Roy Christopher

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Irony is for Suckers

"Irony used to feel like a defense against getting played," writes the novelist Hari Kunzru, "a way for a writer to ward off received ideas and lazy thinking." Broadly speaking, irony is the rhetorical strategy of saying one thing yet meaning another, usually the opposite. It also might be the most abused trope of our time. It's beyond substance over style. It's the absurd over the authentic. "It also made us feel nihilistic and defeated," Kunzru continues. "More recently we've seen how it can be a screen for reactionary politics." In the preface to his 1999 book, For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy frames the overbearing irony of our era as a defense mechanism: "It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us up to these." It's an escape route, an exit strategy, a way off the hook in any situation, it's become the dominant mode of pop culture, and we're all tired of it.

In his book, The Comedian as Confidence Man, Will Kaufman explains the feeling, coining what he calls irony fatigue, the exhaustion of ironic distance as the promise of play collides with the pursuit of truth. He discusses the comedian Bill Hicks having to edit lines from his twelfth, unaired appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Hicks maintained his "Warrior for Truth" persona, claiming all the while that they were "just jokes." He didn’t intend to offend because he was just kidding. Having it both ways is perhaps impossible for a figure under public and media scrutiny, but what about your classmates, colleagues, and friends? What about the coffee shop denizen? Are they for real, or are they joking? Why is everyone so veiled in irony? Princeton Professor Christy Wampole writes,

Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn't own anything he possesses.

#81
January 9, 2023
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A Prayer for a New Year

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

#80
January 3, 2023
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Recommendations and a Request

Charles Mudede is a senior editor at The Stranger, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper,” and he recently started doing a video series called Mudede’s Book Nook.

He writes, 

Because a big part of the only life I’ll ever have  is devoted to books, the best thing I can offer during this holiday season is a recommendation of five books you can read by a fake fire (like the one in my cottage) or gift those who happen to be close to your life or who you want to be close to your life. 

In the third installment of the series, Charles recommends Boogie Down Predictions, which, as you know, is a collection of essays edited by me and published by Strange Attractor Press. See the video here (You really want to watch this):

#79
December 9, 2022
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2022 in Recordings

Today is the Last Bandcamp Friday of 2022, during which Bandcamp waives its fees and all of the money spent goes to the artists. So, spend recklessly.

Read on!

Zeal and Ardor Zeal and Ardor (MVKA): Mixing black metal with Black gospel, Zeal and Ardor is a dirge of a different kind. There’s a darkness here other metal bands attempt but never achieve. Band leader Manuel Gagneux once said Z&A is an answer to the question, “What if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus?” Wonder no more. This is their best yet.

#78
December 1, 2022
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Walk This Way

I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop.

Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn't agree on the impact or the import of it. Well, while I was factchecking my memory, I found out there's already a whole book about it! There's no doubt it was a special moment in music, a new node in a burgeoning network of sound.

-- Notebook cover I made from the sleeve of Run-DMC's Raising Hell (1986).

#77
November 21, 2022
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What's in my NOW?

This week is all about paper and printed products: namely notebooks, zines (old and new), and books, of course.

Read on!


What's in my NOW?

#76
November 16, 2022
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The Grand Allusion

Well, I just signed on to write The Grand Allusion for Palgrave Macmillan as a part of their Pivot series! So, I thought I'd repost my early thoughts on the idea.

Here's my mock cover. Like a lot of allusions, I did it for yuks:

And here's the tentative Table of Contents:

#75
November 3, 2022
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Raking Leaves: A Prologue, an Excerpt, and an Anniversary

For the last couple of weeks I've been busy with writing and editing The Medium Picture (forthcoming from Zer0 Books) as is usual these days, but also made a public appearance, released a new excerpt, celebrated an anniversary, and kicked off a new project (more on the latter later). All the details follow.

Read on!


#74
October 21, 2022
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Disguise the Limit

When we try to draw a line at the limits of our comfort with technology, we make a statement about what we think is too much technology. My favorite example is the bicycle. As much as I love computers and stereos, the analog interface of the bicycle is the perfect amount of technology to me. The difference in realms of these contrivances-- analog/digital, muscular/mental--may have more to do with our comfort than we think.

"Mind didn't actually emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter."
– Charles Mudede, August 2012

"I like simple instruments," Brian Eno told Deirdre O'Donaghue of KCRW in 1985. "I always have. I've always used very simple synthesizers actually, and I prefer them because I don't particularly care to be faced with limitless possibilities. I prefer a slightly more constrained situation."

In a 1999 article for WIRED called "Revenge of the Intuitive," Eno expands the idea, pointing out that a proliferation of options on a new device reduces the intimacy one can have with it. He's writing specifically about recording technology, but the concept applies far more broadly. You can't get facile with a tool if its use keeps changing. You can't have a relationship with something if it keeps becoming something else.

