Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Amnesia Scanner- "As Angels Rig Hook"
"A stream of more or less violent crimes.
What was violence again?"
Dino-Sexism
Dude guy posts joking parody picture online. Everyone assumes he's having a laugh. Well-established woman of letters with over 50 years experience in the written word tells essentially the same exact joke: everyone assumes she's a fucking idiot who doesn't know dinosaurs aren't real and can't comprehend basic irony. Everyday sexism. Living in the dinosaur era.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
The White Male DJ Strikes Back
Interesting how, at this moment, in light of the Ten Walls and GFOTY incidents, Hollywood and indie micro-Hollywood is set to take on EDM and the plight of the White Male DJ. We Are Your Friends, named after the Simian song which received an electrohouse mix by Justice about a decade ago that may have been the spark that spun into the EDM moment, announces itself appropriately enough by Zac Effron running away from the present moment, which is some weird pathway from study halls and SATs to bailouts and broken dreams. "This is not our future", the title cards boldly declare. And, fuck, I can get on board with that. But rather than a rallying cry to the underserved, this winds up just being a plea for this particular Vinnie Chase and Co. lite crew to be winners, not losers in this predatory mandate.
Rather than just sticking to music, Effron and his all-white male entourage seem to envision some hybrid of a tech startup venture and a life spent deejaying parties to thousands of adoring acolytes bewitched by the spell of their crossfader. This is a world where women mainly exist to titillate and prove how scene-deaf they are by requesting "Drunk in Love" at a rave (a song coincidentally by two black superstars, Beyonce and Jay-Z, who are absolutely idolized by scores of deejays). In another moment, one of the quaint street team members invites a passing girl to invite all her friends to a party "if they look like you". Ugh. Their fierce heterosexuality is announced with utter clarity as the core of their existence. This is a bildungs-bro-man and the space for women, blacks, or the LGBTQ community is limited, at best.
Sea of white faces in the climactic audience shot of the We Are Your Friends trailer
The tired narrative of opportunistic capital, selling yourself, and crying into your pile of money has grown old and reeks of #firstworldproblems. I'm not rooting for the film's failure though. It's intriguing that the film even exists. It appears to take its subject matter seriously, albeit with comic results. There really has never been a good fictional take on the process of actually making electronic dance music. Most that incorporate dance music into its narrative make the music production process incidental or nonexistant. The films themselves are more about rave culture rather than the music; plots concern drug addiction, drug-related crime, romance, growing up, rebellion, or other tangential things, but never beat-making, beat-matching, texturology, arpeggios, force and form, club-testing, white labels, et al. The shot of Effron recording a nailgun firing against a roof for a four-to-the-floor sample would almost seem inspiring were it not a) the most tinny, crappy sound imaginable, b) preceded by a scene of him talking up the shift from 125bpm to 128bpm as the most thrilling thing a DJ could ever do (a DJ who coincidentally only needs a "laptop, some talent, and one track", a reduction that may or may not be a pisstake on Deadmau5's indictments of his own scene).
Eden has already won some critical acclaim, paces itself chronologically from the 90s to the present, and features Daft Punk as sidelining friends of the protagonist (it takes place in France). The trailer is less bro-tastic, but still definitely heteronormative. It follows the travails of a different white male DJ, mostly it seems in some state of romantic malaise or libertine bliss. There's some brief vinyl shots, but nothing that demonstrates music production or club mixology as an artform with schools of thought, different methodologies, and vast variegation in styles/crowds, particularly in the world of micro-genres that emerged in the 90s.
If fact, the only real thought about the music is shown from the perspective of another female who apparently just doesn't get it, portrayed in what is implicitly a post-coital state, remarking "I mean, it's great to dance to but I don't know that I would listen to it every day at home"*. Perhaps this is some promotional miswiring, as this film actually is directed by a woman, Mia Hansen-Løve, sister of French producer Sven Love, on whom the film is partly based. The cast still seems principally white though, but at least we get a more diverse climactic trailer crowd shot.
Most baffling of all though is the moment at exactly 0:26 in the trailer, when the Daft Punk soars beatless and blissful over a scene of...is that a fucking plate of oysters? Who made the executive decision that one of the most important things to emphasize from a two hour film was that being a deejay in the 90s French house scene allowed you to eat some primo seafood?
*Okay, to be fair to the character, this statement actually correctly discerns the functional nature of much dance music, which is not intended for home-listening, but the trailer presents this as if it were a great insult to the poor male producer, who has to now go through the hard labor of explaining his craft to a cadre of ignorant but willing lovers.
