Tuesday 25 December 2007

A Christmas Message from Simon Saint-Simon

Christmas is considered by many as a time for coming together; families re-convene around the triumvirate extravagances of tree, gift and fayre, friends return home to renew old acquaintance and in general we are encouraged to relax into the soporific of the familiar. Or so goes the shiny and dare I suggest, lightly sparkling veneer.

Not to say that any of the above is not true or worthy of celebration but I would like us all to take a moment this Christmas to think about what 'coming together' could mean for us and for others, beyond a surface that intends to cleverly emulate, for the purposes of stimulating seasonal hysteria and light hypnosis, both frost and opulence simultaneously.

At this part of the service other commentators would no doubt ask us to stretch ourselves (but only a little, please, it is Christmas and you deserve a 'break') and cast our minds outside of the turkey shoot, beyond the frivels and dribbles, to those less fortunate than ourselves this Christmas time. Of course it is in the nature of things, just as poverty and famine is dragged behind the cart of wealth and gluttony, that those who instruct us so tenderly to spare a thought for the welfare of others near (and far by george! because most Christmas goods now come from 'far' and we have brave boys wherever 'far' may be to make sure they jolly well keep on coming) are themselves far (but in this case noticeably and away) more wealthy than the masses who have so callously forgotten those 'other' masses who often, especially in densely populous areas, live right next door.

So as part of my Christmas message of Love! and Yes! I would like us all this year to join together and spare absolutely no thought at all whatsoever for those less fortunate than ourselves. After all in many cases we will spare the thought and then find, through our own moral or fiscal decrepitude, that there is in fact no-one less fortunate than ourselves and that thought will then be wasted, contributing to global emissions of vapid, disposable pre-packaged thoughts busily consuming the skin of organic, re-usable thoughts, permeating the atmosphere, that protect us from cosmic evisceration and complete self-annihilation.

I would also like to remind the belligerent Scrooge-like do-gooders who do spare a thought for others that sparing a thought is not the same as sparing any expense or even spending any of that spared expense upon the welfare of others not fortunate enough to have any expense to spare. Of course if such unfortunates had spared a thought, or had any thoughts to spare in the first place, then they wouldn't be in such an ill-conceived situation of their own un-making. Christmas is a time to bear that in mind.

It is of no less a surprise that our monarch, The Queen, traditionally along with the Son of the King, Cliff Richard, our nation's key purveyor of timely Christmas reminders, also reminds us at Christmas that any attempt to spare thoughts when actual fiscal expenditure is expected, for example when purchasing goods, services or Cliff Richard merchandise, may result in you being invited to spend Christmas in Her Majesty's own seemingly inexhaustable (if they let off rapists and the rich with community service) hospitality. becuase you know what when you look more than skin deep we're all rich really and we're all rapists and after all it is Christmas. And Christmas is a time of peace and goodwill to all men, and as any Iraqi or Allied soldier will tell you peace comes at a price, and we all know too well ourselves goodwill is at the bosses'/landlords'/coppers'/magistrates'/_______s' discretion, so anybody getting anything for nothing, other than me, this Christmas would frankly be an insult to God, Queen and Country!

Picture this. A Christmas postcard of my own childhood. It's Christmas dinner and the knives are out...for the prodigal son hath returned to the fold, and after the elders have miraculously turned their upteenth carafe of Christmas spirit into a rich, golden stream of unflushable rennet, they decide with telepathic unanimosity that the true meaning of family togetherness at Christmas is that all members of the family, tribe, hamlet... in fact all of God's Creation, should agree with their own hastily assembled Christmas gift of missionary positioned zeal and compassion, an unconditional (well maybe on the condition of tougher border controls, ID cards and the threat of ASBOs) acceptance of the world's less fortunate as less fortunate. And in doing so they are doing the poor unfortunates a favour. And in a Christmas miracle of sorts the spirit of togetherness ensures my Christmas companions are simultaneously being done the same favour by Wise men and Women the world over.