#73
October 15, 2022
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The Advent Horizon

The inevitable upgrade annoys us before it delights us and then becomes commonplace and indispensable. Advances in technology are disruptive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. They are the initial conditions from which our media is born. Feared and disparaged at first, all of our technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in. They change our minds. They change our relationship with our world and with each other. The era in which we are born helps determine our comfort with new technologies. Not unlike learning new words, every new advance is a new addition to our media lexicon. Our media vocabulary includes those technologies with which we feel facile or familiar.

I call the line we draw at the edge of our comfort zone with new technologies the advent horizon. It’s a line we draw as individuals as well as a society at large. In his book Human as Media, Andrey Miroshnichenko describes it in terms of eras, writing, "If an era is shorter than a generation, the balance between the speed of technological innovation and the speed of cultural adaptation breaks down." We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines.

At the DMA conference in 2011 in Boston, I described it as follows:

#72
September 27, 2022
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When Everyone's a Winner

Celebrity, fame, and influence are inherently asymmetrical. They all require a one-to-many style of distribution akin to the wide-range broadcasting model of legacy media. As that media infrastructure has given way to smaller and smaller platforms serving smaller and smaller audiences, the ideas of celebrity, fame, and influence have been reconfigured and need to be redefined.

"It’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning." — Charlie Kaufman, BAFTA, 2011 [1]

The dictum, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," for which several sources have claimed credit, is widely attributed to Andy Warhol. [2] Regardless of who first said it, those 15 minutes of the future are the popular origins of the long tail of fame. Though the phrase has been around since the late 1960s, its proposed future is here.

In his 1991 essay, "Pop Stars? Nein Danke!" Scottish recording artist Momus updates Warhol’s supposed phrase to say that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 people, writing about the computer, "We now have a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, 'unpopular' pop musics, each perfectly customized to our elective cults." [3] In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger’s 2002 book, he notes about bloggers, content creators, comment posters, and podcasters: “They are famous. They are celebrities. But only within a circle of a few hundred people.” He goes on to say that in the ever-splintering future, they will be famous to ever-fewer people, and—echoing Momus—that in the future provided by the internet, everyone will be famous for 15 people. [4] Democratizing the medium means a dwindling of the fame that medium can support.

#71
September 20, 2022
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Boogie Down Predictions is Out Today!

Boogie Down Predictions is out today!

After a global pandemic, all the supply-chain delays, and a printing backlog, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is available! You can get yours directly from Strange Attractor, the MIT Press, or the source of your choice (yes, including that one)! It's also in fine bookstores everywhere today. It is well worth the wait, but the wait is over!

Below is a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine.

Read on!

#70
September 13, 2022
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Turn on the Bright Lights

A few weeks ago, I looked up a song on YouTube, got busy with something else, and inadvertently let the algorithm run. When I started paying attention again, a new Interpol song was playing. Realizing both that I hadn't listened to them since their debut and that the new song reminded me of the Afghan Whigs, I decided to play catch-up on both of their respective discographies.

After I listened to various records from both bands over the next few days, I found myself returning to that first Interpol more than any of the others. Soon, it was the only one I was listening to -- and I haven't stopped.

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Turn on the Bright Lights (Matador Records) came out exactly twenty years before my recent kick began. Plagued by comparisons to Joy Division, Interpol's debut is rich with many other veiled and not-so-veiled influences. The shoe-gazing tendencies of Ride and My Bloody Valentine, a jaunty bounce more akin to Echo and the Bunnymen or the Doors than to their contemporaries the Strokes, and a post-punk gloom Ian Curtis could only dream of are all inherent in the early Interpol. Recorded as it was in November of 2001, 9/11 also hangs heavy over the record.

#69
September 11, 2022
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Clay Tarver: Gone Glimmering

I've been wanting to share another piece from my latest interview anthology Follow for Now, Vol. 2 for a while now. When I was trying to figure out which one, I kept coming back to my 2014 interview with Clay Tarver.

Clay's a guitarist, a writer, a director, and as you'll see below, he's been doing really cool stuff for a few decades now.

In addition, this one features cameos by Greg Dulli and Donal Logue.

Read on!

#68
September 6, 2022
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Through Being Cool

When I was growing up, my family moved every two years. We did stints all around the South, in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama again... My dad is an air traffic controller and to move up in that career, you have to move on. Apparently, out of consideration for me and my kid sister, we made all of these moves during the summers between school years, except one. In the fall of 1984, we moved from Level Plains, Alabama to Richmond Hill, Georgia a few weeks after the school year started. That one was to be the defining relocation of my early life.

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The factors involved in this move’s impact on me are several. I was in the throes of adolescence. It’s a time of trying on identities and seeking out tribes. I'd tried various sports, played Dungeons & Dragons for a couple of years, but by eighth grade I had discovered the activities and music that still define me today: BMX, skateboarding, punk rock, heavy metal, and hip-hop. I wasn't a fully formed personality yet, but I had a few, new ideas. That move would help solidify my self like nothing before it.

