remix of D_MAGIK gif
October 2014
you can have your cyberpunk-near-future-with-elves
Science fiction writer Charles Stross announces his intention to write fantasy novels for the poorest of reasons: because you don't know how your smartphone works, saying "Siri, where can I get a hamburger" is kind of like a magic incantation, if you do in fact, get a burger.
One of the purposes of reading is to learn, and the John Campbell style of sf had side benefits to its escapism. Editor Campbell made his authors (Heinlein, Sturgeon, Del Rey, et al) explain how things worked. If the premise of your story is "we live in a universe governed by arcane rules of magic," a limited amount of useful information can be gleaned there. Stross's already-extant "Laundry" novels, combining Len Deighton-style spy stories and watered-down Lovecraft, have a limited repertoire of magical effects and those aren't terribly interesting. Once you've used the severed hand of a dead convict to make yourself invisible you can't really employ that trick again.
Lovecraft himself didn't believe in "magic," which is one reason his supernatural stories are so scary.
Escape into a world of elves because we can't understand our smartphones also sounds like a political cop-out. Leave the phone production and marketing to our betters, those shadowy world-dominating corporations that are also beyond our comprehension. Heaven forbid we should look to fiction for tales of little-guy empowerment -- better to keep talking to Siri and having our witch and warlock fantasies.
A writer who does very well what Stross wants to do is Michael Swanwick (in novels such as Stations of the Tide and The Iron Dragon's Daughter). Cyberpunk meets elves and fairies, yes, but you are usually aware, as a reader, that these tropes are locked in deadly antagonism.
Addendum: To sum up, if it needs summing up: If the world's awash in puerile fantasy the solution isn't to write more of it. Stross has a point about the difficulty of continuing to write SF when less people believe that, say, faster-than-light drives are possible. Yet the first story I read of his, a few years ago, was "Bit Rot," which had AIs making long star voyages (precisely because of that physical limitation on human space travel) and something going horribly wrong. It combined horror and SF in a way that seemed relevant to the present, more so than recycling Tolkien for an age of microchips.
precursors of solo jazz appropriation
I tweeted last year* to Michael Bell-Smith that dump.fm-ers had done about 100,000 riffs on the '80s style "solo jazz" paper cup design (example) not realizing he'd done the work above, "Flowers/Jazz," in 2010. The image is from his website; according to Foxy Production they are ink jet prints on canvas, 30 x 20 in.
A detail of the above photo shows these are smashed or flattened cups:
These are quite elegant but somehow lacking the gritty street panache of melipone's Master Shake Solo Jazz cup, ben_dover's Brute solo jazz and copulating solo jazz corn ears, cloroxxx's solo jazz headphones, etc etc.
*am not proud to use that phrase but don't know how else to describe what happened
A.G. Cook on PC Music
Let's take another look at Simon Reynolds' putdown of the PC Music label:
...whether you should even go deep with something so determinedly shallow as the PC Music aesthetic is debatable. But then these sort of operations are never content to just be blank, are they? They can't resist showing how thought-through and conceptual the whole thing is. Pointing out the references, the precursors, the intent.... Just like the art world.
If there's any basis for this it can't be found in this interview with PC Music founder A.G. Cook (hat tip kiptok); it seems quite unpretentious and un-conceptual, while clearly not stupid. Below are a couple of excerpts that get at what this label and producer are about. It's not clear from the music how fully collaborative Cook's production role is -- the various PC artists have a unified sound and intent that makes me think he (or he and someone else at the label) have their hands in everything. Would like to get in touch with one of the artists, say, GFOTY, and ask "who is GFOTY, is it just one person, and if not what is the breakdown of who does what (vocals, production, songwriting, etc)?" Not that it ultimately matters in a post-identity world, it's just a nerdy itch of wanting to know what individual consciousnesses contribute.
Here's AG Cook, from the interview, on his approach to the label:
I've always enjoyed playing a bit of an A&R role, not just through finding new music but also by embracing the major label concept of "artistic development". I particularly enjoy recording people who don't normally make music and treating them as if they're a major label artist. Often we end up developing a really strong musical and visual identity, which is still kinda personal and idiosyncratic. Working with all these different personalities and styles has become a core part of how I think about music, to the extent where, for me, it's becoming a style in itself. So starting a label isn't just a way of releasing all this stuff, but it's also a way of operating as a larger structure that can still be categorised and understood. The label's called PC Music, which alludes to how the computer is a really crucial tool, not just for making electronic music but for making amateur music that is also potentially very slick, where the difference between bedroom and professional studio production can be very ambiguous.
This seems neither studiously "blank" nor excessively "thought-through and conceptual" so Simon Reynolds must be getting those pejoratives from somewhere else. Here's Cook on his musical influences:
...those [UK garage and David Guetta] are both pretty big references for me! I'm relatively up to date with chart music. I like keeping track of the mega-producers who have been responsible for endless hits over the last decade or two – Max Martin is probably my favourite, I'm usually drawn to his tracks whether they're for Britney Spears, Taylor Swift or Cher Lloyd. Also producers like Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who worked on great New Edition and Janet Jackson albums and then gradually evolved their sound to make songs like "U Remind Me" for Usher. I listen to quite a lot of RnB; I really like Cassie – some of her tracks epitomise the minimal, synthetic, almost robotic potential of commercial music, something which can sound crap when it's done badly, but can also become a sort of perfect, untouchable product when done in the right way. I always find any kind of "extreme" pop music interesting. One of my favourite albums is Cupid and Psyche 85 by Scritti Politti, which was a conscious decision to take pop music and make it as shiny and detailed as possible – it's a really beautiful balance of great hooks, rhythms and sounds. There's so much other stuff that has been influential: J-Pop, K-Pop, Nightcore, Ark Music Factory, Hudson Mohawke and Nadsroic, Frank Zappa's Synclavier stuff, Jumpstyle. Recently I've been really into Ukraine's Eurovision 2013 entry, "Gravity" by Zlata Ognevich. It's the same few chords throughout, but they keep moving them around to create different sections – it just feels like it's infinitely escalating, really clever.
untweeted tweets
cable shouter chris matthews imagined his own head being lopped off and began baying for war -- others also imagined that: his, not theirs
radical group of adult-onset diabetes sufferers "takes out" the inventor of honey mustard
we tortured some folks - no big deal - in hell
spring, and the gentrifier next door is back at work on his flagstone patio ergonomic hot tub tiki grill combo whatever #noise
fetus one direction is not about training the unborn to vote for the right (something i learned from my involuntary "trends" sidebar)
if you're going to write about the Whitney's need to show net art it might be best not to mention brad troemel or the jogging
one who truly hated post-internet art would never write about it ["net art acceptable to galleries" is how i'd define it and leave it there]
years ago a friend with an MFA who was also a programmer explained that hacker aesthetics came down to "is it cool" or "is it shit"
"animal rescue person found with a house full of decomposing pet bodies" is essentially the neocon plan for the middle east