent a linear extension or progression of Renaissance science, but rather a wholesale replacement, which essentially abandons avenues of exploration opened by the Greeks and later re-opened by Italian Neoplatonists, such as Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. Couliano goes so far as to suggest that our trust in quantitative science is so central to our contemporary worldview that the subjectivity of a Renaissance-era thinker would strike us as fundamentally unrecognizable.
This book works both as a fascinating elaboration of this alien Renaissance mindset and a critique of the modern scientific worldview, with Couliano firmly rejecting the notion that its rise represents a kind of "progress." In Couliano's view, the Renaissance sciences—including astrology, alchemy, the art of memory, and demon-magic—serve as strategies for working with the unconscious or imagination, and that their abandonment serves as a sort of psychological crippling. Actually, as Couliano explains in his final chapters, these methods are less "abandoned" and are more supressed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, who jointly align these sciences with heresy and persecute the practicioners. (It is interesting to note that this alignment is still with us: see for instance the continued resonance of the Faust legend, which represents a man of knowledge as a servant of the devil, or any of the countless films or other cultural products which have depicted Satan as an erudite Italian.)
This book also makes a compelling case that these suppressed methods of knowledge-work continue to exist today in the form of various sciences and quasi-sciences: advertising, mass media, psychology, cryptography, and what Couliano calls “applied psychosociology.” As these sciences are commonly used in the services of mass control, those of us who want to understand control logics would do well to attempt a more complete understanding of these techniques—which involves understanding their roots in the Renaissance. A difficult task, perhaps, but Couliano's book provides an excellent starting point. |
Sunday, December 19, 2004
3:58 PM
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upcoming events
Chicago-area Raccoon readers may want to come out into the cold to check out either or both of the following events:
1. Tomorrow (Sat 18) Chris Miller and I, performing as Number None, will be debuting a new drone piece, "Pacific Metals," at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 West Fullerton in Logan Square. We'll be performing with improvisational vocalist db Pedersen and Madison-area psychedelic collective Davenport.
2. On January 9th, 2005, I'll be doing a reading as part of the Sunday night Myopic Poetry Series. I plan to read some Imaginary Year entries, as well as some more experimental writing, maybe even some poems. Save the date! Labels: number_none, personal, writing |
Friday, December 17, 2004
2:25 PM
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public history / secret history
Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Craig Baldwin's Spectres of the Spectrum (1999), two movies I've seen in the past month, are both comprised mostly of collaged footage from other sources, but beyond that the two of them couldn't be more different. In fact, although I enjoyed both immensely, they essentially function as counterpoints to one another.
Los Angeles Plays Itself uses footage mostly culled from mainstream or studio movies filmed in and around Los Angeles. Andersen is interested in examining the documentary information embedded within these films: he's interested about what we can learn about the history of urban institutions (a neighborhood, a building, the police force), by noting the shifts that occur in their representations over roughly a century of cinema.
Spectres of the Spectrum's approach is very nearly the exact opposite: where Andersen makes documentary out of fictional films, Baldwin makes fiction out of documentary-matter. He's dug up what appears to be hundreds of educational films and 1950's kinescopes, and he uses them to tell a science-fictional tale of time-traveling anarchists in the year 2007.
Baldwin's film isn't totally fictional: his anarchists are fighting an "electromagnetic conspiracy" which has tentacles which sprawl through the real history of electricity and electronic media. The first half of the film is a helter-skelter recounting of this history, and the real names and events which crop up will be familiar to anyone interested in electromagnetic imaginary or experimental energy: Tesla, Edison, Watson and his spirits, RCA, General Electric, United Fruit, David Sarnoff, Bill Gates. As with any good piece of conspiracy-art, Spectres gets a lot of mileage by blurring the line between fact and fiction, and by the end of the film you may begin to believe that a secret war for control of electrical transmission is the real battle of the twentieth century (and that everything you ever learned about the magnetosphere is all part of a cover-up).
Andersen's film, by contrast, is interested in the "real" Los Angeles, and eschews the notion of secret histories. He has special ire, in fact, for films like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential (and, to a lesser extent, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) that reframe the "public history" of Los Angeles as conspiracy. Andersen suggests, rather convincingly, that the power-grabs that most disenfranchise the masses usually happen right out in plain sight: they're front-page news, not back-room deals. Andersen points out that people often end up voting for their own disenfranchisement, believing that they're acting in their own best interest.
