[Genteel Death]

yeah, right.

[!@#$%!]

im subscribing to this

[dead_battery]

i dont know why you want me to do this. at this point, rock music is a completely impotent, obsolescent and conservative form. its time is past and it will have about as much interest to people in the future as 16th century liturgies do to people today.

warhol put nico on this because he had some fucking sense. for the majority of the time, female energy was totally absent from rock music. but nico just seems to sing alone and doesn't really interact with the rest of the album.

album manages to make heroin addiction appealing, heavenly and mesmerizing. in fact it manages to give the impression that taking skag is a substitute for a religious experience, one that might actually work. this is quite an accomplishment for a song. but the majority of people who will follow this example will destroy their bodies and become impoverished, ill and eventually dead as their life spirals into an absolute hell. they won't manage to exist off their own celebrity and suck the magic ding dong of consumerist hedonism. they won't be able to just "hang out or whatever" and be cool and have fun, they'll be swallowed by the system that uses them as its advertisements. there's nothing but unpaid internships and zero hours contracts left. you can't fund your lifestyle of twattish fey flaneurism unless you have a trust fund. you might like VU and Nico but only as an accessory in general to your fucking list of indie references. everyones heard this album already and noone cares anymore.

baudrillard wrote about the metaphysical dimensions of warhol and his brilliant banality. but i tend to have a bad reaction to it. valerie solanas shot him, and the scum manifesto is great. in fact its aggressive insanity and rage is an antidote to the irritatingly laid back drawlishness of vu.

almost noone knows about it, but there's a book by NY feminist shulamith firestone called "airless spaces". it was printed once on semiotexte in 1998 to absolutely no fanfare.

firestone was one of the most important left feminists in the 60's and released a book that cemented her fame. but then after the anti war movement ended and the first wave of feminism passed, she faded into total obscurity.

she died in 2012, alone in an apartment. she had become a recluse and seems to have starved herself to death. neighbours from her building have commented on the few articles about her written after her death and claimed that she would scream and shriek at her (long dead) parents in the middle of the night.

airless spaces has been read by almost noone. but it exposes a perspectives of life that are almost impossible to see in our culture. obsolete humans, the mentally ill, destitute, addicts, anonymous proles, the excluded. people who aren't famous - who aren't celebrities, who have zero social capital or brand identity. the book is a series of short vignettes about these characters. in other words, it shows the reality of life that all our entertainment culture exists to escape from and edit out. the people who exist in it exist for noone and thus are burdened with the intolerable weight of having nothing in their lives. they are in a kind of bemused daze, where nothing can ever happen to them again, where whatever little scrap of sustenance, housing, shelter etc. they have is clung to for its own sake. they are beyond being unwanted, having reached a point in which they are of no use even to themselves.

there's nothing to be said from this vantage point - the people have biographical histories, and some vague things can be said about what they are doing now. they are living corpses, anonymous people living in an indifferent city that recognizes them only as silent figures in its backround. some are "mentally ill" but really they're all just socially excluded due to either neuro atypicality or some the trauma of some abuse.

this reality goes beyond bleakness to a kind of affectless creepiness. everything is unsettled and disturbing, precisely because there is no possible response, no reason to exist for any of these people, and nothing for them to do. they live lives in which nothing will happen. they are economically and socially disqualified, but will persist on some basic scraps of social security or insitutions or pan handling if it comes down to it. you get the impression that even if they had public voices, there would be nothing to say. the title "airless spaces" evokes this odd sense of life being compressed into imperceptible vacuums. that's what's happened to peoples lives. living in post war consumerist societies in the 20th century - safer and more prosperous than at anytime in history, living in impenetrable homelands. and we enjoy hearing this squalor pornographized and mythologised in musical form, and celebrate it - even though it's just awful. VU and Nico is just guys fucking about and doing skag and they manage some good songs, but it still reeks of this american banality.

firestone was an incredibly sensitive woman, who seems to have collapsed into herself in slow motion. its something a stretch to bring up her book in relation to this album but theres nothing to say about the fucking album in the first place.

it was the last thing firestone ever published and her slippage into madness is apparent. but if this book can be said to have an aesthetic then its the human real of the kind of narcissitic, fascinating banality of warhol. the life depicted on this album is of the honeymood period of urban addiction - but the majority of the people who ever heard or owned it won't have become famous or rich. or if they become the former, then never the latter, and the former won't last for long. they end up living lives like the ones in firestones book.