So in the spirit of the LoveYes! distribution don't waste a second upon woolly dreams of a closely-knitted Christmas, rather meditate solely upon yourself and gaze deeply into your own annus horribilis. Somewhere deep inside you will find yourself, entangled amongst everybody else, all the unfortunates writhing as one rippling, quivering mass of lubed-up pathos. As soon as you cease to think of these characters holed up inside you as 'other' (and therefore as less) there is suddenly a breaking of the waters and a fluid 'coming together' of petroleum-based explosions, a worldwide chain of orgiastic couplings and de-couplings rather than the isolated farts, snores, fatuous hurrahs and forced guffaws belched out this Day of Our Lord by those incestuous conjoined twin colossi; alliance and filiation.

So please join with us the NymphoYo this Yuletide in discovering the true meaning of x-mas in pledging yourself to do the right thing and in good grace fall out with each other for Christs' sake! Of course to fall out in this manner is not an equivalent to falling out of a house or a taxi (or even metaphorically), bruised and cold, into an ice-hardened vomit-slaked rut. Rather it is the essential expression of the LoveYes! axiomatic; an acceptance of each other's good fortune to be no more than one self and the acclesia of all creation.

Monday 10 December 2007

NoXRave

(This is an entr'acte plucked from the between degenerative genetic tissue of malformed cultural deposits...)

"While starving myself with tiny, underwater kisses, miniscule bubbles filled with gaseous reminders excitedly began to cuddle up upon the rubbery back-annals of my exposed lobes. From within this watery tension seemingly meaningless trifles, that would have usually seemed a million lights from home, cracked the muddy channels, lined as they were with the sciatic tendrils of fibre optics, their endings be-knighting the river water with an output of rock steady plasma."

Via satellite, retrospectively, with time differences perfunctoraily abridged and only a sanitary delay, images were comfortably delivered of Brasilian avant-retro-pop group CSS live at Glastonbury, claiming to be the only ‘Third World band’ on the bill. Sadly this self-affirmation was no victorious cry of defiance, no revolution of the industry. This was no more than ‘Knebworth?! Are you ready?!" rock-toric. The band played off and on but seemed to know not what they said or rather what they had signed.

Through this statement from the mud they sucked up the ghosts of this tourist shanty town’s ‘disappeared’ ( the roundabout radicals, the tie-dyed in the woolly mind hippies and even the gangs of thieving scallies) and processed their ideas into a finished plastic novelty. The band’s kitsch bric-a-brac reference-image library was a crash course in lazy laser surgery, a tour de force in how to shambolically, and with only half-realising, carve up the cash cow but keep the heart beating (to extend my analogy: a stadium rock group like U2 would have no such ethics, they just mince the fucker and sell the hamburgers). From the LoveYes! perspective Lovefoxx’s passionate scream was simply making sure that we were aware that, despite the popularity of off-the-shelf Third World full of artificial sun , fruit acid and Epoverty, there was a new organic product on the market, dreamed up by indigenous modern culturalists and full of natural ingredients. look around you for Sao Paulo, Brasil and the entire Third World actually has a burgeoning ‘middle class’ too!

The essence of ‘development’ (‘overseas’ or internalised to the nth degree) is the technological construction of a layer or layers that control and obscure the unequal distribution of opportunities. Our view of this ‘diversity’ is thus prescribed and homogenised so as to most effectively circumvent an orgiastic explosion of difference that might threaten to overwhelm these health surfaces that separate us from each other and each other's experiences.

(An important aside: This is why it is necessary to hold up another lens or mirror (media) to this view; in order to grasp something of a world the that appears somewhat at least the wrong way round).

I believe this to have been the case when Marx and Engels waxed lyrical about the forces unleashed by capital and industry and well before, right back to Kubrick’s projected Ulyssean vision of ape-like humanoids out clubbing. This technological stratification of the social throughout history is the ideological parallel of Descartes’ rudimentary anthro-pologising when discussing physical human extension beyond ‘the self’ on his mission to grasp the motor of being.
We are made a propos of ‘development’ in the sense described more readily in terms of demographics and marketing; both the study and the practice of increasing the ‘middle’ (i.e. consuming) classes (and reducing the numbers of 'producing' i.e. working classes). The growth in the global middle class can therefore be understood not as the erosion of poverty but its de-politicisation. technology may re-engineer certain forms of production but this conceals rather than eradicates poverty. Thus our impoverishment is consolidated as quickly as we become more crippled in trying to grasp it.

