Steven Shaviro posted a link to this on Twitter. It’s a mini-documentary about Seattle writer, artist, theorist, and filmmaker Charles Mudede by Kindred Media. It’s an interesting glimpse into the world of an unsung thinker. Continue reading “Charles Mudede mini-documentary”
Simon Reynolds: Erase and Start It Again
Simon Reynolds writes about music like a cross between a die-hard fan and an open-headed academic, sitting him decidedly on the fence between the pit and the podium. From this spot, he’s able to write both enthusiastically and critically. His books, Bring the Noise (faber & faber, 2007), Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 2006), and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Routledge, 1999), cover the major movements of the of underground music over the past thirty years and provide a crash course in the underpinnings of today’s mix of repurposed technology and styles, recycled beats and sounds, and the attitudes and energy driving it all.
Fellow traveler and Disinformation Editor Alex Burns joined me in asking Simon a few questions about his books, his writing, and what’s coming up next.
Alex Burns: What prompted you to make the rise-fall arc of John Lydon and Public Image Ltd’s “careering” central to Rip It Up And Start Again? What lessons could emerging artists learn from how PIL handled its contract negotiations with Virgin Records and the “fault lines” between Lydon, Jah Wobble, and Keith Levene?
Simon Reynolds: PiL were probably my favourite postpunk band, certainly the one that had the most impact on me. But beyond the personal inclination, it just seemed to be objectively the key narrative in terms of explaining how punk turned into postpunk, and then how postpunk eventually fell into disarray. You had the central figure of the era, Johnny Rotten, the punk saviour, the man everyone was looking towards, completely confounding expectations and going on this total art trip with PiL. You had all the incredibly influential rhetoric that Lydon, Wobble and Levene put out there about rock being dead and “obsolete”, rock as something that should be “cancelled”, “a disease” is one word they used to describe it. And PiL’s diagnosis of punk’s failure on a musical level, that it had been the last gasp of traditional rock. A lot of people followed Lydon’s lead. But the saga of how it all went wrong for PiL is classic, because the irony is that this band opposed to all things “rock” were undone by all the archetypal rock’n’roll bullshit of drugs, ego, money disputes, mismanagement (they didn’t have one, basically… indeed they could probably have used a proper manager, but Lydon had been scared off that because of his experiences with Malcolm McLaren). It would make a great VH1 Behind the Music story, actually. They also came unstuck in a way that was emblematic of postpunk in general, which is reaching a kind of dead end with experimentation and deconstruction, with their third album Flowers of Romance. That came out just at the point at which postpunk turned to new pop, the more optimistic and accessible music of Orange Juice, ABC, etc etc.
In terms of the contract, I’m not sure they actually had that great arrangement with Virgin. A manager would have been handy in that respect. I think they were indulged by Virgin, given lots of studio time, but then again Virgin probably charged them for using the Manor and the other top of the line studios. Virgin supported Lydon because they could see he was obviously the most important front man to come out of Britain since Bowie. But they also tried to persuade him to reform the Pistols at one point: Branson played him the demos by the Professionals, the band that Paul Cook and Steve Jones formed, and said “isn’t this great Johnny? How about reforming the band?”. There was a hope that he would revert to doing more accessible music and become a superstar. Which is what Lydon actually tried to do eventually, but still under the PiL brand.
AB: You wrote about the “dark side of paranoid psychology”, “totalitarian undercurrent,” and “music as a means to an end” of Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P-Orridge’s first mission. How significant is Throbbing Gristle’s re-emergence and what new alienations could this new mission evoke?
SR: I’m not sure what it signifies beyond the fact that the band members felt like doing it and that at this point in history the climate for them doing that is more welcoming than it has been for a while. Also, they are probably keen to reaffirm their place in history, which is totally understandable. I was a bit surprised how little impact their return to the scene had– I thought it would be a much bigger deal, if only because it’s such a great story for magazines. But I guess this sometimes happens, especially when a band has been so groundbreaking, they suffer a little bit when they return to a music world that they’ve changed. Because everyone’s like, big deal. I thought the album was really good myself.