something like vu and nico comes from this same world, but it presents it as one of exotic hedonism, careless bohemianism and self satisfied coolness. it repackages this into rock n roll and becomes widely popular with middle class hipsters and rich people. postcards from lives they don't lead.

noone can lead the rock n roll lifestyle anymore and make enough money to sustain it. thats why this album just seems like an irrelevant decadence. its a celebration of a moment long past, and offers absolutely nothing to anyone living today but bad ideas and postures.

the fact that this album became enshrined as a classic in the 00's and generally recognized as some indie masterpiece is telling. although the music has merit, it's also bland, vacuous and mainly concerned with petty hedonists reflecting on their vacuity and thus coolness. this album was made solely for money by people solely interested in money. indie tried to make it "mean" something, man, which was a retarded idea.

i dont know what else needs to be said about this album or why it has to be listened to or spoken of at all.

fuck this shit. you should all read BEATRIZ PRECIADO - TESTO JUNKIE and PHILIP MIROWSKI - NEVER LET A SERIOUS CRISIS GO TO WASTE

listen to WITCH

fuck indie fuck rock fuck this fucking middle class sunday supplement columnist music. hipsters are infantilized talentless idiots.

indie tried so desperately to emulate this album especially forever since then but you can't play like this self consciously. it's a kind of one off. all those shitty cutesy twee jangle indie pop type bands tried to play like this and it sucked. its regressive to try and want to "recapture" this innocence. maureen tucker became a teabagger. that shows you what happens when you follow the indie lifestyle to its extreme - to the point wherein the search for a rediscovery of a child like, innocent joyous relationship to the world becomes narcissistic rage at the fact you can never recover this illusion and the world does not adhere to your so fucking shitty and so utterly fucking stupid political and economic ideas. lady gaga had lou reed killed because he wouldnt appear on her shitty new album. la monte young is to vu what glenn branca is to sy, sy used to literally la monte young in some of their noise passages. john cale had cool pink hair. maureen tucker realized cymbals were shit but noone else in indie rock ever understood this. john cale fuck all yall for making me write about this.

in conclusion , 9 ding dongs out of 10 but still who cares

[!@#$%!]

db does not disappoint. thanks.

[noisereductions]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

db does not disappoint. thanks.

jeez. Yeah. You're right. Wow.

Good thread!

[Nefeli]

thank you.

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/09/what...ith-firestone/

http://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpre...revolution.pdf

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by noisereductions

jeez. Yeah. You're right. Wow.

Good thread!

one can disagree with him on a lot but he's always interesting/ challenging/ refreshing.

i like VU a whole lot more than witch though i agree with everything he says about its enshrinement-- still, i've never wanted to be a junky or anything like that-- i will however steal the affect of the music for my own purposes. i like the feeling of the postcards even though i never want to visit the places they purport to portray. i'm very much a voyeur.

the other thing is that speakers of "foreign" languages process music in english primarily as music and only secondarily as lyrics, in other words, you could replace the lyrics with a good mumble and it would sound the same to a lot of us. cadence in language is what conveys the emotional content ("tone"), and my hypothesis is that melody in music derives from cadence in language, i.e., it takes the pure emotion out of language processing and runs with it. you don't need words, you can just hear the tone and get what's going on (this is what janacek pursued in some piano works). this way to un-hear words is really well illustrated in a mexican novel from the 60s about kids forming their bands and singing in english and they make up these shit words that sound like english but aren't-- eh, it's a hilarious book, josé agustín's "de perfil". anyway this is why i hate pavement btw, the music does nothing for me even though the lyrics supposedly speak to a certain group of people-- but i am not those people… anyway i rant...)

Originally Posted by dead battery

american banality

i just watched alexander payne's "nebraska" -- great fucking movie. almost a documentary. yes, this story has some sort of redemption narrative whereas real life generally doesn't, so if you can separate that fairytale in a different box and pretend it's a kind of ethnography, it reads as a documentary about a very depressing country--much, sounds to me, like the airless spaces you describe (though not quite as poor). mang, i know the smell of those american living rooms where the tv is on all day… i could almost smell it while watching. i also know those empty conversations where everyone looks at the tv… so weird.

there's another thing though that reminds me of freud… i can't find the quote but he said something along the lines that the basic elements of life were so fucking boring we had to make things up to keep us distracted from it. so it's not just capitalism, really. emptiness precedes ideology-- makes it necessary, actually. something to dream about-- redemptions, utopias, fantastic struggles, etc.

