it's a mod mod mod mod world

Indonesian mod revival band!

Japanese mods!

Swedish mods clash with Swedish rockers!

They do this every year apparently!


Apparently there's Mods in California today, or so someone told me, but all I could find was these things about the Eighties LA mod scene

and for dessert, the original revivalists, the class of 79

"Just what is it that makes today's cities so disjointed, so anomic?" 

-- Our God Is Speed aka Greyhoos raises a smile with the title to this picture-post of the architectural collages of Nils-Ole Lund

 

a sort of mute addendum to his "scattered and increasingly digressive" series of posts on collage in the visual arts

 

more Lund here 

 

 c.f. all the talk about vaporwave and the children of Ferraro & Lopatin, or indeed the endless commentary about Marclay's The Clock, the question is: will we ever get past Pop Art?

 

"Endless" indeed: that's three verdicts offered from a single magazine in a five month stretch this year!

 

Of the three, the Richard Brody take struck the loudest chord with me. After Clock-watching earlier this year when it came to LA, I concluded that  it was postmodernism's Sistine Chapel - an achievement of grand scale, at once about and in collusion with faithlessness and the desacralisation of art...  a testament to an ever-deteriorating inability to get lost in the work of art (the film, the long-playing record, or indeed the rave - having gone to one at the weekend and been startled by how many people were texting or phone-videoing or otherwise social-mediatising the experience they were only partial-immersed in)

 

in that sense, truly epochal, deserving of all the column inches

 

but, as Brody says, a love-less masterpiece...  a delightful disenchantment

 

a mash-up... the art world equivalent of "Intro Inspection" (and look how someone's labored to depict the appropriate record-covers for every appropriated intro)

 

enabled by, expressive of, the same digital facility 

 

the technology itself eloquently speaking its dark will to dis-integrate

 

{via Tim H Gabriele}

"a note-for-note, sound-for-sound cover of Loveless"
 
http://soundcloud.com/gordrann/loveless-album-new

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."-- Brian Eno, The Guardian, January 17 2010


Not surprised to see Eno subscribe to "inevitabilism"... as discussed in this review I did of A Year With Swollen Appendices, politically he does seem aligned with "a socially progressive, 'kinder' capitalism (long-term planning, improved design) insofar as he participates in the Global Business Network, a future-scenarios development group founded by Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz." Inevitalism (a.k.a "sorry mate -- history's moving along") accords with the ethos of flexibility that Eno adheres to: he's a pioneer of "creative" as non-specialised, transdiciplinary career designation, always keeping your options open, staying mobile, evading commitment.  Adapt or die, because History is an unfolding catastrophe and there's no point in swimming against the current.

Still, that doesn't mean you need to be smugly fatalistic about the vagabond-isation of an entire of class of artists who once made a modest livelihood off the selling of recordings, along with the small companies and small stores who produced and sold those recordings...  Especially if you happen to be someone whose rise owed a huge amount to that recordings-based system...  a system that, in addition to subsidising or otherwise enabling him to to make a shitload of  not-obviously-commercial records of his own using expensive studios  and expensive musicians, but also provided a great number of lucrative production jobs (that in turn probably subsidised a lot of the more esoteric and experimental projects).  Where would Eno be now without the recordings-based industry? Probably somewhere pretty cool and fairly prosperous, given his multi-talents. But the equivalents of the pre-Roxy Eno today, what are their prospects?  Probably about as good as today's equivalents to the pre-signed-to-Island U2.... 

"Quaint, innit? File under: Futurisms of the past, and Bright ideas from a bygone era" - Our God Is Speed digs up an amazing period-piece graphic titled "Man Reshapes Nature: What May Be Done" with all kinds of fanciful ideas of future forms of weather control and natural disaster management.