Camberwell Then

The Possibility of a Book About Houellebecq

It looks as though Zero have a book on Houellebecq in the pipeline - makes perfect sense, after all it he was he who identified very clearly the way in which 'business ontology' had come* to dominate even interpersonal relationships in 'L''Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte' - lazily translated into English as 'Whatever' when it really translates as 'the extension/broadening of the field of struggle'. It'll be interesting to see whether it just tackles his work or his public persona as well (those comments on Islam etc). I suspect (and hope) it will largely be the former - but will that include the film of La Possibilité D'une Île (which I've only managed to see a few clips of on YouTube), his dabbling in 'erotic' film and that album on Tricatel where his poems are backed by Bertrand Burgalat and his house band (mostly lounge-y, Air-y vibes that work well with Houllebecq's images of consumer-business classes 'enjoying' their leisure/travel time)?



* and that tense right there is very important in Houllebecq, 'Atomised' begins with it. In both that and 'The Possibility of an Island', the Last Men in their near-obsolescence (like Island's 'shock' comedian Daniel) are observed from a future standpoint - "I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end." Houllebecq is someone who actually does envisage the end of Capitalism, either through the genetically engineered arrival of the post-human in Atomised, or through immortality equalling the elimination of desire/'self' in The Possibility of Island.* In the latter, it's hardly an image of human collectivity (only very loose kind of future-internet-based one)... but then there is that 'possibility', which in Houllebecq's work isn't much, but it isn't nothing either.

*What is the island? A place where the miserable desiring machines of the past, and the desire-less clones that persist for the rest of forever, could be reconciled.




NB On closer inspection I just imagined that thing about the tense - it's just the simple past he uses after all... maybe the pluperfect/past perfect just feels like the right tense for Houllebecq.

Kicking a Cold Corpse

Recently for the Rockfort French music website I asked electronic producers Hypo and EDH to interview each other. The full result can be read here and I think makes for a great read, but this part from Hypo about postmodernism really stuck out for me. The clunky translation from the French is mine:

"I liked playing with the codes of postmodernism. That’s really the background that I’ve come from, like V/Vm (that's the Caretaker, for the hauntologically inclined) and several others among my contemporaries. We took great pleasure in wringing music’s neck. It was good, necessary and healthy. And I still do it to a certain extent. But at a certain point, our generation woke up next to a cold corpse that everyone had been sticking their boot into, and we really had to decide what to do with it. Since then, many people have carried on thumping on cold meat as if nothing had happened, with others retreating to very conservative, classical forms, and yet others cultivating some form of revival of all sorts of genres, with the ‘mise-en-abyme’ of ‘revivals of revivals’."

I also like him on live vs recorded music.



You can get pretty much the whole of Hypo's back catalogue here for free

lyndhurst grove

Accentuate the Negative

I attended Mark Fisher’s Kafka 2000 talk at King’s with M. yesterday. Apart from anything else, we both enjoyed the feeling of being back at school, and I felt myself in the shoes of those engaged, questioning mature students at University that my listless, apathetic self (as it was at that time, for some more, and less, common reasons) had looked at askance – I’d actually read the book, for heaven’s sake! The material was familiar though it was nice to have it reactivated, but it opened up a bit more when it came to the questions afterwards. One question was about how art can respond to capitalist realism, and one answer was naturally the hauntological approach – but what tweaked my antennae was the idea that artists should reclaim ‘negativity’. It struck a chord as it’s something I’ve been trying to work through myself – what ‘negativity’ could mean when applied to music-making.

(I haven’t read Cold World yet, but I guess some of what follows might be creeping onto the same territory).

Initially, I think it’s possible to define the negativity by what it isn’t. The first point is that, in itself, this negativity runs counter to pervasive compulsory affirmationism. Also, it needs to be distinguished from the fossilised James Dean, rebel negativity of, say, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or The Kills or groups like that, which isn’t even “I wear black on the outside because that’s the way I feel on the inside” but “I wear black cos it’s, like, cool.”
On that note, it’s also a negativity that shouldn’t be so much ‘misery me’ as ‘misery us’ – the point of view presented should be depersonalised, de-self-ised (NB overheard as a response from one woman to another’s woes on the train: “You should be more selfish.”) In lyrical terms, for example, this wouldn’t have to mean not using ‘I’, but it’s important that the ‘I’ is not the Romantic one of the artists typically eulogised in Laura Barton’s reliably toe-curling ‘Hail Hail Rock n Roll’ Guardian columns, and more of a meta ‘I’.

Thinking more now about the positive properties of this negativism: the post-crisis moment can give artists of this generation a moment and a subject. What I suppose is a standard-issue existential-artistic dissatisfaction with what is sold to us as reality can take on an added resonance now that some people (including artists themselves, perhaps) are waking as if from a slumber. If there’s a small chink here, the work of anyone sensitive to it, in any walk of life whatever their aptitude, must be to keep it open in themselves and in others, and to – at the very least – contribute to and cultivate the ambiance of negative feeling towards neo-liberal realism as the psychic foundation for genuine social change. This ‘negativity’ must be, in K-Punky terms, ‘libidinised’, and music is an excellent medium for through which that can happen - This is not just an argument in favour of sonically impoverished sloganeering, though.