At Richmond Hill High School, they had a leveled system within the grades. Group A was remedial, group B was regular, and group C was advanced. Ideally, one would take all of their classes within their group. I was an eighth-grade C, but some of the 8C classes were full. So, I had a few 8C classes, a two 9B classes, and 8B P.E. Yeah, it was confusing.

#67
August 31, 2022
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A Now Worth Knowing

 "...Our technology has produced the vision of microscopic giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time out of the picture, contracting space to a spasm." – Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

"How did you get here?" asks Peter Morville on the first page of his book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005). It’s not a metaphysical question, but a practical and direct one. Ambience indirectly calls attention to the here we’re in and the now we're experiencing. It is all around us at all times, yet only visible when we stop to notice. In Tim Morton’s The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), he explains it this way:

Take the music of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Early postmodern theory likes to think of them as nihilists or relativists, bricoleurs in the bush of ghosts. Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” features a repeated sample of her voice and a sinister series of recorded messages. This voice typifies postmodern art materials: forms of incomprehensible, unspeakable existence. Some might call it inert, sheer existence--art as ooze. It’s a medium in which meaning and unmeaning coexist. This oozy medium has something physical about it, which I call ambience.

#66
August 24, 2022
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A Bad Miracle

"I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like." – Shinya Yamazaki in William Gibson's All Tomorrow’s Parties

While Jordon Peele's Nope (2022) is many things--a modern take on the classic monster movie, a study of spectacle, a comment on our relationship with nature, a reminder of the erasure of the Black presence in cinema--it's also a critique of our media-saturated society. My interest in media drew me in to that aspect of the film over any of the others. If you've seen the trailer, you know that the main characters are Hollywood horse wranglers, descendants of Alistair E. Haywood, the black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 series of photographs of a horse running, one of the first motion pictures ever recorded. The technological mediation of experience is less of a theme of the movie and more of a condition of the environment it's set in.

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[Please note: If you haven't seen Nope, but plan to, there are spoilers galore below.]

#65
August 17, 2022
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Don’t Believe the Hope

As you know, my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journey's Beyond the Human Body, is available as an open-access .pdf or a lovely paperback from punctum books! You should snag a copy, if you haven't already.

Here's a playlist I put together featuring all of the songs and artists discussed in the book, including Godflesh, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celtic Frost, and Jawbox, among others.

Play it loud while you read this edited excerpt from the book.

#64
August 10, 2022
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Exit Interview: Marnie Ellen Hertzler

A small band of rapping misfits convened in a wasteland commune, weed-bent on making music for their masses and a self-sustainable community for themselves. Sadboy, Keem, Mijo, RyBundy, Huckleberry, Phong Winna, Benz Rowm (RIP), and Champloo Sloppy set up camp in the desert near Crestone, Colorado. Having gone to high school with most of these guys, Marnie Ellen Hertzler followed with her camera.

Ostensibly making a documentary, Hertzler manages to capture a mix of both pre-apocalyptic dread and post-apocalyptic glee. The result is a delirious detour through the chaos and contradictions of coming of age in a future that’s already ending. The cast of characters listed above and the setting—as desolate and demanding as Tatooine or Arrakis—make Crestone a mesmerizing study of people out of place, a whole subculture uprooted and relocated on the edge of the end of everything.

Hertzler is currently in production on her second feature called Eternity One about a disappearing island community.

#63
August 3, 2022
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Midsummer Updates

In spite of projects chronically getting pushed back, I've managed to get some of them out into the world: a book here, a zine there, a poem, new shirts and stickers...

What follows is a round-up of my friends' and my current projects, forthright and forthcoming.

But first...

Here's a quick clip of me talking to Eiliyas of Mixtape Menage about the impact of Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause," which I first heard on the Plywood Hoods' OG BMX videotape "Dorkin' in York."

#62
July 27, 2022
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Exit Tragedy: Introduction to ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY

Last week, my new book Escape Philosophy: Journey's Beyond the Human Body was released by punctum books. Many thanks to those of you who helped make it a #1 New Release and a Top-Ten Bestseller in Heavy Metal Music Books on Amazon!

Here's an Escape Philosophy playlist I put together featuring all of the songs and artists discussed in the book, including Godflesh, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celtic Frost, and Jawbox, among others.

Play it while you read the Introduction from the book below.

#61
July 20, 2022
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For Real This Time: ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY is Now Available!

Well, I feel foolish... and I apologize for this extra email.

That last newsletter went out earlier than planned and its announcement was premature (Shouts to the troopers among you who found the book on Amazon anyway).

Please read the following as if you didn't already see it. Hey, maybe you didn't!

My new book, Escape Philosophy, really is available now!

#60
July 14, 2022
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ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body

I am very excited to announce that my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, is now available from punctum books!

Using extreme examples from heavy metal music and science fiction and horror movies, Escape Philosophy is a survey of all the ways we try to shuck off the shackles of our physical forms.

