The Phil Zone, acerbic, on Technological Progress and Science-as-Saviour as the "tattered gospel" preached by BBC's Horizon -- which is really "one of the UK's top religious programmes"-- focusing specifically on an episode that extols "data mining":
"From what I can glean, data mining can apparently help mitigate petty
crime in a city awash with crime and close to social collapse. It can
shave additional profit from a financial system that is almost entirely
built on numerical fictions and abstractions. It can possibly do
something useful with preventing genetic illness if our health system
doesn't collapse. It can map out a cosmos we're never going to visit.
"This is not exactly hypersonic airliners and moon bases, is it? What
isn't acknowledged here is just how low science and technology's sights
have fallen. Data mining should really be called data scavenging,
depending as it often does on figures recorded decades, perhaps
centuries ago. It also reveals that science itself is well into the
scavenging phase of its arc of decline, where, like an uninspired Indie
band, it increasingly has to look into the overlooked or unexamined
corners of the past in order to locate fruitful possibilities."
Showing posts with label THE PHIL ZONE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label THE PHIL ZONE. Show all posts
Friday, April 12, 2013
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
addendum to previous post on patternwork
here's the very thing I had made a mental note re. -- Phil's post from April last year on patternwork at the Nineties blog Up Close and Personal
which starts with this bloody big Spengler quote
"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.
What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.
So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures."
- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"
and goes into a panoramic riff-sweep across 20th Century culture before homing in to blast into smithereens both Britpop and Britart - the former described as "a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well" and the latter as "a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge".
here's the very thing I had made a mental note re. -- Phil's post from April last year on patternwork at the Nineties blog Up Close and Personal
which starts with this bloody big Spengler quote
"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.
What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.
So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures."
- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"
and goes into a panoramic riff-sweep across 20th Century culture before homing in to blast into smithereens both Britpop and Britart - the former described as "a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well" and the latter as "a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge".
patternwork
Phil Knight at The Phil Zone picks up on the post here about Beck and Flaming Lips doing remakes of classic albums, in relation to the difference between art (discovery, vision, bring something new into the world) and craft (doing it correctly, replication, perpetuation of the tradition etc). He mentions Spengler, who
"had a term for precisely this kind of process, which he called the descent into patternwork. An archetypal example of this is the Persian carpet, whose complex interwoven motifs were originally intensely meaningful expressions of sacred geometry (our old friend phi and its fractions), but are now churned out merely as decoration by people who have no idea what the designs signify, and if they do, view it as merely anecdotal. What once was high art becomes a kind of autistic self-replicating craft. Much of what we now consider to be ethnic styles of pottery, textiles etc. are simply the endless reproductions of art forms whose meaning has long since withered away."
I am sure I've come across this idea before -- almost certainly it was something Phil posted somewhere or other, or maybe a comment he made in a comments box at one of the Decades Blogs. I made a mental note to do something with pattern work here, but naturally forgot.
This thought of Phil's struck me as particularly acute:
"Most interesting from our perspective is that the lubricant for the passage from art to craft appears to be irony. It's when the replications start to be produced by people who don't get the in-joke, and this will surely happen, that the true inauguration of the long, long era of patternwork begins."
Yes, the irony phase, which in rock sets in among the cleverer sort of bands from
the mid-Eighties onwards: Butthole Surfers, Red Kross, Urge Overkill, Zodiac Mindwarp, Gaye Bykers on Acid, Monster Magnet, White Zombie, Royal Trux (to an extent),... later on it becomes more mainstream and less-clever The Darkness... you also have something like Andrew W.K.. There's a urge to rock, to have that kind of scale and epic-ness and the mass response that came with it, but it's checked by an awareness that kind of ye olde rock is ludicrous and passe, and also, more significantly, what it signified in the late Sixties and pre-punk Seventies in terms of rebellion, a lifestyle of freedom and excess that was counter-hegemonic and anti-normative, that was no longer tenable. Indeed it had become hegemonic, normative, cliched. The way to deal with attraction to cliches that are no longer valid or timely was through parody, a form of equivocation.
Then you had bands, concurrent with the ironic "we just wanna rock" bands in the alt-scene, who were deadly earnest about it (Sunset Strip glam metal -- Motley Crue, G'N'R, etc), and not parodic, so much as self-caricature, or mannerist maybe.
And somewhere exactly in between: The Cult, who managed uniquely to give off the aura of presumed irony but were as far as I can tell absolutely earnestly dead-serious about it (and so succeeded in the commercial American context more than the genuinely ironic meta-rockers)
Rick Rubin seems to have some crucial place in this fake-real, becoming-patternwork of rock. He believes, with all his heart; but what he touches comes out, despite that, with this sheen of air quotes.
Andrew W.K. reminds me of Rubin, there's a sort of Zen aura....
(Def Leppard belong in here somewhere. At some point they go from being the real thing to being the pomo thing)
"had a term for precisely this kind of process, which he called the descent into patternwork. An archetypal example of this is the Persian carpet, whose complex interwoven motifs were originally intensely meaningful expressions of sacred geometry (our old friend phi and its fractions), but are now churned out merely as decoration by people who have no idea what the designs signify, and if they do, view it as merely anecdotal. What once was high art becomes a kind of autistic self-replicating craft. Much of what we now consider to be ethnic styles of pottery, textiles etc. are simply the endless reproductions of art forms whose meaning has long since withered away."