When the next World Party tells us we are all children of the same mother make a closer inspection of the sensational Damien Hirst-designed bridge umbillicisng us between continents. Funny how it’s shaped like a syringe and appears to be pushing in poison and sucking up money. But you shouldn’t feel bad about it. No sir! as the only real difference between 'us' and 'them' is the bang from the crack we on!

“Nothing had changed, the monster was still breathing and, to tell you the truth, since the operation takes a better photograph. But off screen the nights here are still illuminated only by desperation and made sticky with longing and ignorance…”

“In Other news: Once exiled Gilberto Gil named Brasil’s Minister of Culture and closer to home (is it? where am I exactly?) Peter Garratt joins the Cabinet of Kevin Rudd”

The examples of ‘virgin’ ethnic territory being coated in make-up and sprayed with the spot light are too numerous to detail as they occur with every human reflex whether on the other side of the world or amongst the interstellar chaos of your diminishing responsibility.

As usual and as intended what this extended public thought-wank (of course due to the above described extension and stratification of ‘public access’ everyone is waxily onanising, yet understandably no-one is listening and we are alone again) condenses into (?) in my navel as a question of how to make a ‘political’ culture in an 'economy of survival', whether actual or spiritual. Should CSS not exploit markets in their own or other continents and become fantastically successful? Do they not deserve it? Should they not share their music? Such questions seem fairly ridiculous.

Rather what we are saying is that we are still bored of being instructed to have fun and our emotions harvested and processed, our native lands re-developed. We are old and tired of it! (our teeth are too long for it, our eyes too big and hairy to hear of it!). I believe the pulse of a band like CSS is fun-oving ,iving and sharing and we want this and not all the other shit that we are told must come with it along with the army of mimiks who vacantly rape every moment of all its magic.

"In the steam of the bathrooms of the chateau bleu, the shadow of the negress dances, stimulating a longing for more resistant, persistent dreams with less empty gestures and more intense intimidating meanings.

Yet even now through my TV eyes they have captured the image of my obsidian charge and are crystallising her movements ready for the next dawn's mock-up street markets".

We don’t need a Nu Rave. We need Love!Yes?

Tuesday 13 November 2007

LoveYes! III - A Rough Cut

Fundamental to cinema was its exquisite representation of the multifarious and expanding relationships between ‘containers’ rendered as fixed and discrete by a human and cultural consciousness corralled into this a persuasion by a combination of hegemonic markets and and a falling back upon base instincts due to survival sickness. Analogous to such containers are the frames upon a piece of film or within a videogram. At its core the moving image captured by a camera is one photograph after another registered on a strip of film as separate frames. Yet by arranging these individually frozen moments into a sequence, moving them from one to another, we create not only movement but with movement we make all manner of connections, whether emotional, philosophical or scientific (concepts ad infinitum) between frames and ‘limitless’ data within the frames. 1+1 = 3 (or 4 or 1,000,000!).

Film criticism has often and rather simplistically, opposed the ‘plenitude’ of the image to the ‘cut’ of the edit in terms of ‘a little death’. However by focussing instead on the essence of cinema, its bringing of motion to the photographic, the violent separation becomes instead a loving embrace between movements, moments of communication. The further this connection is stretched (yet maintained) the greater the tension. The energy imbued within this elastic relationship is invested by the ‘authors’ of these movements; in industrial terms both those who were part of the production and the ‘consumer’. However rather than passively receiving, the ‘spectator’ can be actively constructing meaning and investing desires (authoring) while almost fully immersed in the data field created. The art therefore is to maximise the investment of energy between these ‘containers’ (frame, thought, idea, gesture, spectator, bit, beat, user, whatever (although I find ‘figure’ an eloquent encapsulation of the many inadequate distinctions)). Brecht might have called such a process distanciation but currently within the LoveYes! paradigm it is conceived as much as a channel or shifting data stream than as a process. I have referred to this more recently as the ‘libidinal bandwidth’.

From this perspective it soon becomes apparent that montage is a motor that although most fundamental to (and eloquently brought to the surface by) cinema, it is itself a force that extends and expands far beyond this media into every corner of human perception. It is no surprise then that this conception of film editing, discovered perhaps by the Soviet film-maker Dziga-Vertov was reconfigured by the Dziga-Vertov group of late 60’s France as ‘Montage at all levels of production”

Due in no small amount to the current availability and affordability of certain types of production capital our current major tool should be music (see the glut of entries to this blog by one Mr. Bob Swans). If we are to gouge, with any success, cupid’s arrowhead out from the body politic under dissection, then perhaps it is best returning to our mainline cultural concern.