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The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

#58
July 14, 2022
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Flowers for QAnon

In the three weeks between January 6 and January 20, 2021, I followed the white rabbit, as early Q followers would say. I read QAnon blogs and watched Q-commentators (QTubers). I even signed up for a Parler account. Even in that brief span, I found an alternate reality where the pope was arrested amid blackouts in several countries, and the US presidential election was to be overturned at any moment. The Storm was supposedly upon us. Again.

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Whether QAnon is a religion, a cult, a joke, a political movement, or just an online game gone awry, Robert Guffey's Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump (O/R Books, 2022) is his attempt to figure it all out. Guffey's pedigree in this area is unmatched. His first book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (Trine Day, 2012), explores every conspiracy theory out there. Here's a prescient line from Cryptoscatology: "In the modern day digital environment truth is as malleable as viscous liquid. You can't make up anything that won't come true a few minutes later." Ever since Q emerged online in 2017, he's been trying to figure out the appeal, the movement, and its meaning. His efforts are all chronicled in Operation Mindfuck.

Where cognitive dissonance is the default state of mind, QAnons' frequent refrain of "Do your own research!" echoes that of Behold a Pale Horse author William Cooper. Cooper was viewed as a "P.T. Barnum-style huckster" in UFOlogy and conspiracy circles alike. Guffey quips, "Compared to QAnon, William Cooper was Buckminster Fuller." Tarpley Hitt writes in The Daily Beast, “There’s an aspect of QAnon obsession that resembles demented literary criticism: every current event encoded with hidden meanings, global criminals desperate to signal their crimes through symbols, millions of messages waiting for the right close reader to unpack them.”

#57
June 29, 2022
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Summer Reading List, 2022

After a break to move everything out of the house, we're back! And there's a lot to get into this week.

Starting with...

Summer Reading List, 2022

For 20 years I’ve been bugging my literary-minded friends and colleagues about their most anticipated or most loved summer reads and compiling those lists into our annual Summer Reading List. To celebrate two decades of The List, I asked more contributors than ever, and I asked them all to recommend just one book.

#56
June 21, 2022
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The Unseen in Between

I live at one end of a two-block stretch of road in the middle of Savannah's Baldwin Park neighborhood. Since there are only two consecutive blocks, the traffic is minimal. The end I live on dead ends into the back of an abandoned shopping center. There were two extant businesses in there when I moved here three years ago, but they've since closed up like the rest of the place--one in step with the pandemic, the other much more recently. Across the vacant parking lot and the street, a nightclub and a carwash stand empty. The front of the nightclub insists "no drugs," and the carwash sign still advertises "the best hand job in town."

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Living adjacent to the blight of these buildings seeps into your psyche. It makes it easy to feel left behind. The closing of another business can feel like the end of the world. The end of a street can feel like the edge of the earth.

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#55
May 31, 2022
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Shining Girls' Tangled Timeline of Transgression

“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes' easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.

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Harper’s havoc reaches roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s and the 1990s. It’s a tangled mess of totems, trauma, and one who got away. As Harper puts it, "There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random." Beukes had her own method, mess, and snapshots to deal with while writing. She had a murderous map, full of "crazy pictures, three different timelines, murder dates…" She told WIRED UK, "It’s been completely insane trying to keep track of all of this."

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#54
May 22, 2022
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Generation X was a Band

Before it was the name of a Douglas Coupland book, and before it was the designation of people born from 1965 to 1980, Generation X was a band. Formed in 1976 during the first wave of UK punk by soon-to-be pop icon Billy Idol, Generation X also included bassist Tony James. When Idol went solo in the early 1980s, James went on to form Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

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If you were looking to get Cliff's Notes for the 1980s in musical form, you'd be hard pressed to find a better exemplar than Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1986 debut, Flaunt It! Tony James described them as "hi-tech sex, designer violence and the fifth generation of rock and roll." A product of punk in the same way that Big Audio Dynamite and Devo were, their techno-pop sound was laced with samples from movies and media. Even after all of the work Trevor Horn had done defining a new sound for the decade, Sigue Sigue Sputnik was still exciting. At the time, for better or worse, they sounded like the future.

In a move of unfortunate prescience, the band sold brief advertisements that played between the songs on the record. Ones for i-D magazine and Studio Line from L’Oréal share space with fake ones for The Sputnik Corporation and a Sputnik video game that never materialized. James touted the spots as commercial honesty, adding, "our records sounded like adverts anyway." Where the punk that preceded them railed against the dominant culture, Sputnik was out to to mirror it, to consume it, to corrode it from the inside. To interpolate an old Pat Cadigan story, the former was trying to kill it, the latter to eat it alive.

