further to the post about retro politics and Republicanism versus the "reality-based community", here's a column by the Guardian's Gary Younge based around that infamous phrase.


"Finally it appears defeat has sobered some of them up, forcing a rift between those willing to engage with the world as it is and others who prefer dystopian visions, woven from whole cloth."

the nub is "the word as it is", which is  capitalist realism / managerialism / incrementalism / pragmatism / "the end of history / "centuries of boredom"* 1

yes, paranoid-conspiracy, dystopian-apocalyptic  -isms are the reactionary version of "is and ought", but there are plenty of utopian versions of this kind of wishful politics -- not based in restorative nostalgia, but in fictive futurism



* 1 “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”--Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?

David Byrne on the end of (pop) history:

"With pop music now, it sometimes feels like the end of history. You can shuffle and reconfigure continuously. But it's interesting that in the midst of all this technologically-driven creativity there is a surge towards performance. In a way, we're going back to how it was before there was recording technology, when the song or piece of music existed only in performance and reinterpretation. People seem to want the communality of the live experience. They want to get out and be together as opposed to sitting alone, looking at a screen. The neurologist, Oliver Sacks, says that music is something that is never an isolated thing. You can organise a group and play and it can make you feel better in all sorts of ways. It can spread out into your whole life. That's an incredible thing."

from an interview at the Guardian about his new book How Music Works

I have a review of it in the new edition of Bookforum and one of the threads I draw out of the book is a semi-buried one about the conditions that encourage innovation in music

That Jonathan Lethem book on Fear of Music is ruddy excellent, let me tell you.

Here's a podcast he did with Andy Zax for LA Review of Books

And another interview, in Pitchfork's Paper Trail series.