AB: Your analysis of music and political subcultures highlights a “lifecycle” (i.e., experimentation, discovery, a golden or “heroic” age, entropy, and reemergence or revival). What can other analysts and critics learn from this approach? What are the possibilities and limits of a “lifecycle” model?
SR: It’s hardly an original way of looking at cultural movements! But if it is a cliché, it’s one of those “cliché because it’s true” situations I think. In my experience, music genres or scenes seem to coalesce out this long-ish period of germination, disparate things gradually come together; there’s some kind of spark or flash-over moment when it all converges and reaches fruition, the momentum gets going, the sound evolves and quite quickly reaches maturity; after this “prime” period, things start disintegrating, the center will not hold, all kinds of tangents and offshoot genres split away while a purist faction try to freeze the sound at what they consider is the golden moment. All the energy ebbs away leaving a lot of people feeling disillusioned and burned ‘cos they believed so fiercely in it. Then the sound or scene is filed away in the archives where it might be excavated by some future generation.
In some ways the emergent phase in the most interesting phase, because often what’s going on around the proto-scene is a period of general disparateness and entropy, no clear direction in music culture. And those periods often are actually quite rich, especially when you look back at them with hindsight, and you wonder what the people trying to launch the new thing were complaining about! Like with punk: it took about five years to get off the ground, people like Lester Bangs were using the term “punk” to signify te need for some kind of pomposity-removing revolution, the people reclaiming rock from the bloated superstar elite, he was doing that from about 1970 onwards; there were various false starts, like with the Stooges, or pub rock in the UK. Then finally it all takes off with Patti Smith, Ramones, then the Pistols and Clash. But you look at the early Seventies music scene that they were so fed up with, and it seems–compared to now–jam-packed with exciting things. All quite disparate maybe, but still… what on earth were they so depressed for? But it’s also interesting to look at the emergent phase of the movement-to-be, all the lost bands like the Electric Eels in Cleveland, proto-punk outfits here there and everywhere that are isolated and at odds with the general tenor of things, bands that could either be ahead of their time or behind-of-their-time, it’s not at all clear. And gradually they all find each other, and BOOM!.
Roy Christopher: Your brand of para-academia puts you on the fence between journalist and scholar. Do you find this vantage point to be more of a boon or a burden?
SR: I can’t write from any other place! Well, that’s not quite true: I can and have done more standard music writing. I do quite a lot of fairly straightforward record reviewing, and have in the past done newspaper-type profiles and reporting, still do it now and then. But the mode that I naturally fall into, if left to my own devices, is somewhere between theory and journalism. I find it a good place to be in terms of the work produced, because pure academic work doesn’t have much place for enthusiasm, or for a flamboyant prose style. And there’s all that slog to do with footnotes and talking about your methodology and your theoretical framework, all that protocol. Academic work on music also suffers from its slow turnaround, it always seems to be dealing with stuff that’s from years and years ago. I like the rapid-response nature of journalism. On the other hand, I like to have an extra dimension or two to work with than just the basic consumer guidance level of responding to a record or profiling a band. Larger resonances to do with society or culture beyond music.
So I would say definitely it’s a boon in terms of the work produced, as discrete pieces of writing. In terms of work on the macro level of a career, I think the scope for doing this kind of theory-informed music writing has definitely shrunk significantly. Theory is much less of a cool or sexy thing than it was in the 1980s when I started. But it’s also to do with shrinking space, smaller word-counts, and the decline of spaces like the alternative weekly in America and the weekly music press in Britain. Those were havens for pretentious music writing, but with the exceptions of art magazines and places like the Wire, most music magazines and newspapers now seem to have an orientation toward the layperson. You can’t assume too much esoteric knowledge of music. But above all, it’s the shrinking of space that’s key. If a review or piece is being pared to essentials, the first thing that goes is the extraneous theory, the references to thinkers outside the world of pop music.