#53
May 3, 2022
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Booty from the Bargain Bin

In 1994, David Baker had just left Mercury Rev, the band he co-founded with Jonathan Donahue, and started a new thing called Shady. I was a big fan of the first two Mercury Rev records, 1991's Yerself is Steam and 1993's Boces, but I'd yet to hear the Shady record, World. Baker enlisted the help of members from some of my other favorite bands of the time: Bill Whitten (St. Johnny), Jimi Shields (Rollerskate Skinny), Adam Franklin (Swervedriver), Sooyoung Park (Seam), and Martin Carr (Boo Radleys), among others. In an interview that year, he talked about never having money for records growing up, and how his musical influences were all found in thrift stores and bargain bins. I remember being really excited by this. Not only because of the kaleidoscope of sound it conjured but also because I too scoured thrift stores and bargain bins for records and tapes during my formative years.

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Our discretionary budgets back then were small, and cassettes cost around $10, while CDs were closer to $17. I remember the music industry titans at the time promising that the CD would soon cost the same as a tape, promising a cheaper CD. Instead, CDs stayed the same and the tape eventually edged upwards. LPs were all but gone with fewer and fewer new releases even appearing in the format.

Prohibitive pricing notwithstanding, buying music was always a risk. We might have heard a song or two from a friend or seen a late-night video, but most of what one might buy was unheard, a mystery that could turn out to be quite disappointing. I never knew when I was going to have enough money to buy another record, so in the event that I had money for a record in the first place, I had to hope whatever I was buying was good.

#52
April 18, 2022
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Friendship and the Deleuzian Delusion

Michel Foucault once said that the twentieth century might eventually be considered Deleuzian, and he still may end up being right. Gilles Deleuze, and his frequent cowriter, Félix Guattari, wrote some unignorable books in the late decades of last century, the two volumes, 1983's Anti-Oedipus and 1987's A Thousand Plateaus being the two most prominent in either’s canon. Each has an extensive body of work in his own right, but Deleuze casts a large shadow over his friend and colleague. Such a shadow in fact, that it prompted Ian Bogost to Tweet a while back: "Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?"

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Assemblages, rhizomes, bodies-without-organs, repetition, difference… I can’t claim to have an answer to Bogost’s question, as I can’t claim to understand much of the Deleuze that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of it, and a lot of it more than twice). I do know that a lot of it is difficult simply by dint of the contrarian angle on subjectivity: These books challenge the fundamental way(s) most of us tend to feel that being in the world works. Eugene Holland opens his 1999 book, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, with the obvious statement: “The Anti-Oedipus is not easy to read.” Regarding writing it with his coauthor, Deleuze said, “Between Félix and his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how.” And about A Thousand Plateaus, he mused, “Now we didn’t think for a minute of writing a madman’s book, but we did write a book in which you no longer know, or need to know, who is speaking…” On page 22 of the latter, they even write it out, in black and white: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is compose of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” How is one to make sense of bastard philosophy such as this?

I once asked my friend and mentor Steven Shaviro what path to take as I embarked upon the plateaus alone for the first time. He suggested using Claire Parnet’s Dialogues as a sort of crib notes to the two major volumes mentioned above. Dialogues was compiled between the writing of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze talked about the book’s in-betweenness. That is, its being between both the two books and the three authors, writing that what mattered was “the collection of bifurcating, divergent, and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without going from one to the other.” And so it goes.

#51
April 6, 2022
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The Science of Sound and Silence

In our most tranquil dreams, peace is almost always accompanied by quiet. Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they did so, like tea leaves before the addition of hot water.” Reading silently was subversive.

We often speak of noise referring to the opposite of information. In the canonical model of communication conceived in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, noise is anything in the system that disrupts the signal or the message being sent.

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If you’ve ever tried to talk on a cellphone in a parking garage, find a decent sounding radio station while driving through a fly-over state, or follow up on a trending topic on Twitter, then you know what this kind of noise looks like. Thanks to Shannon and Weaver and their followers, it’s remained a mainstay of communication theory ever since, privileging machines over humans. Well before it was a theoretical metonymy, noise was characterized as “destruction, distortion, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages.” More pointedly, in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali conceives noise as pain, power, error, murder, trauma, and youth—among other things—untempered by language. Noise is wild beyond words.

#50
March 30, 2022
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Swarm Cities: Location is Everywhere

Each time we move to a new city, we make memories as the city slowly takes shape in our minds. Every new place we locate — the closest grocery store, the post office, rendezvous points with friends — is a new point on the map. Wayfinding a new city is an experience you can never get back. Once you’re familiar with the space or place, it’s gone.

Since moving out on my own, I’ve gravitated toward cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago. Externalized memories built in brick and concrete. It reminds me of a passage from Steve Erickson’s novel Days Between Stations:

“What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?”

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#49
March 22, 2022
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Three Years of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

This week marks the three-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release, the Preface from the text, and some information on a related forthcoming project. Enjoy!

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We launched Dead Precedents properly at Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago with readings by me, Krista Franklin, and Ytasha L. Womack.