I never really liked the Manic Street Preachers.

I liked them even less without their original spit-ritual force and songwriter. They seem to define at least one aspect of yesterday’s null state (a)git-pop (where guitars Blair and hands wring out in a muted apology by the citizens of Jericho to the chaos outside). These monsters stalk a suburban De Chirico/Lowry world, microbes evaporating from a plastic reality in every and no direction on a scientifically austere canvas, under a looking glass left vacant. Chill ceramics, organic food fayres encased in vacuum-formed polymers, lined by Mondeo and Celica). A series of empty gestures, middle managers in guerrilla-garb, youth make-up & rock-out pose to hide the fact that underneath the onion skin of image, meaning and identity they are devising still more ingenious ways to talk knots around the issue before dumping it in the canal, avoiding forever addressing the problem without appearing to jump ship like rats. The process makes thick, glossy, smooth and increasingly impenetrable the epidermis of the ‘political’ class. We simply slide off the silicone finish, no closer to the buds and bellows of our desire. The Harvest for the World was always just a seed toss. Political pornography.

More subtle and complex contributions to the Spectacular Dance of the Liberals (sold out I’m afraid) are perhaps those entrances made by U2 and now even Radiohead. Yet to be quite even-handed their spectacular anality and grandiose cultural impact deserves a more joyous shotgun autopsy.

But rather than embark on endeavours similarly frigid to our death watches, by talking any further about what we are about and about to do (surely it is more exciting to be sluiced through by s-lang pumped with run-on syntax errors and be truly a bout de soufflé!) I would like to now conclude this opening Attunement (a method I believe necessary due to what is currently a crisis of faith in our cultures) and direct you to the Acclesia of conceptual elements and concrete figures (and whatever other object or container comes to hand and can be thrown about) we hope to now concieve with every yard of flesh we can offer and to our last contracted, prolapsed gasp.

Monday 29 October 2007

LoveYes! II - (Time and Space = Movement) = Love

Since last time we spoke I have been found floating. I’m not sure for how long but I am here and I must be floating because I can’t feel anything, well anything apart from myself but one feels quite different when you can’t feel what you’re touching. Anyway I’m glad you’re here, even if you are made up. After all it is communication that matters, the essence of the cosmos…

…Now where were we up to? That’s right I was regaling you with the fine morals of a group of people known as the NymphoYo who had partly by will and partly by accident embarked upon an atomic mission called LoveYes! Here we tread softly off on a tangent (which is of course, the entire point) to ensure you realise that the name of the group or the endeavour (or what-have-you) is not really important: it's always merely a linguistic container into which the interstellar, genito-urinary signal is poured like ambrosian liquid into an elastic jelly mould. The signal doesn’t have a name, like all effective communication it is beyond language, the name is simply the imprint the signal makes upon collective human consciousness as it bounces off the mirrored plate with which we attempt to capture it. Alas with this rudimentary process we only admire and re-direct the signal, rather than truly grasp it.

As I remember the last time we spoke the subject in question was time and I suggested that perhaps the NymphoYo were actively attempting to produce more time and thereby achieve a more ecumenical distribution of LoveYes 'units'. So that this process may be fully understood we must first make an important distinction or rather, a syllogism; that Time and Space suffer no distinction.

The Twentieth century was perhaps the epoch when the history we had clung on to (often for grim death) ended. Grand narratives, driven forward by the dialectical engine, upon mythical parallels of linear progress, were derailed, carriages exploded by what Deleuze coined as ‘Un method du ‘entre’’ or ‘et’ (the method of the ‘and’, the connection between). It seems that the revolutionary gangmasters of art and science, despite tribal differences, seemed tacitly concerted to absolve the separation between articles, items and concepts by demonstrating the subtle and complex relationships shared by an overwhelming and incalculable number of ‘binary’ variables. Yet rather than any measurement made between say Einstein and Schrödinger's cat it was the distance between Eisenstein (or more probably Bergson and Thalberg) and Jean-Luc Godard that more eloquently articulated the passage of an age, from industrial reproduction to a super-reality. Yet although the moving image is one of the many tools employed by the LoveYes production and distribution it is not cinema (or television or video)that is so important. Rather it is the cinema’s fundamental method that will endure beyond the art form itself and is therefore of most use to the ‘mediation’ of love. Namely: montage. I hope this relatively shallow yet celeritous descent below the surface has whetted your frontispiece somewhat. Until next time dear friends when once more we can dive together.