Personally I haven’t felt this as a source of anguish that much, because I’ve gradually lost interest in doing the critically theory-infused approach, through not finding much in that world very exciting in the last ten years or so. There was a time when going into St Mark’s Books in downtown New York, or its London equivalents like Compendium, would get my pulse racing with excitement. But not for a long while. So you won’t find too many name-drops of philosophers in my writing these days. I still have my favourites, but they’re old ones, and for whatever reason they seem to have less applicability to the music I like. I also feel like I’ve reached the point where I’m on my own trip, as a thinker about music; I don’t need to fuel up on other bodies of thought so much.
RC: What are you working on next?
SR: I just finished an expanded/updated version of Energy Flash (a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy), with stuff on the last decade of electronic dance culture, and that is due out in early 2008, timed for the 10th anniversary of the book and the 20th anniversary of rave. Right now I’m about to embark on the companion volume to Rip It Up and Start Again, which will include interview transcripts, essays, and a discography-with-commentary dealing with all the esoteric postpunk music I couldn’t cover in the original book. That should be out in 2009. I’m also drawing up plans for my next book proper, but for now I’ll have to keep that under wraps.
New Technology: Exploration versus Utility (Microblogging and Its Discontents)
As much as I think it’s cool that I can update a tiny piece of text on my website from my phone (that little speech bubble on the right side), I’m still wondering and exploring what kind of utility Twitter and its ilk are really offering. I often find my friends’ posts mildly interesting — especially when viewed over time — but “mildly interesting” does not a useful communication tool make. Continue reading “New Technology: Exploration versus Utility (Microblogging and Its Discontents)”
Spiral Bound (Workbooks Part Two)
In my quest for better notebooks, I bought a spiral-binding machine so that I could make my own. Here are a few of my creations so far. Continue reading “Spiral Bound (Workbooks Part Two)”
Summer Reading List, 2007
We’re late again with the summer list, but here it is. Thanks to all who participated, including newcomers Dave Allen, Howard Bloom, Alex Burns, and Calvin Johnson, as well as veteran contributors Mark Pesce, Patrick Barber, Steven Shaviro, and Gary Baddeley. As this list proves year after year, there’s a lot of good stuff out there to read. Enjoy.
Mark Pesce, Author, The Playful World
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Arthur A. Levine Books): I must be the only one reading that.
Philip K. Dick The Zap Gun (Gollancz)
John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley): Highly recommended!
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous (Times Books)
Richard Vinen A History in Fragments (Da Capo)
John Henry Clippinger A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity (PublicAffairs)
Dave Allen, bass player, Gang of Four
You know I often ramble on about the collapse of music sales as people stop buying CDs, and of course the first to suffer there are the music retailers — farewell Tower Records for instance — but it’s amazing to me that bookstores still abound given the fact that I never set foot in them any longer — all my purchases are through Amazon. Anyway, I discovered this weekend as I worked on restoring my motorhome (another story, to be continued) that the mailman/woman/person has been dropping books off at an alarming rate. Here’s the list of my unread pile that accumulated during May, without review, of course:
Jon Savage Teenage: The Creation Of Youth Culture (Viking)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (Scribner)
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books)
Martin Amis House of Meetings (Vintage)
Simon Schama Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Harper Perennial)
Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (Mariner Books)
Philip Roth The Plot Against America (Vintage)
John Gray Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New Press)
Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company Ltd.
Roy, as usual my summer is largely taken up with our own books, especially the new edition of Graham Hancock’s Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers of Mankind. Also in my pile are Mick Farren’s Who’s Watching You? and Thom Burnett’s Who Really Rules The World?
The best fiction I’ve read recently was Vikram Chandra’s long but always engaging Sacred Games (not one of ours — I get to read fiction just for pleasure!).