I am sure I've come across this idea before -- almost certainly it was something Phil posted somewhere or other, or maybe a comment he made in a comments box at one of the Decades Blogs. I made a mental note to do something with pattern work here, but naturally forgot.
This thought of Phil's struck me as particularly acute:
"Most interesting from our perspective is that the lubricant for the passage from art to craft appears to be irony. It's when the replications start to be produced by people who don't get the in-joke, and this will surely happen, that the true inauguration of the long, long era of patternwork begins."
Yes, the irony phase, which in rock sets in among the cleverer sort of bands from
the mid-Eighties onwards: Butthole Surfers, Red Kross, Urge Overkill, Zodiac Mindwarp, Gaye Bykers on Acid, Monster Magnet, White Zombie, Royal Trux (to an extent),... later on it becomes more mainstream and less-clever The Darkness... you also have something like Andrew W.K.. There's a urge to rock, to have that kind of scale and epic-ness and the mass response that came with it, but it's checked by an awareness that kind of ye olde rock is ludicrous and passe, and also, more significantly, what it signified in the late Sixties and pre-punk Seventies in terms of rebellion, a lifestyle of freedom and excess that was counter-hegemonic and anti-normative, that was no longer tenable. Indeed it had become hegemonic, normative, cliched. The way to deal with attraction to cliches that are no longer valid or timely was through parody, a form of equivocation.
Then you had bands, concurrent with the ironic "we just wanna rock" bands in the alt-scene, who were deadly earnest about it (Sunset Strip glam metal -- Motley Crue, G'N'R, etc), and not parodic, so much as self-caricature, or mannerist maybe.
And somewhere exactly in between: The Cult, who managed uniquely to give off the aura of presumed irony but were as far as I can tell absolutely earnestly dead-serious about it (and so succeeded in the commercial American context more than the genuinely ironic meta-rockers)
Rick Rubin seems to have some crucial place in this fake-real, becoming-patternwork of rock. He believes, with all his heart; but what he touches comes out, despite that, with this sheen of air quotes.
Andrew W.K. reminds me of Rubin, there's a sort of Zen aura....
(Def Leppard belong in here somewhere. At some point they go from being the real thing to being the pomo thing)
Friday, July 13, 2012
"In With The Old" -- Phil at, er, The Phil Zone, on the catalogue records outselling current releases phenomenon
Which he argues is really down to the fact that "music is no longer the driver of a youth culture which in itself no longer seems to have any inherent, coherent sense of direction", which he further relates to "the process that affects all physical and biological phenomena on Planet Earth, which is the process of entropification - the natural movement to a state of randomness and disorder."
He wonders if the concept of entropy figures in Retromania, and it does, if somewhat shifted in emphasis, as hyper-stasis. But unlike Phil's great description of cultural entropy as "a voidal stasis in which endless diversity is experienced as uniform blandness" the difference here is the hyper-ness: the roil of micro-genres that keep emerging but never quite take-off (but equally, never go away completely... instead they rise and dip away and rise again (look at black metal's serial ascents to prominence across 20 years of existence, or the strange trajectory of grime).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the few 21st Century candidates when it comes to linearity in the old fashioned sense (musical evolution, audience expansion, crossover into unconquered territories) is dubstep. The original fans of course see the path taken by the sound through wobble into brostep as a devolution. But (c.f. rave>jungle and techno>gabba in the 90s, or indeed the history of metal itself), devolution is still a form of linearity.
Bass-tardisation is a direction. In this case (brostep), it is also -- as a centripetal, scene-forming/genre-conforming drive -- a force working against entropy. In favour of massification. Just look at the scale of the raves in America now.
This is a New Thing that is selling (but it's selling tickets, not records).
It also seems to be serving as the locus of generational identity. Whether any content will emerge beyond "let's go crazy" and "the parents will find this incomprehensible" is yet to be seen.
Which he argues is really down to the fact that "music is no longer the driver of a youth culture which in itself no longer seems to have any inherent, coherent sense of direction", which he further relates to "the process that affects all physical and biological phenomena on Planet Earth, which is the process of entropification - the natural movement to a state of randomness and disorder."
He wonders if the concept of entropy figures in Retromania, and it does, if somewhat shifted in emphasis, as hyper-stasis. But unlike Phil's great description of cultural entropy as "a voidal stasis in which endless diversity is experienced as uniform blandness" the difference here is the hyper-ness: the roil of micro-genres that keep emerging but never quite take-off (but equally, never go away completely... instead they rise and dip away and rise again (look at black metal's serial ascents to prominence across 20 years of existence, or the strange trajectory of grime).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the few 21st Century candidates when it comes to linearity in the old fashioned sense (musical evolution, audience expansion, crossover into unconquered territories) is dubstep. The original fans of course see the path taken by the sound through wobble into brostep as a devolution. But (c.f. rave>jungle and techno>gabba in the 90s, or indeed the history of metal itself), devolution is still a form of linearity.
Bass-tardisation is a direction. In this case (brostep), it is also -- as a centripetal, scene-forming/genre-conforming drive -- a force working against entropy. In favour of massification. Just look at the scale of the raves in America now.
This is a New Thing that is selling (but it's selling tickets, not records).
It also seems to be serving as the locus of generational identity. Whether any content will emerge beyond "let's go crazy" and "the parents will find this incomprehensible" is yet to be seen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)