r.mutt's blog

5/18/08 THE LONG NINETY-THREE everything i read these days references the historian eric hobsbawm. apparently, those who are currently theorising the "globalisation turn" are all over hobsbawm's book the age of extremes, a sort of history of the twentieth century. in it, hobsbawm coins the term "the short twentieth century," a reference to his longest lasting contribution to the humanities: the long nineteenth century (a historical period which began in 1789 with the french revolution, and ended in 1914 at the dawn of the first world war). some have claimed that may of '68 was a singular, synchronic international event. others (like this guy) think of '68 as a more drawn out movement beginning with the growing resistance to french colonialism in the late '50s and petering out in the violence of the red army faction in the '70s. i haven't heard anyone calling this period the long '68 (or even the long '60s, though most historians seem to periodise the '60s in this spirit), but it seems appropriate. being far too young to engage in 1960s nostalgia (though i'm far more amenable to the western european may of '68/decolonisation/neo-marxism narrative, the eastern european anti-stalinism one, and the militant american civil rights one than i am to the insipid hippie/free love nonsense i grew up hearing from all the aging white longhairs and kerouac readers), i look to the early 90s as the most exciting historical period of my lifetime. in terms of a politics of resistance, the early 90s seems to have little to offer outside of the rodney king riots. but the aesthetics of apathy exemplified by the popularisation of grunge and the mtv/beavis and butthead phenomenon, i think, speaks to a period marked by the first instance of popular resistance formulated both in reaction to and within the consumption and dissemination of mass media (as was so powerfully evidenced by the reactions to the rodney king footage in los angeles; coming just after the first gulf war, which we watched unfold in real time on CNN, those riots mimicked the way operation desert storm was staged to be broadcast via the newly ubiquitous cable news format). as i've written, slacker rock was actually about resistance, not apathy. and i've argued elsewhere that the real triumph of popular music in the early 90s was the coming together of all of the disparate subcultures — the true sites of aesthetic resistance — of the 80s. its aftermath in the present (in vice magazine, for example) is, to be sure, trite, if not offensive and politically unconscionable. but, properly historicised, things like the judgment night soundtrack, and giant robot, the beastie boys, etc., did a lot to reorient popular culture (in good ways... really). so, the long ninety-three. in punk rock, it begins with sonic youth's daydream nation in 1988, which, while it closed the doors on a lot of sonic youth's experimentation, opened many for more traditional, guitar-based punk bands. and it ended on april 8th, 1994, when they found kurt cobain's body. its apogee was '91, the year most of us heard "smells like teen spirit" for the first time. but, more importantly, '91 was also the year of the international pop underground convention in olympia, washington, the year riot grrrl became a point of pop cultural fascination (for better and for worse), and of "revolution summer" in d.c. in hip-hop, it began in 1989, when de la soul changed hip-hop forever with their debut album 3 feet high and rising (de la soul also closed the book on 1988, which was another pivotal moment for hip-hop). it coalesced, of course, in 1993, as was memorialised on souls of mischief's classic song "'93 'til infinity." and that version of '93, predictably, died with 2pac and biggie. a truer and more measured narrative of the long '93 would, of course, encompass a lot more than just punk rock and hip-hop, classic albums and celebrity funerals. and, probably, all of this pales in comparison to all that happened in and around '68. but then, all of this "epistemic" and "zeitgeist" talk is pretty well-worn (read: trite) and out of date. which is why we decided to remember '93 by throwing a dance party last year. click on the photo below to download the dj set i played that night. 40th anniversary of mai '68? bah. happy 15th anniversary of '93. la lutte continue. '93 'til infinity. 5/16/08 FORTY YEARS OF PAINTING part one of my celebration of the fortieth anniversary of mai '68. They stole France, took it for a joyride, and then, just as suddenly, dropped it in a back alley with no more than a few scratches. . . . it managed to achieve what any revolution worth its salt is meant to — it brought the population to its feet and ultimately brought down the regime (within a year de Gaulle would lose a referendum tantamount to a vote of confidence and resign) — while still avoiding the typical fate of rebellions: brutal and prolonged repression. May '68 wasn't made to last, and it outlasted them all. —Sylvère Lotringer in the special Mai '68 issue of Artforum here's song i wrote about mai '68 5/13/08 AFTER BED ". . . one axiom was shared by [all of the old masters], and it remained operative in the succeeding centuries, even through Cubism and Abstract Expressionism: the conception of the picture as representing a world, some sort of worldspace which reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture. . . . Even in Picasso’s Cubist collages, where the Renaissance worldspace concept almost breaks down, there is still a harking back to implied acts of vision, to something that was actually seen. . . . But something happened in painting around 1950 . . . these pictures no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed . . . The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes." —Leo Steinberg, 1972 5/01/08 IN WHICH I DROP SOME BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE my former colleague, doug wolk, recently wrote "To claim that a band can be 'indie' without being financially independent of the major labels is to pretend that industrial capitalism does not exist." me, i feel like he's misplaced his self-righteousness. here's what came before it, as an answer to a questionnaire forwarded by music critic andrew phillips on some new yorker/indie yuppie thing: "Indie rock" has a generally understood meaning, largely associated with what a bunch of guitar bands on independent labels did in the '80s and '90s. It is, in fact, a subset of rock released on independent labels — an aesthetic that got its name from its economic circumstances. But the reason it got its name that way is that the idea of deliberate financial independence from a few large companies was, and sometimes still is, an important part of the intention and meaning of a lot of "indie rock" artists' work. To claim that a band can be "indie" without being financially independent of the major labels is to pretend that industrial capitalism does not exist. so yeah, i'm feeling some misplaced self-righteousness here, which is to say that maybe it's not calling major label bands "indie" that's being wilfully ignorant, but the obverse. hey, i'm all for "taking it back," so to speak; make the people remember that things can happen on a whole different scale. but to pretend that "indie" isn't a genre, isn't a lifestyle, isn't a demographic — while being a music critic who writes in all sorts of middle-brow, indie-yuppie media outlets the world over, no less — maybe that's pretending that industrial capitalism (and the culture industry that disguises it) doesn't exist. r.mutt's diaryland profile tradition and the individual talents' friendster profile monopöle!'s myspace profile your emily dickinson's facebook profile —————blog archives