Next month we’re publishing Russ Kick’s new book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, with contributors like Neil Gaiman, Richard Dawkins, Doug Rushkoff and Erik Davis, and I think it’s really going to cause a stir. I can’t wait!
Howard Bloom, Author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain
Lewis Thomas The Lives of A Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Penguin): This book is 20 years old, but is still one of the most provocative reperceptions of science I’ve ever read.
Gregg Easterbrook The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House): A book that cuts down every preconception you’ve been fed about the economic progress of the West and replaces today’s dour notions of scarcity with a hearty report on how, in fact, humanity has enriched itself vastly during the last 150 years — and may well continue to do so.
Barack Obama Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Three Rivers Press): One of the first books on the experience of a new breed of Westerners — the meta-racial cosmopolites — a generation of mixed-race and mixed-culture kids who are the gifts of the last 50 years of globalism.
Thomas L .Friedman The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Picador): The most encyclopedic vision of the new globalism I’ve seen.
Steven Johnson Everything Bad is Good For You (Riverhead): Another book that turns commonplaces on their heads. Johnson hypothesizes that pop culture is a “collective-perception and processing-power” expander. He goes on to posit that the “garbage” of pop culture is responsible for “The Flynn Effect” — a measured growth in individual IQs during the past 90 years, a rise of brain power whose origin has baffled the scientific community.
Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media): This book is tough-sledding, but presents an old idea from the 1980s in a brand new way. The idea? That the cosmos’ mysteries can be cracked not with Newtonian and Einsteinian math, but with a cellular automata model. In other words, the cosmos may have started with three or four simple rules, than have gone through so many iterations of those rules that the results defy belief. Wolfram presents unequivocal evidence that repetition of simple rules can even produce what looks like utter chaos.
Alex Burns, Editor, Disinformation
C. Otto Scharmer Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (MIT Society for Organizatzional Learning): My fellow alumni in Swinburne University’s Strategic Foresight program have been raving for the past 2 years about Scharmer’s Theory U as the cornerstone for blind-spot analysis and self-reflective practices. In essence Scharmer has developed a framework that might explain initiatory knowledge – to directly re-experience being and essence – for a contemporary business audience. It’s a call to self-reflection that cannot specify the reader’s aims: Scharmer’s readers might create the next Castalia, Second Foundation, Players of the Godgame… or Aum Shinrikyo.
William C. Martel Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press): Martel’s academic level text explores a Theory U blind-spot that is missing from debates about the Iraq War and the War on Terror’s grand strategy: What does victory mean, exactly? His survey of strategists such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Bernard Brodie, and Martin Van Creveld is a succinct journey through the jungles of military strategic thinking and forceful change writ large. Case studies include the major wars, humanitarian interventions, and stability operations of the past two decades. A good structural model for a PhD and an excellent primer to debate with military strategists and policymakers on their own turf, rather than as activists who can be marginalized in street protests [Excerpt here].
Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday). The perfect book to read alongside the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and before seeing Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd (2006). Weiner shows how intelligence’s analytical process — like the initiatory orders in the Western magical tradition — can potentially be corrupted by structural secrecy, information silos, organizational politics, and subgroup coalitions. The anecdotes range from operations failures to how old boys’ networks become an in-group elite that is shut off from change. Thus, whilst the intelligence community will debate the validity of Weiner’s research until 2012, this is also a good book for would-be change agents and project managers on what can go wrong without self-reflective practices such as Scharmer’s Presencing and Theory U.
Don Webb When They Came (Henry Wessells). When I first came across him in the mid-1990s, Webb was one of the guiding forces behind Austin’s FringeWare Review and shortly afterwards became High Priest in the Temple of Set. On the surface Webb’s collection is a variation on the mythos of Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, and others gathered from the press, zines, and eldtrich Internet sites. Webb’s deeper purpose is to offer teaching stories — like the path notes of martial artists or Idries Shah’s Nassrudin anthologies — about the psycho-cosmological insights of spiritual dissent. Webb’s essay “Fictive Arcanum” explains how he uses the form of Lovecraftian fiction to communicate initiatory knowledge.
