Thursday, February 19, 2004
hard to read
Sorry, this bothered me, and I wanted to put it up. A friend of mine through work, Dan Knepp died about a month ago. Just now I looked at his old friendster profile, and on it was written this:
"About Me: I . . . guess i ain't feelin' it tonight. In spite of that i fight to find some kind of peace of mind but- mind you i dont think it can be mine before i die. So when I'm through, burn me till i'm ashes, hold them in a coffee can, and throw them from the cliffs west of this city."
My boss and a friend of mine went to the funeral, which I think was a casket one.
In other news though, my old tennis coach was released from his charges, because the girl that accused him admitted it was entirely a fabrication. This is such a relief to me.
"About Me: I . . . guess i ain't feelin' it tonight. In spite of that i fight to find some kind of peace of mind but- mind you i dont think it can be mine before i die. So when I'm through, burn me till i'm ashes, hold them in a coffee can, and throw them from the cliffs west of this city."
My boss and a friend of mine went to the funeral, which I think was a casket one.
In other news though, my old tennis coach was released from his charges, because the girl that accused him admitted it was entirely a fabrication. This is such a relief to me.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Astounding
Really. I work in an archive (in, not with) and this boggles my mind.
Therapy Through Violence - Nirav's Noise Mix
(a mix cd for a kid in one of my classes)
Kevin Drumm - Turning Point - Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego)
Whitehouse - Why You Never Became a Dancer - Bird Seed (Susan Lawly)
SPK - Slogun - Auto da Fe (Mute)
Merzbow - Glass - V/A: Extreme Music from Japan (Susan Lawly)
Incapacitants - No Discount - "
Sutcliffe Jugend - Ripper Victims XI-XII - We Spit on Their Graves (Cold Spring)
Priest in Shit - Physical Punishment for Public Broadcast (Deadline)
Orphx - Words Once Spoken - Fragmentation (Malignant)
RHY Yau/Kazumoto Endo- RYKE 1998 Parts 1-3 - Coagulation: Selected Works 1996-2000 (Auscultare/Groundfault)
Prurient - Hallucination - The History of Aids (Hospital Productions)
MB - Endoradiation - Anthology 2: Come Organization Archives 1981-82 (Susan Lawly)
Kevin Drumm - 1 - Land of Lurches (Hanson)
- What's most obviously missing (in my mind) is 80's Whitehouse, The New Blockaders, and Sickness. The latter two aren't on there because I left them at work, and the former because I didn't feel like listening to New Britain again.
I'll be impressed if he makes it all the way through.
Kevin Drumm - Turning Point - Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego)
Whitehouse - Why You Never Became a Dancer - Bird Seed (Susan Lawly)
SPK - Slogun - Auto da Fe (Mute)
Merzbow - Glass - V/A: Extreme Music from Japan (Susan Lawly)
Incapacitants - No Discount - "
Sutcliffe Jugend - Ripper Victims XI-XII - We Spit on Their Graves (Cold Spring)
Priest in Shit - Physical Punishment for Public Broadcast (Deadline)
Orphx - Words Once Spoken - Fragmentation (Malignant)
RHY Yau/Kazumoto Endo- RYKE 1998 Parts 1-3 - Coagulation: Selected Works 1996-2000 (Auscultare/Groundfault)
Prurient - Hallucination - The History of Aids (Hospital Productions)
MB - Endoradiation - Anthology 2: Come Organization Archives 1981-82 (Susan Lawly)
Kevin Drumm - 1 - Land of Lurches (Hanson)
- What's most obviously missing (in my mind) is 80's Whitehouse, The New Blockaders, and Sickness. The latter two aren't on there because I left them at work, and the former because I didn't feel like listening to New Britain again.
I'll be impressed if he makes it all the way through.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
"Self-alienated Spirit. Culture"
In that I have tied myself to art, I have become alien to it. Instead of building my life through art (artistically), I've built it around art, around a hole that keeps slipping away. There's a reason that I haven't been able to find any ontological signifigance to music: it is only instrument to me, rather than actual mode of being. Art has given me solace, rather than comfort, but art in itself has been the source of why I need that solace. The circle is particularly viscious. One really does become a *slave* to their record collection. There's a page in Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content (1999: Stanford) that explains this perfectly, and thus I'll transcribe, rather than paraphrase:
"On the verge of the French Revolution, this particular perversion of the man of taste was taken to an extreme by Diderot in a short satire that, having already been translated into German by Goethe at the manuscript stage, exerted a powerful influence on the young Hegel. In the satire, Rameau's nephew is a man of extraordinary good taste and at the same time, a despicable rascal. In him every difference between good and evil, nobility and commonness, virtue and vice has disappeared: only taste, in the middle of the absolute perversion of everything into it's opposite has maintained its dignity and lucidity....In Rameau's nephew taste has worked like a sort of moral gangrene, devouring every other content and every other spiritual determination, and it exerts itself, in the end, in a total void. Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends; though condemned to depend on something other than himself, in this other he does not find any sense of what is essential, because every content and every moral determination has been destroyed" (23, emphasis mine).
There is a sense, in which through losing yourself with music, over and over, there comes a point at which you yourself become......lost.
"On the verge of the French Revolution, this particular perversion of the man of taste was taken to an extreme by Diderot in a short satire that, having already been translated into German by Goethe at the manuscript stage, exerted a powerful influence on the young Hegel. In the satire, Rameau's nephew is a man of extraordinary good taste and at the same time, a despicable rascal. In him every difference between good and evil, nobility and commonness, virtue and vice has disappeared: only taste, in the middle of the absolute perversion of everything into it's opposite has maintained its dignity and lucidity....In Rameau's nephew taste has worked like a sort of moral gangrene, devouring every other content and every other spiritual determination, and it exerts itself, in the end, in a total void. Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends; though condemned to depend on something other than himself, in this other he does not find any sense of what is essential, because every content and every moral determination has been destroyed" (23, emphasis mine).
There is a sense, in which through losing yourself with music, over and over, there comes a point at which you yourself become......lost.