I noted with great pleasure that Poetix (aka Cold World author Dominic Fox) has a nicely detourned quote from Cathal Coughlan/The Fatima Mansions atop his blog at the moment (from The Door To Door Inspector “You made your choice when mocking the ways of true grown men.”) since, when I was a teenager, the Coughlan of The Fatima Mansions (and we can argue about the sonic shortcomings or otherwise of Coughlan’s various musical formations another time) was one of the first people to make attractive a certain negativity (as outlined above) and seriousness, one that was on speaking terms with musical surprise, absurdity, grotesque humour and invigorating language-mangling (Coughlan and Chris Morris are strangely twinned in my mind). At the time I perhaps didn’t even take Coughlan as seriously as I should have – after all, an album like Valhalla Avenue which then seemed thrillingly paranoid and bilious now reads, from ‘Evil Man’ to ‘Be Dead’, like a pretty sane and reasonable state of the world address. That is not to argue that The Fatima Mansions should be taken as the model (they just might not work in that way for you), or that words-in-music are the only way of expressing negativity (this would be a terrible, unmusical straightjacket). The expression of negativity vis-à-vis neo-lib realism perhaps doesn’t have to be as literal, as literary, as Coughlan’s.

The great thing about the Zero Books project is the manner in which it libidinises thinking against and around capitalist realism, or it has certainly had that impact on me (although the economic crisis itself also played a large part in that…). And one interesting aspect of the Michael Jackson tome was that it demonstrated how this kind of thinking can be the background hum, the bassline mood of a work even if it isn’t its ostensible subject. I think this is relevant to other forms of artistic/cultural production, including music.

Ah...

So it was Lime Headed Dog we saw that day, James...

Peckham or Atlanta: Don't go there...

From the Pecknam blog

'Shot in Atlanta and Peckham'

Black Hole Sun

Probably one of the most spine-tingling sequences in recent TV history. The more you stare at this picture, the more you realise you're staring into two bottomless black holes in Don's face. The black hole in the sky is the black behind Don's eyes (those ridiculous, cartoonish 'pupils', those 'windows into the soul' that are really nothing but the reflection of the sun.)

Burt Cooper asks later: "After all, when it comes down to it, who's really signing the contract, anyway?"

Crow Calling

Until now I'd only ever heard the Martin L Gore cover of this on the Conterfeit EP. Don't know anything much about Joe Crow himself except that, according to a review on his MySpace page, it took him a mere 28 years to follow it up with an album!

One of the things I like about the song is that the restless, circular nature of the melody creates the imperative that drives the lyrics. "Finding the right words, can be a problem/How many times must it be said/There's no chance/It had to happen." It's not an 'emotional' outpouring, but more like automatic writing. The lyrics both dramatise the process and are process.

this man has my flask

After Your Health (Sketches from a song)

I

Middle class emotion is always muted or modulated. The compulsion is to put on a brave face and carry on as usual, so sadness is preserved, internalised - becomes part of the fabric of things, the background hum; the family home is retained, the ritual of Sunday lunch continues but rooms are hollow shrines now the children have moved out and the spouse has passed on, and there are empty places at the dinner table. But it must continue for it’s all about family, even though family and its aspirations (for itself, for the world, for its posterity) are also the greatest cause of suffering. These homes are haunted by the spectre of the successful, healthy family unit; melancholy slips into the silences and slender gaps between the ideal and reality, settling there like sediment. No major disasters, nothing alarming, just a slight falling short of expectation, of what was promised. Quiet defeat, entombed.

II

“Old age isn’t nice” my grandmother tells me on a regular basis. This is not just because of the physical deterioration, it’s also because it seems the longer they are alive, the more people become depositories or vessels for distress, sadness and disappointment. Not just their own, but those of their extended family, of friends of friends, of all the people they have known and outlived. Via my grandmother, I’m just a short step away from the War; from poverty on Clyde Bank; from a sibling who never made it out of childhood; from my grandfather’s glancingly acknowledged mental problems and their reverberations; from his mother, a hard Irish woman “incapable of love”; from another mother (herself) feeling no connection to her youngest son, viewing him as some sort of alien perhaps; from a boy I’m related to in some distant way who suffered from paranoid delusions that he was being monitored by malicious agents and eventually committed suicide, and whose parents subsequently separated (I’ve listened to that sequence two or three times). So many stories that have unfolded, played out to their conclusion. Identity is memory, and so many memories end in… well, where does anything end, if the long view is taken? A typical trigger – “I went swimming today, grandma” – leads to the same recollection every time, of going swimming with a good friend, a good friend who died many years ago. Always: from swimming, to death.