Trendy freethinking
Nov. 7th, 2006 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe part of Kreuzberg where the Falckensteinstrasse meets Schlesischesstrasse (I honestly defy anyone, German or not, to pronounce that word, it has me slathering like an alkie every time I try) has recently become trendy. Three trendy new shops have opened up on the Falckensteinstrasse -- a bookshop called -- trendily! -- Gap, an Asian goods store called 7th Sense selling baskets, lampshades, tea, and other trendy Asian stuff, and a clothes shop too trendy to have a name or even open when its owners don't feel like it.
Thanks to the wonders of photography, the ultra-trendiness of this neighbourhood (or kiez, as we trendy Berliners say) can now flap around the world like a snobby woodpigeon, putting less trendy places to shame. And, like an arrogant badger, I can tell you that in Gap's used vinyl section I today bought three records so untrendy they're trendy: a selection of communist cabaret songs with titles like "A Letter From Friedrich Engels", some baroque dance music played on a church organ, and a record of renaissance lute music which, trendily, I am playing at 16RPM instead of the recommended 33, just to exaggerate the odd crackly sound of the trendy, trendy vinyl.
Which is appropriate enough, since my new Wired piece is about the fall and rise of vinyl. The article, entitled Snap, Crackle and Pop, puts forward the idea that, exempted from the irksome duty of representing the world, a medium is free to celebrate -- even fetishize -- its own errors and limitations. But that this is a mere consolation prize; power never comes from representing only yourself, it comes from representing others. This has serious consequences for anyone basing claims to power on being a culture, because being a culture is all about being situated -- in other words, celebrating limitations and errors (even if you don't call them that).
This is what my lecture in Birmingham on November 17th is going to be about, so hurry, hurry, book your ticket now! Or if you want to hear an even better lecture, totally free, listen to this recent one by Brian Eno, part of BBC Radio 3's Freethinking Festival.
Thanks to the wonders of photography, the ultra-trendiness of this neighbourhood (or kiez, as we trendy Berliners say) can now flap around the world like a snobby woodpigeon, putting less trendy places to shame. And, like an arrogant badger, I can tell you that in Gap's used vinyl section I today bought three records so untrendy they're trendy: a selection of communist cabaret songs with titles like "A Letter From Friedrich Engels", some baroque dance music played on a church organ, and a record of renaissance lute music which, trendily, I am playing at 16RPM instead of the recommended 33, just to exaggerate the odd crackly sound of the trendy, trendy vinyl.
Which is appropriate enough, since my new Wired piece is about the fall and rise of vinyl. The article, entitled Snap, Crackle and Pop, puts forward the idea that, exempted from the irksome duty of representing the world, a medium is free to celebrate -- even fetishize -- its own errors and limitations. But that this is a mere consolation prize; power never comes from representing only yourself, it comes from representing others. This has serious consequences for anyone basing claims to power on being a culture, because being a culture is all about being situated -- in other words, celebrating limitations and errors (even if you don't call them that).
This is what my lecture in Birmingham on November 17th is going to be about, so hurry, hurry, book your ticket now! Or if you want to hear an even better lecture, totally free, listen to this recent one by Brian Eno, part of BBC Radio 3's Freethinking Festival.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-06 11:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-06 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 12:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-08 11:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-09 03:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 11:52 am (UTC)The best introduction to weirdo music from the DDR is probably the "Kult" volume of the "Das Beste Aus Der DDR" series (don't buy the "Pop" or "Rock" volumes as they are teh suck).
All of these records are probably available on the interweb, or in the branch of Saturn on Alexanderplatz.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 12:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:43 am (UTC)SCOTSCHE GRAMMOPHONY
Date: 2006-11-07 06:54 am (UTC)I am a performance artist
Date: 2006-11-07 06:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 11:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 12:15 pm (UTC)But it wasn't until the 90s that you could find a machine, like the Korg D12, that had "analog crackle" as a handy readymade patch that you could apply at the flick of a switch. I didn't go into synths in the article, but it was also the 90s that saw the emergence of digital synths which mimicked analog synths.
You could say (simplifying vastly, of course) that when Rick Wakeman was playing them in the 70s, synths aspired to "represent the world" -- to be orchestral, the universal instrument, capable of anything. But later it was the specificities of the analog synth which were celebrated, just as it was the errors and limitations of vinyl that we revived. What survives of a displaced medium is not its capacity to represent the world, because the next medium always wants that. What survives is a series of limitations. For this reason, the displaced medium is always cute.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 12:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:52 pm (UTC)Of course when it's going on ("being a culture") then these are not recognized as non-truth, but as truth in itself, so on with ozymandias.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 10:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-08 07:33 am (UTC)so to rephrase (though I think it still sounds negative):
It seems handsome to say that we celebrate errors while not calling them so (unless you are just coy). We all know that humankind always reaches the heights of greatness, so celebrating "error" is misnomer since obviously we intended to do it that way to begin with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-09 03:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-09 04:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-09 10:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-12 01:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-25 01:15 pm (UTC)