High Wolf- "Wild at Heart"
High Wolf goes full on fourth world on his new alien dance party of an album
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Brokun Britun Extract
Lenny Gottlieb- Found Photograph
" We were marooned, engineless and alone, in the shadow of the Brownlands Heritage Colliery & Themepark. A grim-looking FauxVictorian tower loomed over us, topped with what looked like an enormous bicycle-wheel. The buildings were simulations, of course - frames dressed to appear old and ruinous - but there was something sinister and unutterably alien about the architectural mock-ups and the starkness of the landscape that surrounded them. They unsettled me in some way. I had to remind myself that none of this was real, that they were just harmless, backwards-pointing signifiers, plywood representations of some long-gone culture that was as incomprehensible to me as the Paleolithic Era. I could barely imagine it. Had human beings once toiled in such inhospitable conditions, browbeaten and exploited by pitiless union bosses?
The pixelated face of Lady Thatcher, saviour of UK Coal, smiled down from a large animated flatboard that stood defiantly in amongst the mounds of fake anthracite. The hoarding’s motion- or audio-sensors spotted us milling around the Zapruder and Maggie T’s head swivelled slowly to confront us. “This country’s not for turning!” it boomed in a pompous Iron Lady avec-accent VoiceFont, then began reciting a list of its corporate sponsors."
- Nice piece of scorched earth fiction extract from Kek-W
Friday, June 5, 2015
Achoo
“Experian is a data broker well known for selling credit scores—which include information on bankruptcies," Libert said. "Academic research by Senator Elizabeth Warren has shown that over 60 percent of bankruptcies are medical-related. Given that I found Experian tracking users on thousands of health-related web pages, it is entirely possible the company not only knows which individuals went bankrupt for medical reasons, but when they first went online to learn about their illness as well. In essence Experian can follow an individual from her first sneeze to her final unpaid hospital bill.” (Experian failed to respond when asked to comment.)"
-Brian Merchant, Looking Up Symptoms on the Internet? These Companies Are Tracking You
"Say, is there any cure for hell?"
- Sparks, "Achoo"
The Night Belongs to Kubrick
"You've quoted Pudovkin to the effect that editing is the only original and unique art form in film.I think so. Everything else comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.Pudovkin gives an example: You see a guy hanging a picture on the wall. Suddenly you see his feet slip; you see the chair move; you see his hand go down and the picture fall off the wall. In that split second, a guy falls off a chair, and you see it in a way that you could not see it any other way except through editing.TV commercials have figured that out. Leave content out of it, and some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials.Give me an example.The Michelob commercials. I'm a pro-football fan, and I have videotapes of the games sent over to me, commercials and all. Last year Michelob did a series, just impressions of people having a good time —
The big city at nightAnd the editing, the photography, was some of the most brilliant work I've ever seen. Forget what they're doing — selling beer — and it's visual poetry. Incredible eight-frame cuts. And you realize that in thirty seconds they've created an impression of something rather complex. If you could ever tell a story, something with some content, using that kind of visual poetry, you could handle vastly more complex and subtle material"- Tim Cahill Interview with Stanley Kubrick, Rolling Stone, 1987
Between this and his admission that one of his top ten films of all time is "White Men Can't Jump" , Kubrick remains a total mystery. The one thing I can say about these Michelob ads (which, far from visual poetry, seem pretty standard in terms of editing/visual narrative in 80s commercial advertising) is that it's a bit amazing how...well, clothed the women are. Though they are obviously objectified to an extent, the very physical dignity they are given seems completely anomalous in our current regressive fucked-up environs.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Futurecrimes
"Well, what happens—I mean, and all of the great writers of totalitarianism have written on mass surveillance, Hannah Arendt being one in The Origins of Totalitarianism. And she says that when you collect data on every single citizen, it’s no longer about crime or justice; it is about having material so that when you criminalize a certain category of people—and Stalin was kind of the master of this—you can instantly arrest them, because there’s always something, and they can exactly do what you’ve done, where they take that rather innocent discussion and twist it to serve the ends of the state. That’s the danger of mass surveillance"
- Chris Hedges, interviewing Robert Scheer
"In 2010 David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student, was convicted under Sarbanes-Oxley after he deleted digital records that showed he had obtained access to Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account. Using publicly available information, Kernell answered security questions that allowed him to reset Palin’s Yahoo password to “popcorn.” He downloaded information from Palin’s account, including photographs, and posted the new password online. He then deleted digital information that may have made it easier for federal investigators to find him. Like Matanov, he cleared the cache on his Internet browser. He also uninstalled Firefox, ran a disk defragmentation program to reorganize and clean up his hard drive, and deleted a series of images that he had downloaded from the account. For entering Palin’s e-mail, he was eventually convicted of misdemeanor unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and felony destruction of records under Sarbanes-Oxley. In January 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that Kernell’s awareness of a potential investigation into his conduct was enough to uphold the felony charge.
At the time Kernell took steps to clean his computer, he does not appear to have known that there was any investigation into his conduct. Regardless, the government felt that they were entitled to that data, and the court agreed that Kernell was legally required to have preserved it.
Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the feds’ broad interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley in the digital age is part of a wider trend: federal agents’ feeling “entitled” to digital data.
