It's a steal

 

One of my favorite things I've written in the last 15 years or so, is this demolition job on what I called "recreativity" - a.k.a. "everything is a remix", a.k.a. "copying is cool", a.k.a. "there's no such thing as originality"

So it was funny to see this well-worn mission statement recycled in Whatever You Think Think the Opposite, a sort of motivational book of aphorisms + illustrations (an echo itself of that famous McLuhan book with all the pix, The Medium is the Massage).

Ha, ha - the twist at the end where he reveals that he nicked these pearls himself, from Jim Jarmusch.

 Clever-ish. 

But as is pointed out in my Recreativity piece, the key bit of the Godard quote that Jarmusch and now Paul Arden brandish is  "it's where you take them to". 

That, right there, is the aperture, the window, through which creep back the very properties of originality / genius / innovation that the recreativity mavens are trying so hard to exorcise and eliminate. 

Seeing this inadvertently self-deconstructing steal reminded of how uninspiring I found David Shields's  Reality Hunger - the book almost entirely composed of meant-to-be-inspiring quotes from others. 

(For conceptual integrity, Shields really really wanted them to be unidentified, but the publisher forced him to run attributions at the end of the book. So in pique he added some text urging the reader to cut out and throw away the attribution pages!). 

Like, did Shields intend to write a proper book and then just gave up and decided to present his research, in this barely organised fashion?

One of that select company of books I started and just gave up on well before the end. Usually I am  a dogged, tenacious, teeth-gritted, gotta-get-to-the-finish-line reader.

(My favorite feat of overcome-by-apathy is getting to within 20 pages of the end of On the Road and then just pulling over and giving up)

Talking of books...

There is a super-expanded remix of my Slate article on recreativity which is about 18 thousand words long and was published as a stand-alone mini-book to accompany... the French version of Retromania? Or was it the German? I cannot remember!  It's the marshalling of all my thoughts on innovation / originality / nature of creativity. 

It's also proof that the best time to write a book would be a couple of years after the book comes out, if you get me (i.e. it gets sharpened immeasurably by all the arguments you have with people)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Another bit from the Arden book, and here he's got the McLaren-Westwood story badly wrong, both in particulars and in his sense of what it meant... 

Nostalgia of Mud was started in the early '80s. 

(The "beginnings of the 1970s" boutique was Let It Rock and it was at the far end of the King's Road, not just off Oxford Street). 

And those Nostalgia of Mud-era clothes were neither unwearable or unbuyable. They were very much for sale. And became  fashionable very quickly. Instantly in fact, so hot was Westwood by this point.

But the same thing happened with the oh-so-shocking punk era get-up -  the shop, by then renamed Sex and then Seditionaries (or was it the other way round - I can't remember) and its owners got covered rather rapidly in the glossy fashion mags.

At absolute most, the punk look was a couple of years ahead of its time, not thirty. 

What's also odd about this page is a/ the fact that he is talking about originality as a virtue and a value (whereas the Jarmusch steal-it thing is saying the opposite)

And b/ this wholly un-punk illustration on the facing page

[also via Douglas Keeley]

from one of Malcolm McLaren's last interviews, with M magazine, done originally at the end of 2009 for a round-up of pundit opinions type piece, and then reprinted in full in 2010 after his death


"Pop culture is a crumbling ruin, but no matter where we look today that is all we are beginning to care about: The Ruins! Why? Because two words describe our feelings about culture – one is ‘authenticity’ and the other is ‘karaoke’. Most artists today spend their time trying to authenticate, make true, a karaoke culture but you have to be a magician to do that.

"The next decade will determine whether a 21st century post-karaoke school of pop music will replace the Simon Cowell School of Talent Shows, what has been described as the tyranny of the new. The Talent Show, gaming culture and extraordinarily enough, Performance Art, are probably the three distinct cultural arenas that music in the near future will most definitely be best exploited. The latter, I am certain, will inspire a new generation of outsider artists.

"Pop music is unfortunately something we do not listen to anymore unless we are in therapy. We simply watch on occasion, download, and maybe send it off to someone we love as a funny seasonal greeting.

"At the beginning of the 21st century, we had seriously entered an audio-visual world and with it, saw the absolute decline of the music industry. Why? Because they hadn’t the education, artistic sensibility, and real knowledge of new business models to immerse themselves with absolute confidence in this burgeoning new culture, and so had to begin closure.

"No matter what part of the music culture you look at, the near future will unquestionably entertain its ruins. Why? Because the ruins are authentic and unrivalled. There is an ever-growing nostalgic, undeniable, and unquenchable thirst for that authenticity across all generations and ethnicities worldwide. It is, I predict, all we will love for quite a while. The globalised disease of commodified culture will inevitably reach unparalleled success before the next generation starts to build on top of it. They may well sweep away all those who dwelled and worked within ie. the music industry. There is a chance some audiovisual artist might step away from this entire craziness and act like a pause between two epochs attempting to cure the incurable rampant globalised disease by reclaiming the ruins. Let us all scream now, BELIEVE IN THE RUINS!"


from the Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle's original trailer: "Malcolm McLaren -  architect of this fabulous ruin - look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!"