future shlock / deja retro

also Electro Voice

"When hell is full the dead will dance on your iPhone" -   really interesting review of Retromania at Datacide by lfo demon aka Hans-Christian Psaar -- lots of issues and questions raised, and many great sentences

just one of the points, from the footnotes:

"If you are searching for a sphere where the past is still fading away – it is software. There are niches like Retro gaming, but in the mainstream there is still a clear model of historic progress. And everything outside this ends at the digital junkyard"

- that is very true and it relates to things some other folk have suggested to me, e.g. this young man Ashley Bodenham who, talking about feeling an exhaustion with music, said that he'd "turned away from hoping for a really new music and turned to videogames because I think they manage to avoid both the retro and content overload culture; there is a retro tendency in videogames but I think that runs parallel with pretty exciting never seen before things and I also think most people still buy games and they are quite expensive so you tend to commit yourself to them, which is what turned me off seeking out new music, the endless options and easy access"

This got me thinking about my 13 year old, who has minimal affect as regards music (he likes it;  I don't think he would ever buy it) but who is a fanatic for games (and for anything to do with computers - apps, social media, etc). What I find faintly heartening is that, despite the non-interest in music, there's still a chip-off-the-old-block aspect at work, in so far as he's still caught up in that same psychology of obsession, which is inseparably coupled with obsolescence.

So there's that quasi-modernist linearity within which he exists, like I did as a teenager (and subsequently continued to do during my unnaturally extended adolescence, which still isn't fully ended, for better or worse).  A linear propulsion driven by the superceding and discarding of the passé;  a constant moving on, fueled by a restless insatiable desirousness for the "new". This lends his life  a sense of acceleration, that irritable excitement based in the double-sided syndrome of  anticipation / impatience. However the units of obsession and neophiliac fixation are much more expensive than records.... and whereas a certain percentage of music bought tends to survive as abiding favorites, joining the permanent collection, the stockpile of future nostalgia... with the games and other digital pleasure tech, in most cases it does seem to get outmoded rapidly and ruthlessly  (e.g. his Wii, which  sits idle and dust-covered in the bedroom upstairs,bereft and wholly abandoned).  So while he and I can both be accurately and fairly described as dupes of the capitalist entertainment complex, in his case the cost is quite a bit higher and the losses less recoupable.  (I also, of course, feel that music is emotionally and spiritually richer than games;  that music points to things outside itself - the portal syndrome -- much more than the gameworld does. But that is doubtless me being trapped inside my generational biases, being someone who simply missed the whole games thing altogether). 

What is really interesting, though, is that for my son (and his generation?), while he stills lives inside this propulsive linearity of chasing the new and the latest, the concept of "the future" doesn't seem to exist for him. Nor in fact does "space", as in "outer space", the Beyond.  (Like "future", space = Jameson's "desire called utopia").  

Everything that is happening, all the action, is going on inside -- literally indoors, but also inside the non-space or post-space in which things like Minecraft (his big obsession - I should say, current obsession) take place.  I observe in him, with fascination but also concern, a non-cathexis towards the Outer, the Outside as a phenomenological category. The sky seems to hold no special fascination for him. But then perhaps that makes sense: what after all would be the point in projecting out towards something that will remain unreachable in our lifetimes?  

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and here's some nostalgia for the phuture that Datacide crew might find acceptable

the frozen frontier

"There’s a sense in which Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 argument about how the idea of the frontier shaped American history can apply to the entire modern project. Exploration, expansion, the promise that a better life was just a long voyage away — all of these helped fuel the sense of historical mission, the assumption of perpetual progress, which shaped and defined the modern age. Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique. "

from a NYT column by Ross Douthat about the discovery this month of not one but two Earth-like planets circling the star Kepler 62

"The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned more headlines at a less horrific moment [i.e. the week of the Boston marathon bombing and the Texas explosion] but it would have fallen out of the news soon enough. It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon. 

"Obviously exploration is not a cure for unhappiness or evil. But it can be an antidote to the mix of anxiety and exhaustion that seems to permeate the developed world these days.And after a week as grimly claustrophobic as this one... it seems worth hoping that the human desire for wider horizons — for new worlds to wonder at, reach for and understand — will someday be fulfilled again. 

"Time to get to work on that warp drive."

Debt-dude David Graeber speaks at length:  On Bureaucratic Technologies & The Future as Dream-Time
 

Blurb - "The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all."

(via Carl Neville)

Reminded me I meant to link to this Frieze dialogue between Franco 'Bifo' Berardi,  author of After the Future, and Mark Fisher, author of forthcoming Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

interesting post by Ian Hogarth on hip hop's changing relationship with its own past

he sees it as having become (lyrically) less allusive, with MCs much less likely to made an interpolative quote-nod to hallowed ancestors....

has hip hop been claimed perhaps by atemporality / "the endless digital now"?

certainly trap, ratchet, radio rap etc seem pretty line with the NOW!ism of EDM and Top 40 dancepop alike

Ian offers various speculations as to why...

one thought: the loss  of a sense of the past, while it seems like ought to free you from History's burdens and open the way for the future ... it doesn't really seem to work like that

in fact having a sense of history seems to be essential in order to move forwards -- without a sense of the past-ness of the past, it seems you can't project into the future (science fiction, true science fiction as opposed to space fantasy, is the historical method flipped around and projected forwards)

NOW!-ism / atemporality is really the uncoupling of the present from the dialectical chain that carries music/culture/civilisation from the past to the future

c.f. the hardcore continuum, where "roots n' future" consciousness is precisely what enabled the music to keep pushing forward... it's as if the past, tradition, etc served as steps in a stairway that you climbed onwards and upwards -- you pushed down on the past, and that pushed you forwards...

roots 'n' future = defining temporality of black music of all kinds (funk/soul/R&B, hip hop, reggae too obviously   -- where the past is recycled, pragmatically, put to service in the present -- old riddims, anthemic refrains, etc)

until now?

noticeable that in the last ten years we've not heard much from dancehall -- it hasn't thrown anything much our way, as it were...   has its R 'n' F dialectic disintegrated too? is it stuck on a gym treadmill, going around and around...

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unconnected,  really, except that a parallel quest for something else while reading Ian's post, checking emails, led me to it ....