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.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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
…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
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
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