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#48
March 16, 2022
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Joy Division: The Rest is Mystery

In late May of 1980, Joy Division had planned their first tour of the United States. Planned, that is, until just a few days before they were board the plane, Ian Curtis committed suicide. Life had been a few notches higher than hectic for Curtis for the months before the planned tour. He was juggling a family (Debbie and their one-year-old daughter Natalie), a girlfriend (Annick Honoré), and a band on the verge (they’d just recorded their second record, Closer, and were all set to tour the world), not to mention his epilepsy getting the better of him both on and off stage. They’d had to cancel several shows in England, and he’d already made an attempt on his life on April 6. All of the above would have been heavy load even without the disorder. Something had to break.

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In Jon Savage's recent This Searing Light, the Sun, and Everything Else (faber & faber, 2019), Liz Naylor says, "My thing about Joy Division is they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's just the noise around where you are." Even with his life’s story on film with the Anton Corbijn-directed Control (2007) and many books written, there remains so much mystery around Ian Curtis. “He seemed able to surrender control of his life as if it was nothing to do with him at all,” his widow Debbie wrote of him at the time of his overdose. Indeed, he wasn’t much in control as the band went straight back to doing shows. “Ian went straight from his suicide attempt to a gig at Derby Hall, Bury, on 8 April 1980,” Debbie writes in Touching from a Distance (faber & faber, 1995). He only sang two songs at that fabled show, which ended in an outright riot. Something, nay, many things had to break.

Just four years earlier on June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played another much-fabled show in Manchester to a few dozen people and even more empty chairs (the scene in the movie 24-Hour Party People supposedly has it about right). Supposedly everyone there left that show dead-set on starting a band. There’s even a book about it: I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World by Dave Nolan (Blake Publishing, 2006). In attendance were Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto (of the nascent Buzzcocks, who organized the gig but weren’t ready to play), Kevin Cummins (photographer who took many great pictures of the British punk and post-punk scene, including the one above), Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Mick Hucknall (Simply Red), Tony Wilson (TV personality and future Factory Records owner), Paul Morley (writer; chronicler of the Factory scene for NME; future co-counder of The Art of Noise), Rob Gretton (future manager), Martin Hannett (future producer), Morrissey (duh), and Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook (who of course went on to immediately start the band that would become Joy Division). Peter Hook gets all of this down in his Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (!t Books, 2013), and like Debbie Curtis, he was right there when it all went down, albeit facing different facets of there and a different facets of Curtis.

#47
March 8, 2022
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Revealing Poetry: The Art of Erasure

Michel de Certeau wrote in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, "Books are only metaphors of the body." The move to digital texts, which is gaining more and more zeal by the day, has put the not only the fetishization of books as objects in jeopardy but also seemingly the want or need for them at all. As Jonathan Safran Foer (see below) puts it, “When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.”

Erasure poetry both deconstructs and demonstrates the idea that books are bodies, playing operation with structure, doing surgery on syntax. My dear friend Danika Stegeman LeMay has a full book-length erasure of the text from God is in the Small Stuff for the Graduate by Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz (Barbour Publications, 2004). It's called called GOD IS IN THE MALL, and an excerpt is available in Vol. 30 of Word for/ Word. This page gets right to it:

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Danika's is the latest example of this practice I've seen done well, but the first was a while ago. Maybe it’s apt that I don’t remember exactly how or where, but I came across Tom Phillips‘ “treated Victorian novel,” A Humument (Tetrad Press, 1970), two decades ago at San Diego State University. Phillips took William Mallock’s A Human Document (Cassell Publishing, 1892) and obscured words on every page, leaving a few here and there to tell a new story. It’s part painting, part drawing, part collage, part poetic cut-up, and all weirdly, intriguingly unique.

#46
February 28, 2022
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Announcements, Annotations, and an Anniversary

What follows is a brief round-up of various writing and drawing I have out this month and some news about forthcoming books and such.

But first, it's the...

15th ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLOW FOR NOW:

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#45
February 16, 2022
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Interfaces of the Word

The designer James Macanufo once said that if paper didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Paper, inscribed with writing and then with printing, enabled recorded history. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler once wrote that print held a “monopoly on the storage of serial data.” Even as writing represents a locking down of knowledge, one of “sequestration, interposition, diaeresis or division, alienation, and closed fields or systems,” Walter Ong pointed out that it also represents liberation, a system of access where none existed before. After all, we only write things down in order to enable the possibility of referring to them later.

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Herbert Bayer, Diagram of the Field of Vision (1930).

People would make fun of you if you were working on software for communicating with the dead even though that’s half the purpose of writing. -- @mathpunk, November 1, 2014

#44
February 12, 2022
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Twin Peaks: The Forest of Symbols

Today is David Lynch's 76th birthday, and in his honor, I'm sending you this brief bit about one of his several masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday, Mr. Lynch!

[Portrait by Chris Mars.]

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#43
January 20, 2022
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My 2021 in Links and Images

This being the first full year that I've done a newsletter, I'm doing a quick recap of 2021 in links and images. Between writing and drawing and publishing, I did a lot of stuff this year! You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it. Check it out!

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Here we go:

  • I had two poems in the April issue of Anti-Heroin Chic.

