r.mutt's blog

4/28/07 FUCK KIM BOLAN "Muslims around here would rather act like a model minority and don't really want to rattle anybody's chain. I really want to move to New York City, if I can get my plays produced there. Unfortunately it seems many theatre companies are too scared to do my works, or think I only cater to Indians and Pakistanis and won't attract white people. But they're fucking wrong, and they can't see beyond racial boundaries. Fucking worthless piece of shites." 4/25/07 I'LL FRONT YOU IF YOU HANG WITH A PUNK CREW you are cordially invited la lutte continue / '93 'til infinity details here and here. 4/15/07 IN LIEU OF AN INAPPROPRIATE TITLE speaking of the inability to mourn, pathology, cathexis, repression, and other psychoanalytic concepts i throw around as if meaningless except as metaphors, read this article. but that's not the thing. the thing is how the aftermath of the article played out on this blog like the max frisch play andorra (the most interesting parts are the exchanges in the post comments; more here). i make a lot of inappropriate references to the holocaust, but the last twenty years in swift and the german situation as diagnosed by the mitscherlichs, lacapra, bauman, arednt, et alia are eerily parallel. they differ in scale, obviously, but i make the comparison in complete seriousness. 4/14/07 THE ORIGINS OF MORALISM rather than moralising, what if we would just entertain for a second the possibility that hannah arendt might have been right? p.s. sorry for not coming through on the blogslaught. my computer decided to up and die wednesday. more to come eventually. i promise. 4/11/07 FIFTEEN FALSE PROPOSITIONS AGAINST GOD photos added to the blog entry on our ritual consumption of yr lord jesus christ on the day of his resurrection. 4/10/07 TWO KINDS OF IMAGINARY IDENTIFICATION WITH PUNK ROCK as intimated in the last entry, this is probably the beginning of another blogstravaganza. first up, a musing after our department's future of the archive/archive of the future conference. a paper about youtube and the practice of fan culture with respect to the new indie rock (examples included broken social scene, the arcade fire, and deathcrab) got me thinking. her argument was that these practices create their own economy of cultural capital outside of the dominant culture's value system. so i started wondering about the death of indie rock in 1999. what role did the internet and the advent of napster play in this? the question i arrived at was to what degree this new neo-punk rock/generic "indie rock" fan culture is completely unlike what it meant to be a punk rocker before 1999. clearly, i've constructed a kind of punk rock historicity here and i suspect that we see, with the formal summa of the microphones' it was hot, we stayed in the water and the stylisation of the northwest tradition presented by the progression between the first and second deathcrab albums, an epistemic break. this is not to say that digital filesharing and new media in and of themselves presented a paradigm shift. rather, the internet enabled the popularisation of this kind of music at the very moment that the music itself became irrelevant. i do suspect, however, that we can see in the central role the internet played in the death of indie rock a new mode of fan culture. with the bands of the previous generation, we can clearly identify the moment when the bands stopped being punk rock (pavement in 1993, sebadoh in 1994). of the current generation, we can't say whether these bands were already compromised to begin with. what i mean is, there was a time when you had to be a part of the punk rock scene to know about pavement and sebadoh. if i'm a fan of these bands in 1995, i'm a fan the way i would be a fan of any rock band, say stone temple pilots or the smashing pumpkins. i can appreciate them from a distance and i'm probably never going to meet stephen malkmus at a show. but if it's 1990, it's not even really fan culture. if i go to a sebadoh show then, i engage with the band on the level of real social relations, as opposed to imaginary ones. i may not personally know gaffney, but we both exist in the same international social network of people who put on shows, play shows, and go to shows. i can't just buy a sebadoh record and then wait for them to come to my town so i can go to their show as if i'm going to see a movie because i'm not going to know about it... not until 1994, when they submitted to the same mass cultural apparatus that supports stone temple pilots and the smashing pumpkins. but the internet changed that. we have bands like deathcrab and broken social scene reaching that pavement in 1993/sebadoh in 1994 level of non-obscurity