This point has perhaps never been more relevant. |
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
2:40 PM
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deathprod | deathprod
As the evil genius behind the grandiose, icy production of many of the releases on the Rune Grammofon label, Norway’s Deathprod (Helge Sten) has contributed in no small part to that label’s exemplary status. This year, Rune Grammofon returns the favor by releasing a four-disc set, handsomely packaged in a minimalist matte-black box, which compiles fifteen years of Sten’s unreleased or obscure solo material, including two out-of-print albums released only in micro-editions in the mid-1990s.
Read the rest of this review in Raccoon Audio~ |
Monday, December 06, 2004
1:03 PM
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nasoalmo
November has long (in Internet-time, anyway) been known as NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. This past November, Lacunae's Douglas Wolk initiated NaSoAlMo, National Solo Album Month, in which participants attempt to complete a solo album with a running time of at least 29:09 (the length of the first Ramones album, "the shortest inarguably awesome album" Wolk could think of offhand).
Anyway, time's up. Links to completed albums are available here.
If the NaSoAlMo albums are too polished for your tastes, check out the Album-A-Day project, which has documented the creation of 166 24-hour albums since 2001.
To complete the cycle, here's Douglas Wolk writing on Album-A-Day, for Spin. Labels: writing |
Sunday, December 05, 2004
2:04 PM
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100 favorite things
It has been over a year since I last made one of these lists, so here's a new one:
abandoned spaces acoustic guitar adobe illustrator & adobe photoshop altars & shrines audiomulch barns being introduced to something new blogs body awareness bonfires brian eno cafes card catalogs chocolate coffee collaboration collage & juxtaposition comics & mini-comics consciousness corrosion & decay cycles dada databases diagrams dreams & dream-work drones effects pedals engineered cuteness fantasizing femininity fluxus & conceptual art games getting letters / writing letters grant morrison having a conversation having a meal with friends hooking up with someone for the first time hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time hybridity & variation ice cream improvisation independent bookstores index cards indexes infinity & paradox iTunes & the iPod japanese aesthetics john cage laptop computers libraries making music making things for my friends manifestations of the sacred minimalism mix tapes & mix CDs moss & lichen my dinner with andre noise nonmonogamy patterns pennsylvania & jersey platonic affection playing centipede at the empty bottle plot & narrative poems public transportation pumpkin pie reading richard linklater’s slacker roadtrips science fiction seasons self-referentiality sexuality in its million variants singing spending the night in bed alone spending the night in bed with someone synchronicity taking a bath taxonomies teaching the comfort of habit the dictionary the dungeon master’s guide the golden nugget or other greasy spoons the idea of role-playing games the idea of zines the internet the marvel universe the ocean the spring conference the woods things my friends made for me time machines unusual books or bookforms venus walking william s. burroughs writing xerox machines
Here's the one from 2003 and the one from 2002. I enjoy getting these from other people, too, so if you want to send me one, jeremy (at) invisible-city.com is the address to use, or put it up online somewhere and post a link in the comments section. Labels: lists, personal |
Friday, December 03, 2004
1:29 PM
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concordant opposition
I've been meaning for a while now to reveal Concordant Opposition, a collaborative project that I've been working on with poet Eric Burger, which currently takes the form of a poem in six parts.
We gave ourselves a month to write each section, so the six sections reflect a collaboration that ran from May to October. We took turns adding words to the poem, and the number of words we'd add on a given turn was constrained by the number of the section—in May, writing the first section, we each added only one word each turn, but in October, writing the sixth section, we each added six words with every new turn. The number of turns taken during a month was governed by the number of days in that month: in a thirty-dayer like September we took thirty turns, fifteen each. Theoretically we each went once every other day, although conditions almost always conspired (as they do) to keep it from playing out that way. In any case, we made it through the six months, and I'm pretty happy with the result, which gets increasingly giddy and unhinged as it proceeds.
Concordant Opposition is currently entering its second phase, another six-month-long project with a wholly different set of constraints. More on that later. Labels: writing |
Thursday, December 02, 2004
1:49 PM
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attention elsewhere
Expect updates to pick up after tomorrow: there are loads of ideas that I've been excited to write about, but I've been out of town and caught up in end-of-the-semester grading madness. Tomorrow is the last day of classes, though, so some more free time should be opening up. Stay tuned. |
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
6:45 PM
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