  • My MF DOOM security-envelope collage (above) was featured in Shadows of Tomorrow: DRO CUP’s DARK SIDE OF THE DOOM Pink Floyd/DOOM Mash-up & Visual Album (MF DOOM Tribute) on The Witzard.

  • I had a poem called "San Diego" in the inaugural issue of Sledghammer Lit.

  • And an excerpt from my next book for punctum books, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (see below), is available on the Malarkey Books site.

  • I have a short story called “Hayseed, Inc.” in Cinnabar Moth’s anthology, A Cold Christmas and the Darkest of Winters.

  • I did a fairly lengthy interview with Fifteen Questions.

  • I also did a “Quick 9” interview with Fevers of the Mind.

  • Todd L. Burns did an interview with me for his Music Journalism Insider newsletter.

#42
December 27, 2021
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When is a Gift Not a Gift?

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct," opens Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction epic Dune. Herbert says of the novel’s beginnings, "It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheroes were disastrous for humans." The concept and its subsequent story, which took Herbert eight years to execute, won the Hugo Award, the first Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the minds of millions. In his 2001 book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, chronicler of cinematic science-fiction follies David Hughes writes, "While literary fads have come and gone, Herbert’s legacy endures, placing him as the Tolkien of his genre and architect of the greatest science fiction saga ever written." Kyle MacLachlan, who played Paul Atreides in David Lynch's film adaptation, told OMNI Magazine in 1984, "This kind of story will survive forever."

Writers of all kinds are motivated by the search and pursuit of story. A newspaper reporter from the mid-to-late-1950s until 1969, Herbert employed his newspaper research methods to the anti-superhero idea. He gathered notes on scenes and characters and spent years researching the origins of religions and mythologies. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist with his finger closest to the pulse of the Universe, wrote in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986), "The life of mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance… Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being." Dune is undeniably infused with the underlying assumptions of a powerful mythology, as are its film adaptations.

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After labored but failed attempts by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Haskell Wexler, and Ridley Scott (the latter of whom offered the writing job to no less than Harlan Ellison) to adapt Dune to film, David Lynch signed on to do it in 1981. With The Elephant Man (1980) co-writers Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, Lynch started over from page one, ditching previous scripts by Jodorowsky, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Frank Herbert himself, as well as conceptual art by H.R. Giger (who had designed the many elements of planet Giedi Prime, home of House Harkonnen), Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and Chris Foss. Originally 200 pages long, Lynch’s script went through five revisions before it was given the green light, which took another full year of rewriting. “There’s a lot of the book that’s isn’t in the film,” Lynch said at the time. “When people read the book, they remember certain things, and those things are definitely in the film. It’s tight, but it’s there.”

#41
December 19, 2021
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Music Journalism Insider Interview

Todd L. Burns interviewed me about my writing for his excellent Music Journalism Insider newsletter, about which he writes,

The newsletter collects some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; highlights news about the industry; and features interviews with writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens.

I first pursued music journalism as a career path in the early 1990s, and though I've strayed, I still feel related to it at least tangentially. What follows are Todd's questions and my answers.

Music Journalism Insider Interview:

#40
December 13, 2021
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The Surface Industry

I don’t know any casual skateboarders. Everyone I know who’s ever done it has either an era of their lives or their entire essence defined by it—the rebellion, the aggression, the expression—inextricably bound up with their being. It’s the way you wear your hair and the way you wear your hat. It’s the kind of shoes you wear and which foot you put forward. It’s the crew you run with and the direction you go. There is something about rolling through the world on a skateboard that changes people forever.

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The author at age 11 and the beginning of a very long road.

Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in the sixth grade, I knew it was going to be a part of my world. I first stepped on a skateboard at the age of 11. There are scant few physical acts and objects that have had a larger impact on who I am and how I am. Through the wood, the wheels, and the graphics, skateboarding culture introduced me to music, art, and attitude. Riding a skateboard fundamentally changed the way I see the world. "Skateboarding is not a hobby,” says Ian MacKaye, “and it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.”

#39
December 7, 2021
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Top Ten for the Year End: The Last Bandcamp Friday of 2021!

As much as I clearly see the problems with year-end lists, they're one of the things I look forward to in the waning days of the year. Whatever negative feelings you have about them, mine is meant as a celebration: These are the sounds that kept me going this year.

To be honest, I listened to Elder's Omens (Armageddon Label), which I missed last year, more than anything else this year, but the ten records below came close. There are a lot of favorites, old and new. And, as they have been for the past several years, all of the links below lead to the album's Bandcamp page where available. Today is also the last Bandcamp Friday of the year, during which the site waves all of its fees, so these artists will get all of the funds you send their way. No one has been able to tour properly for quite some time, so... Please spend recklessly.


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#38
December 3, 2021
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A Year with Open Parentheses

I journal like a lovelorn kid in middle school. And I've been keeping one almost since I was a lovelorn kid in middle school. My senior year of high school, I met a girl. I started writing poems about her on receipts, handbills, and other various scraps of paper. My writing about her was so prolific, I decided to start keeping it all in a notebook. I've been keeping such a notebook ever since. Around the same time, I started keeping a day-to-day journal as an extension of the poems. I've kept some form of both off and on ever since.