overnight, without touring the continent over and over until word of mouth spread, on tiny labels that nobody had ever heard of, based in unhip cities. so we've moved from basement punk as life-praxis to basement punk as imaginary identification. you can be a fan of basement punk (remember that deathcrab played those basement punk venues until the fall of 2000) without ever having to go to a basement show, or you can check the band's website and go to the basement show and then go home like you'd just been to the multiplex. if it's what you want to hear, this is all probably very suggestive. the validity of it, however, is questionable. in the very least, calling this an epistemic break is a huge huge overstatement. i won't concede, however, the incompatibility of the new generic "indie rock" fan culture and fanzine culture. those are absolutely not the same thing. but much of this speaks to my own imaginary punk rock, my fantasy of a 1990's moment that i have reconstructed after the fact (and, of course, a performance of my own punk rock cultural capital). i love superchunk. we've been over this. i hear in early superchunk a sort of unself-conscious pleasure in playing punk rock that is so very rare. this is not to say that superchunk weren't and aren't smarter than most bands and that they're not completely aware of what they're doing. what i mean by unself-conscious is that they're not performing; they played the way they did as if it were completely natural to do so because it was just an extension of the way punk rockers lived back then. i wonder if this is a kind of willful utopianism, like what matt wobensmith said. but, more to the point, i wonder if this whole thing is a projection on my part, an avant moi le déluge reconstruction of an early 90's that i want so dearly to believe in. i want this so badly because i have these historicist impulses. my own imaginary identification with the early 90's moment creates a model that makes my actual participation with the punk rock of my generation legible. whether this is necessary or it just serves to enforce a hegemonic conception of praxis, a punk rock doxa, i lack the objectivity to say. but here's the music of kids a couple of years younger than me that i learned a lot about punk rock from. i hear in it something very similar to what i hear in superchunk (and boyracer), precisely because i took part in this. this, i think, is what is lost in the fan culture of the neo-punk rock/generic "indie rock." which, of course, is not to say that i didn't have kirstin from tortilla on my friend list back when people still used friendster. 4/08/07 JESUS DON'T WANT ME FOR SUNBEAM i've so very many things to tell you about, things about cdg, about the art of our generation, about the I=L=/=L=I=T school, about the archive conference, about c-pedemails, and about library and archives canada v. monoculture media conglomerate. but none of that will be happening now, for it's april eighth. and you know what happens on april eighth... only this year, april eighth also happens to coincide with easter sunday. so instead of getting all emo like i usually do, we decided to get righteous. in the spirit of a dear old friend of mine who is very much a prophet, we decided that the right thing to do would be to consume the body of christ on this, the day of his resurrection. so we made lamb chops. it was sacrilicious. but wait, that's not all. we have leftovers. which we're going to microwave later. surely some revelation is at hand. surely the second coming is at hand. (it reminds me of this song geoffy and i used to sing when we were little: jesus came back the very next day/jesus came back, we thought he was a goner but...) which is not to say that i'm not doing my part to remember kurt cobain. but that too will have wait until later, when the pictures of all this nonsense are posted. so much repetition compulsion, so many rituals of vergangenheitsbewältigung, such cathexis; clearly, nothing has been nor ever will be worked through. ADDENDUM: documentation of the rebirth (with the stone roses' "i am the resurrection" playing in the background) — notice the nirvana t-shirt and k records tattoo. because cathexis was never worked through and melancholia remained, what were once meaningful gestures became rituals of remembrance in lieu of mourning and actual remembrance. so much repetition compulsion, without ever coming any closer to understanding. (so many psychoanalysis jokes.) 4/04/06 FOR REALS THIS TIME concrete discussion group. 4/02/07 PETALS ON A WET BLACK BOUGH concrete discussion group. r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile monopöle!'s myspace profile your emily dickinson's facebook profile —————blog archives