Michael Rosenbaum Kata and the Transmission of Knowledge: In Traditional Martial Arts (YMAA Publication Center): Rosenbaum addresses how martial arts practitioners use patterns to capture ‘tacit’ insights and for ‘tacit’-to-‘explicit’ knowledge transfer. Martial arts “kata” provides the form and self-reflective methodology that then becomes the basis for a sustainable tradition — usually only revealed as fragments in path notes. This is one of the hermetic secrets of George Gurdjieff’s ‘legominism’ for inter-generational and transcultural transmission in his Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) — although Gurdjieff cited and used practices from dance, carpet-weaving and mythological symbolism. It underpins why ‘agile’ evangelists including Kent Beck and Alistair Cockburn use martial arts frameworks for software engineers to develop self-mastery.
Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin) and Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip-Rock and Hip-Hop (Penguin): Reynolds fills an important gap between the Sex Pistols’ demise, the rise-and-fall of Public Image Ltd, and the explosion of hip-hop and new wave in the early 1980s. One of the “strange loop” lessons in Reynolds’ stylised prose is of how innovators pick up on the signals, patterns and sub-currents to create new subcultures — Lovecraftian fiction begets Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge. Rip It Up sent me scurrying back to Gang of Four and Pere Ubu whilst Bring the Noise revives the precise style of NME album reviews. Reynolds succeeds in the benchmark of good music journalism: to inspire you to discover or revisit the artists he profiles, and appreciate the cultural impact of their music.
Garry Mulholland Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco (Orion): Mulholland sets out to challenge the classic rock canon with his reviews of Joy Division, New Order, Husker Du, Public Enemy, Portishead and others. Mulholland — like Reynolds — is heavily influenced by the post-punk and new wave genres. For Reynolds and Mulholland, it’s a form of Lorenz imprinting or Anton LaVey’s erotic crystallization inertia. There’s a micro-trend in music journalism here that would be even more interesting if other authors did a similar book on the ’00s and digital natives. Anyone wanna help me convince Disinformation’s Gary Baddeley on the publishing “business case” for this?
Calvin Johnson, K Records
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding The Blank Wall (Quality): Even the most conventional life can take on a frightening edge.
Joyce Cary The Horse’s Mouth (NYRB Classics): Every artists story.
Patrick David Barber, Designer
We just moved across town so it’s been all I can do to keep up with the weekly New Yorker. I dug the recent fiction issue, particularly the Junot Diaz story. Also, a recent Mother Jones issue has a good, long article on species extinction.
Last month (before the move!) I read Michael Chabon’s new one, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins), and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a fertile blend of prefigurative dystopia, noiresque detective pulp, and homey Jewish culture study.
Next on the list is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins). I have a pretty good idea how that one turns out, but it’s important to keep up with my fellow locavores.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin), well, you’re late, but not too late. This was the book of the year last year and it might just be the book of the decade, all in the As Far As I’m Concerned department. Read it!
I’m also reading The Design of Everyday Objects by Donald Norman (Basic Books). You’ve probably read that one already, but it’s the first time for me. I am enjoying it not least because it was written in 1988 and most of his improvements to things like phones and personal organizers have come true. Yet his advice and analysis are still salient. We may now have phones with digital readouts and synchronized calendars, but a lot hasn’t changed: you can go anywhere and watch your average wired citizen struggle with an
ambiguously designed door handle.
Steven Shaviro, Author, Connected
Warren Ellis Crooked Little Vein (William Morrow). The first prose fiction by comics writer Ellis is a hoot. Sort of like noir detective fiction meets a Hunter-Thompsonesque journey into the heart of American weirdness and depravity. Everything from Godzilla bukkake to saline testicular injections to the creepy, sexually exploitative practices of the very rich. Yet the novel ends up being an inspirational fable about speaking truth to power and about the Net as a potential tool for freedom.