For me, journals are like asides that begin and never end, parentheticals or paratexts, running on in the margins of other projects. Though the writing and thinking there ends up in other pieces that are crafted for consumption, the content of the journals themselves is for me only. Mine are full of drawings, diagrams, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books.

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In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Walter Benjamin, discovering Paul Virilio, and the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started a research journal. I've kept three different analog journals ever since.

#37
November 16, 2021
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Bedlam and Then Some: This is Not the Future

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. "All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

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A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to "see" the future. Citing Karl Marx’s reification and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” Spaceships, robots, cyberspace, the metaverse: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science-fiction books and movies. "In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which the technology of the future is going.

Derek Woodgate, founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach. Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points." As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

#36
November 10, 2021
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A Message in a Bottleneck

The first time I heard a compact disc was in middle school. My best friend’s dad had just replaced his entire collection of LPs with CDs. They sat in stacks beside the apparatus that played them. They were like extra-terrestrial objects, something from the science fiction we were into at the time. They were also off limits. We were not allowed to touch them.

One day my friend’s dad sat me down on the couch in the middle of their den. The angled sunlight of autumn streaked through the limbs and leaves of the trees in their small front yard. Four large brown cabinet speakers, sitting one each in the corners of the room, were all pointing directly at me. He put on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” from Yes’s then-new record, 90125, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. The opening samples stumbled around the room before the lead guitar took hold. That first horn stab, a sample from "Kool is Back" by Funk, Inc. (which is a cover of “Kool’s Back Again” by Kool and The Gang) leftover from Trevor Horn’s Duck Rock sessions with Malcolm McLaren, sounded like a laser shot from space. I remember being able to feel Chris Squire’s bass thumping through the floor as Trevor Rabin’s guitar swirled and the samples bounced around the room and my skull to dizzying effect. That day the CD earned and maintained its otherworldly reputation in the history of recording formats, supplanting the raggedy cassette and the woefully outmoded vinyl record.

#35
October 29, 2021
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Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Due to global supply-chain issues, our edited essay collection, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, has been pushed back until early next year, but it’s already available for pre-order! If you're interested in owning a copy, you can help the book immensely by preordering it. If you're unsure, here's a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine. Read on!

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Over the past few years, I gathered up some friends, and we’ve been working on an edited collection, sort of a companion to my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Now, the mighty Strange Attractor Press is putting it out. Check out the cover by Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil!

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#34
October 22, 2021
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Sleeper Effects: Aiming Your Appetite

Why does the world now look more like a William Gibson novel than one by Arthur C. Clarke? Gibson’s friend and cyberpunk peer Bruce Sterling explains:

Because he was looking at things that Clarke wasn’t looking at. Clarke was spending all his time with Wernher von Braun, and Gibson was spending all his time listening to Velvet Underground albums and haunting junk stores in Vancouver. And, you know, it’s just a question of you are what you eat. And the guy had a different diet than science fiction writers that preceded him.

In Doug Pray’s 2001 DJ documentary Scratch, which features interviews with many prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This struck me as odd since the main thing that people remember about that song is the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins.

“Rockit” is also a total anomaly in the Herbie Hancock catalog, but it brought scratching to the mainstream of the mid-1980s with its infectious hook, based on the frenetic but rhythmic scratches of GrandMixer DST alongside Hancock’s catchy keyboards and mechanized vocals. It also had a major role in setting off what would become the turntablism movement—the DJ as musician. The documentary—and other media artifacts like it—represent sleeper effects we're not likely to acknowledge in the moment. We don't necessarily choose the few things that most influence us.

#33
October 13, 2021
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Shatterday: The Quantum Creativity of James Ward Byrkit

We’ve all been at a dinner party where the dynamic seemed to sour as the night progressed. One person is being uncooperative, the conversation turns to uncomfortable subjects, or the personalities assembled just don't quite sync up. What if the dynamic not only went bad but also splintered into multiple realities? James Ward Byrkit’s 2013 film, Coherence, chronicles just such a gathering.

Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. The film is the product of pulling back. After working on big-budget movies (e.g., Rango, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of Clue written by Erwin Schrödinger, Coherence works because of its limited initial conditions, not in spite of them.

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Coherence (2013): A story small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality.

#32
October 7, 2021
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The Medium Picture Object Thing: A Photo Essay

Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter's first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It's about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It's well worth checking out.

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For the cover of his heady tome, Hofstadter carved two wood-block objects such that their shadows would cast the book's initials when lit against a flat backdrop. He went the extra step of working in the initials for the subtitle as well.

Earlier this year, I was inspired to emulate Hofstadter's sculpture. I found a way to put the initials for my media-theory book-in-progress, The Medium Picture--TMP--into a similar configuration. This is one of my early sketches.

#31
October 3, 2021
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