Yours truly and forever

xx Simon Saint-Simon xx

Thursday 11 October 2007

LoveYes!

In our time we have it all, yet all seems lost. Sublime love has been surfaced and impaled upon superficial experience, sold in error to the highest bidder rather than the greatest lover. It is easy for love to become an oversight when its cheap substitute penetrates us in a constant dribble, leaving only shallow puddles and damp squibs. We zip up and head for work so often feeling soggy and unfulfilled.


Numbers dry us. Workings out cajole atoms towards friction, producing warmth and, as particles cool and solidify, shelter, made from blocks of too rigorous calculation, stricken it seems as the mausoleum. Yet within like without all is not dead. From the ground there is an enticing scrape and rattle, while above and all around the elements balance out the equation until the tough fabric of our conclusions is revealed to be only the party-mask of mass opinion, now flapping ragged and strewn around our see-through, climbing frame home. In empirical reality forces of nature are parsed by algebra of need until even fixed systems erode. In the face of this intoxicating, entropical effect we have increased the accuracy of our calculations exponentially; creating by such a process an almost perfect simulacrum of the forces that threaten the structures we have erected to defend us from these very forces!

So even as the capital’s Kapos apply their maquillage and pose-fight ‘guerrilla’ for magazine supplements, we are directed by a gesturing with the weapon, a swivelling of the hips, to look for precedents, to turn back the page and breathe in the aftermath of a profound dialectic: the reduction of the rebel to bloodhound.

The rock n roll years that preceded are now available as a haircut, a compilation, a t-shirt and as a story; an interchangeable surface paraded seamlessly through the gait and across the palimpsest of long dead teenage bodies. They are shopping mall coffee shop zombies feeding upon life force through an all over perfect-skin contagion, reproducing an ossification of difference. But then we are now all officially teenagers according to health care and demographics. A void cocoon painted luminous by the seraphic glow of a cellular screen.

That golden age has long since turned autumnal holocaustic glow and been re-packaged for the endless night as neon gloss. Although the germ of this seismic shift was contained in the milliseconds of an atomic reaction high above Hiroshima, the mutant blast that greeted the residents of Furue, Takasu, and Koi that morning was not just a false and poisonous dawn. For preserved somewhere within impenetrable plastic fossils are creatures in amber, evidence that the projections of capital can never completely resolve, become singular with that which they devour, our organic nature. For the multitudinous refractions of money to breed there must always be virgin territory, more atoms to be cracked. To run out of these is not just a shitty arse but the end of history.

We may be down to the last few sheets but there is still always time…

…a commodity dear friends, we have sadly run out of for now. So until the skin-crawl of survival recedes again and we can continue together our affirmation of LOVE! then please, Ladies and Gentlemen, won’t you be so kind to as join me on the dance floor to have our collected assholes interruptured by none other than our very own Electronic! Enema! Operator! Mr. Bob Swans!

Yours truly,

X Simon Saint-Simon X

Herr Bob Swan's presents...

OKTOBERFEST MIX

Traxxx

Sparks-Tryout for the human race(kafka+BoBedit)
Roctakon-More of what i need
Yeah yeah yeah's-Gold lion(Diplo mix)
Shadow dancer-End hit
Boys noize-Wu tang battery(battery pt2)
Hocus pocus-Heres johnny
LFO-Freak
Best Fwends-First $ money maker
Crookers-Atomic Baile Boy
Fatboy slim-Champion sound(Switch remix)
Crookers ft Mc Leka -Para de Grainha
Blaqstarr-Shake it to the ground(Claude von stroke mix)
Comfy in Nautica-Panda bear
David e sugar-Oi Berlin this is London(Jesse rose garage dub)
Timbaland-Misscomunication(The Bloody Beetroots mix)
Charlie Fanclub-Dirty dick hazzard
Jean nippon-Raw
Krazy Baldhead-Moth3f2ck8z(Midfield general mix)
Party crashers unite-Put your hands up for NY
Gucci soundsystem-aCarpenter