William Gibson Spook Country (Putnam): Science fiction about the recent past (2006). Varieties of stealth and disembodiment, from locative art to cryptography to drug hallucinations to GPS tracking, and the materiality (CIA black technologies, and shipping cargo containers) that underlies it all. Narrated in Gibson’s spare, minimal, yet telling prose: every metaphor is a precise observation.
M. John Harrison Nova Swing (Bantam): Science fiction about the nostalgia for the recent past. It’s the 24th century, and people are still fascinated by the stylings of the 1940s and 1950s. The novel is a spooky, and somewhat morbid, meditation about the mystery of otherness, the allure of self-destruction, the packaging of nostalgia as an illusor comfort, and the ways in which commodification has left us with just the empty shells of experiences we imagine other people to have had.
Roy Christopher, Editor frontwheeldrive.com and Follow for Now
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books): Explicitly returning to the themes he originally tackled in Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic, 1979), Hofstadter seems happy to be back, like a child returning to a playground after a lengthy hiatus. Not that he hasn’t been flogging these concepts in the meantime in such books as Le Ton Beau de Marot (Basic, 1997), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Basic, 1995), and Metamagical Themas (Basic, 1985), but he hasn’t approached them this directly since GEB. I Am a Strange Loop is not nearly as splayed or as sprawling as GEB. It’s more springing and spiraling, written with more levity and lilt, more depth than breadth.
James Inman The Greyhound Diary (Lulu): Thank all that is evil that James Inman got on the wrong bus. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t have this book. The Greyhound Diary is On the Road for the homeless, Oh, The Places You’ll Go for the chronically mentally ill, and The Grapes of Wrath for people who would never read that book in the first place. It’s a sweet, sloppy slice of America’s yawning underbelly.
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books): David’s new book became part of my terministic screen when Ryan Lane and I interviewed Peter Morville a few months ago. Since then, it’s been popping up everywhere, so I copped a copy. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s near the top of the pile.
Cormac McCarthy The Road (Vintage): The Road had been on my list since Steven Shaviro wrote about it late last year. Then Brendon Walsh told me he was reading it, then it won the Pulitzer and Oprah endorsed it, so I finally snagged a copy. It’s a bleak and harrowing tale so far, written with a claustrophobic economy. I’m already tempted to say it deserves the attention.
Richard E. Nisbett The Geography of Thought (Free Press): I’ve often wondered what it is about Japanese culture that spawns musical acts like The Boredoms, Melt Banana, Space Streakings, Merzbow, and K.K. Null. I’m not sure if The Geography of Thought is going to solve the mystery, but so far it’s helping. I’m only halfway through it, but Nisbett’s book is an interesting analysis of the fundamental and historical differences between Eastern and Western thought.
A few others in the to-be-read pile:
Amy Cohen The Late Bloomer’s Revolution (Hyperion)
Adisa Banjoko Lyrical Swords: Hip-hop and Politics in the Mix, Vol 1 and 2 (YinSumi Press)
Paul Virilio Speed and Politics (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) (with a new introduction by our friend Benjamin Bratton)
Tibor Fischer Voyage to the End of the Room (Random House)
David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive)
[Above, Jessy browses the stock at Red House Books in Dothan, Alabama. Photo by Roy Christopher.]