...Similarly, Fakhoury says the government’s underlying theory in cases like Kernell’s is, “Don’t even think about deleting anything that may be harmful to you, because we may come after you at some point in the future for some unforeseen reason and we want to be able to have access to that data. And if we don’t have access to that data, we’re going to slap an obstruction charge that has as 20-year maximum on you.”
- Juliana Devries, You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History
That has to be the greatest password reset of all time
Infinite Sadness
On the latest Pop Unmuted podcast, Robin James talks about her latest book Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism, which sounds like an incredibly interesting read. James has been something of a mainstay in music criticism for over a decade with her It's Her Factory blog. She discusses how EDM with its builds, drops, soars, et al., as well as lyrical themes, fits neatly into the familiar neoliberal narrative of resilience, the "Upworthy"/Lean-In notion of people overcoming challenges or adversity. James notes how this often lets capitalism or patriarchy off the hook because it reframes the thesis of crisis stories to be about an individual thriving despite stacked odds rather than a system categorically failing large groups. Thereby, the championing of progressive/feminist heroes actually assists the existing power structure.
It's the Horatio Alger story from a different vantage, the exception that somehow disproves the rule. Each story provides structure- beginning, middle, end- and thus closure to struggle, despite the fact that these very struggles continue for every other woman in the same situation. While the perseverance of Beyonce or Katy Perry (who my 5-year-old daughter is now in love with granting her songs quite a bit more earplay in my head recently than they might have) may be admirable, the hegemony that informs each of them remains invisible, the implication being that these hurdles are innate. Per capitalist realism, realism now becomes leaning-in, every woman pushing tooth and nail against the brick wall of patriarchy on her own, rather than hegemonic institutions restructuring to put women on actual equal footing with men.
Resilience also provides a counterpoint of negative solidarity to be weaponized against women feeling trapped, defeated, or otherwise alone. After all, all you have to do is believe in yourself and ignore/not internalize every pervasive message that tells you to be ashamed of yourself, hide yourself, watch yourself, set different expectations for yourself, and limit yourself to these finite available models of success.
The stories of "resilience" in EDM arose a time in pop culture that was concurrent with an abundance of uplifting stories being shared on social media, which have so saturated the virtual landscape that there's practically a cottage industry devoted to providing balance to each depressing news item; survivors forgiving their victimizers, little black kids hugging cops, Palestinians and Israelis working together on a business venture, tales of acceptance from parents their kids were afraid to come out to, et al.
None of these are bad things, but their positivism does form a kind of erasure that allows those enjoying the privilege of not being affected by the daily toil of trauma, racism, sexism, conflict,or homophobia to wane their distress and depression over these issues. We can rest on our laurels that, as Dan Savage's infamous campaign promises and as the End-of-History narrative always promises, "It gets better". In this world, an awful status quo can remain as backdrop with our acceptance, tolerance, and consent as long as we can trade a few stories of triumph over the rotten core.
As an alternative to resilience narratives, James proposes what she terms "Melancholy", though the terms of this are far less clear. "Melancholy feels...more 'meh'...It's not good, it's not bad, it's just that there's not that energy behind it. It's more of a listlessness". She goes on to cite Rihanna and what are definitely two of her more "meh" singles, "Stay" and "Diamonds". James argues that ultimately through their denial of the pleasure of the lifts and climaxes of traditional EDM, they defy expectations and set new ones that are at best ambivalent about the existing order.
This made me think (likely because I read it immediately prior to listening to this podcast) of this re-(d)evaluation of Coldplay's X&Y at Pitchfork. Coldplay, to me, are the ultimate merger of the two modes- resilient melancholy; a band struggling to stay sad and ambivalent despite being so well-inclined to be the benefactors of history. They are probably the band that most accurately represented the desolate decade of the naughts in all its resolved indifference (sure, they stood for causes, but they mostly stood in place, waving banners and mugging passively). Their orderly and meted upward chord progressions have always poised like they were building towards the soar, much like EDM, but they always opted to stay at a comfortable, controlled mid-level, mid-tempo, MOR base. As cultural critic Phil Knight once put it, "Chris Martin's role is particularly interesting because he represents the yearning soul repressed by the bureaucratic machinery. He doesn't actively rebel against it. How could he? All he can do is plaintively wish it away. But even this mild struggle leaves him feeling ennervated and wan".
Of course, there's mountains of difference between a white British guy and a black immigrant American woman expressing these same levels of discomfort and dissatisfaction, but is this brand of mild unease really a viable alternative to resilience? Is an admission of powerlessness or being generally nonplussed an actual form of resistance? I'm thinking I'm probably misconstruing her thesis here, but I feel the creep of a thousand bad memories from the previous decade in any motive that doesn't just outwardly dismiss the reigns of a control template. We're still trying to dig ourselves out of that decade when the general consensus reaction to the shit-spiral of pop culture and the political landscape was "Yeah, sucks, doesn't it?"
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