My last post has caused deep offence to the people that most deserve it. The rubbery jaws of toy poodles descend upon me from academes in Sydney to Toronto with much growling and slathering – I am obviously a fool to not have caught the genius of this pre-ordained movement to be. I dared to call it rubbish, because I am obviously pig ignorant – that same ‘dumb fuck muso’ as once described.
Try actually reading …
James Bridle has said many times that he thinks that “New Aesthetic” is a problematic coinage, that it’s “rubbish.” … The true problem with the New Aesthetic is that it truly is a new aesthetic. It has to become one, even if it doesn’t much want to be one. - Wired
Problem is, that the person who originated this whole thing also describes what is happening as ‘rubbish’. Everybody gets so excited about how clever they are with their extrapolations they forget that there was an original pure idea that they are ruining. These are same fools that turned the funny wordplay of Deleuze into 6 unit theory subjects. They’re the ones that turned music studios into anechoic chambers. They pin dead butterflies to boards in museums and they think a pipe is more than a pipe. All archaeology, no ideas.
I am not cowed by you at all. I laugh at you, because you can’t see without the vision of a peer-reviewed article blocking your view. You can’t bugger other philosophers without a powerpoint that tells you how. You can’t even shake your arse. You are frightened of music and want to make it ‘sound art’ because that drains it of sex. Your future is the 1970s reheated and you probably think this blog is about you, don’t you? Don’t You?
I’ll give you a film reference because you understand those and I’ll even make it German. Sometimes the best response to the adult world is to bang a drum, scream and never grow up.
If such falsehoods are to be denounced I will continue to present myself as a ‘dumb fuck musician’ with great pride. Being a musician means more to me than any academic rank, any sophistry, journal or whatever parasite that might try to take advantage of music. And if that tweaks the noses of some East Coast American University well too fucking bad.
And stop reading my blog.
1. Why do you want to work in academia then?
2. A meal ticket is reforming SH.
3. No won’t stop reading your blog nor apologising for admiring SH, solo work and postings on the blog.
4. I’m surprised you still talk to Stephen Jones.
5. Why do you assume every academic and every tertiary educated student want to big note themselves?
6. Note to self stop numbering.
1. To teach others how to create and maybe happy.
2. A very small meal that would be.
3.
4. Both of them, often as I can.
5. Because it’s an athletics carnival with ‘research’ being the bag race.
6.
Academics tend to stay on the meta-level and so to void bodies and practices of their libido and life. Meta-music tries to replace music. My problem with Zizek is that he takes the sex out of Deleuze’s buggery and replaces it with meta-buggery. I think you’re too hard on the 70s, which were full of many ideas and experiments that were too quickly forgotten. However, one big thing in the 70s was Freudism, and this should have been forgotten, but people like Zizek keep trying to bring it back in reheated form as if they were going beyond people like Deleuze and Lyotard and many others. Why not?, as long as it not imposed as a meta-language that gives us the key to novels, films and music. I think that going to the meta-level is quite a good thing, otherwise you couldn’t write your blog, and neither could I mine. The problem is when these micro-meta moments get unified into a devitalised desexualised know-it-all stance. So I am glad that you are not intimidated.
Ah, I will never stop knowing that the pinnacle of my life source will be to some day share a cocktail or two with you. Ellard, you are a total fucking enigma and probably the most peacocked version of that particular enigma that the world has ever allowed to be in existance
God (whoever – whatever) bless you man. The laughs you create will always reverb in my little super tiny little world.
Good show man.
Fuck em up Tom!
Mr. Blake: I was worried that people might not understand where the buggery came about. I sent them to you rather than try figure it out over here.
I don’t like the meta because it means if I say ‘your film sucks’, they can (and have said) “I’m not making a film – I’m examining the idea of making a film” (and therefore not open to the critique). It’s just one of many manoeuvres that avoid a fair fight. Along with ‘research’. When people “research with a film” it’s like a get-out-of-engaging-an-audience card in Monopoly.
The 70s were very sexy. They do need tour guides but maybe not opening a theme park called SEVENTIES WORLD.
I did not notice the 70s, I just lived through them naively, not realising that they would come to an end, despite having done two years of math at Uni. At the very end of the 70s and the very beginning of the 80s I was in a band called the SLUGFUCKERS (so you can see that I was quite impartial about the buggery-question). Noone liked this, so I immigrated to France.
I like the image of the flying fish: it lives in the water (do you know David Foster Wallace’s speech “This is Water”? It is better than people say. Don’t buy the book, it’s a rip off. You can find the text here: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/martinme/Thisiswater.htm). The fish can jump out into the meta-level (the air) and see what is normally imperceptible, this is good. But it can’t stay there and set up class and give us all lessons. The flying fish spends most of its time in the water, and this is good too. I hope that its meta-jumps change how it swims when it falls back.
Mr. Blake: indeed I see you as the go-to expert on buggery not only through writing. You might remember I chipped in to pay for the Slugfuckers album. I didn’t give a flying fuck about dolphins. Instead I think the more marbles you throw on the ground the more people get dancing.
It’s not that people didn’t like it, it’s just that having pulled the cracker open, got the hat and the joke, people wanted to get the plastic toy.
(If you hadn’t hit Gay Paree you’d probably be on a committee about teaching schedules with Graham Forsyth and me right now).
I’m going to read about the fish today, but first I’ve got a heavy date with some 20th century painters that I’ve just learned about and developed a major crush.
“1. Why do you want to work in academia then?”
Implication: If you want to work in academia, you better get on the same bandwagon as everyone else, no matter what construction flaws you perceive. Yes, critical and independent thinking is all very well, but let’s face it, human beings primarily want to set up tribes.
Awesome, keep the nose-tweaking up!
Working in academia is still working. All the usual workplace hopes and disappointments apply. Certainly you’ll meet a bunch of people that never left school, but there’s plenty of those in government and the military as well.