Quite Sick, Mike Vick
Normally I wouldn’t comment on such things, but this strikes me as the perfect opportunity to bring up several things that are on my mind on a regular. Continue reading “Quite Sick, Mike Vick”
Extreme Mediation
These are two images depicting extreme technological mediation that I’m hoping to include in the final book on this topic. Continue reading “Extreme Mediation”
Recurring Themes, Part Four: Addiction and Obsession
After reading a story about a Nevada couple who blamed their computer for their negligence of their children, I felt like this theme had finally reached critical mass in my mind. Continue reading “Recurring Themes, Part Four: Addiction and Obsession”
Guest Post: Brian Tunney on Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk
I am a slow summertime reader. I also subscribe to the New Yorker (which requires a huge weekly reading investment) and prefer to spend my summer nights riding my bike along the banks of the Delaware River rather than sitting at home reading. I do also travel a fair bit though, and quite often, my travels are lengthened by summertime storms, airline delays, etc. It was under these circumstances that I endured an overnight flight from Philadelphia to Paris, France. I missed my connection to Bristol, England and got stuck in the Charles De Gaulle airport for about fourteen hours more before taking an alternate flight to Bristol via Amsterdam. Continue reading “Guest Post: Brian Tunney on Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk”
Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Spook Country by William Gibson
William Gibson is justifiably renowned as one of the key founders of the now vast realm of cyberpunk. His 1984 novel Neuromancer was a foundation stone for a new style of futuristic fiction; high tech but gritty. The opening line of the novel said it all: “The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.”
In Gibson’s world voodoo met with artificial intelligence. It was a dark realm of worrisome virtual realities. It was a soaring burst of imagination that, at the time, had no equivalent.
Since that time Gibson has gradually been re-inventing himself, coming closer to the present day with each book. His latest, Spook Country (Penguin/Viking), is very much placed in the here and now, resonant with references to 9/11, the Iraq war and corruption within the current American administration. At heart it is a thriller, without the flourishes of remarkable futurism that marked Gibson’s earlier works and as such it will be a disappointment to those hoping for the surreal leaps of vision in his earlier works. But Spook Country remains resolutely a Gibson book, replete with references to the gods and goddesses of voodoo belief. Here the iPod meets the goddess Ochun and a drug called RIZE clashes with the muscular, athletic god Oshosi.
The promotional blurb for Spook Country claims that the novel is “J.G. Ballard meets John Le Carré”, but the novel is far too American for it to fit into such a bizarre English context. One suspects that the Canadian-born Gibson is more influenced by the paranoiac sci-fi of Philip K. Dick and the stylistic tropes of Raymond Chandler, both denizens of Los Angeles where much of the novel is set.
Sense of place is a major aspect of Spook Country. Elements of LA and New York City are captured brilliantly. As one of the key protagonists, the youthful Cuban exile Tito, sprints through Canal Street in New York one can envisage the setting immediately. But although this is New York post-9/11 – a fact that is central to the story – Gibson fails to capture the sense of displacement many New Yorkers still feel, a sensation rendered palpable in Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Falling Man.
Like DeLillo, Gibson uses an artist as one of his triggers to get the action rolling, in this case an artist who uses a kind of virtual reality recreation of past events such as the death of River Pheonix. The artwork is the ostensible subject of a feature story for a not-yet existent magazine called Node to be written by a former indie-rock singer Hollis Henry. It rapidly becomes apparent that Node will probably never exist and its’ supposed publisher is seeking something else entirely. Running parallel to this story are the mysterious goings on of a group of Cubans, especially the athletic Tito who summons the aid of Ochun and Oshosi when necessary, a CIA-type thug and a drug addled character called Milgrim.
Central to the book is the “producer” Bobby Chombo, a paranoid and reclusive troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment who refuses to sleep in the same place twice. Hollis Henry has been told by her editor to find him but not told why.
With his sprawling matrix of characters the narrative moves along at break-neck pace. Mis-information transfer run by the Cubans – often via iPod – constantly misleads shadow-agents of the government. Also central is the fortune of American cash set aside to help re-build Iraq that has been pirated away for other, unspecified, but clearly corrupt, uses.
At times Gibson’s narrative soars, at others it is dogged down by slightly lame character development. It is ideal Winter reading but fails to claim anything like the cultural potency of Neuromancer.
[Ashley Crawford is the editor of 21C Magazine and the compilation, Transit Lounge.]