Originally Posted by Nefeli

thank you.

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/09/what...ith-firestone/

http://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpre...revolution.pdf

wow, thats a big pdf for my carrier pigeons, ha ha. i enjoyed the review of airless spaces. anyway, thank you! i might look for it in the library/ interlibrary loan/ etc.

also for those who read spanish you don't need to read beatriz preciado in translation. look for TESTO YONQUI. there's also a bunch of interviews she's done in spanish as well. i think she's in part delusional (as all philosophers must be), but she's super-smart and seems worth reading.

[noisereductions]

that's the thing. I don't care if I agree or disagree. It's an interesting read. That's all I care about. I don't need anyone to sway my opinion on an album I already love. But I'll be glad to read something interesting said about it.

[foreverasskiss]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

i dont know why you want me to do this. at this point, rock music is a completely impotent, obsolescent and conservative form. its time is past and it will have about as much interest to people in the future as 16th century liturgies do to people today.

warhol put nico on this because he had some fucking sense. for the majority of the time, female energy was totally absent from rock music. but nico just seems to sing alone and doesn't really interact with the rest of the album.

album manages to make heroin addiction appealing, heavenly and mesmerizing. in fact it manages to give the impression that taking skag is a substitute for a religious experience, one that might actually work. this is quite an accomplishment for a song. but the majority of people who will follow this example will destroy their bodies and become impoverished, ill and eventually dead as their life spirals into an absolute hell. they won't manage to exist off their own celebrity and suck the magic ding dong of consumerist hedonism. they won't be able to just "hang out or whatever" and be cool and have fun, they'll be swallowed by the system that uses them as its advertisements. there's nothing but unpaid internships and zero hours contracts left. you can't fund your lifestyle of twattish fey flaneurism unless you have a trust fund. you might like VU and Nico but only as an accessory in general to your fucking list of indie references. everyones heard this album already and noone cares anymore.

baudrillard wrote about the metaphysical dimensions of warhol and his brilliant banality. but i tend to have a bad reaction to it. valerie solanas shot him, and the scum manifesto is great. in fact its aggressive insanity and rage is an antidote to the irritatingly laid back drawlishness of vu.

almost noone knows about it, but there's a book by NY feminist shulamith firestone called "airless spaces". it was printed once on semiotexte in 1998 to absolutely no fanfare.

firestone was one of the most important left feminists in the 60's and released a book that cemented her fame. but then after the anti war movement ended and the first wave of feminism passed, she faded into total obscurity.

she died in 2012, alone in an apartment. she had become a recluse and seems to have starved herself to death. neighbours from her building have commented on the few articles about her written after her death and claimed that she would scream and shriek at her (long dead) parents in the middle of the night.

airless spaces has been read by almost noone. but it exposes a perspectives of life that are almost impossible to see in our culture. obsolete humans, the mentally ill, destitute, addicts, anonymous proles, the excluded. people who aren't famous - who aren't celebrities, who have zero social capital or brand identity. the book is a series of short vignettes about these characters. in other words, it shows the reality of life that all our entertainment culture exists to escape from and edit out. the people who exist in it exist for noone and thus are burdened with the intolerable weight of having nothing in their lives. they are in a kind of bemused daze, where nothing can ever happen to them again, where whatever little scrap of sustenance, housing, shelter etc. they have is clung to for its own sake. they are beyond being unwanted, having reached a point in which they are of no use even to themselves.

there's nothing to be said from this vantage point - the people have biographical histories, and some vague things can be said about what they are doing now. they are living corpses, anonymous people living in an indifferent city that recognizes them only as silent figures in its backround. some are "mentally ill" but really they're all just socially excluded due to either neuro atypicality or some the trauma of some abuse.

this reality goes beyond bleakness to a kind of affectless creepiness. everything is unsettled and disturbing, precisely because there is no possible response, no reason to exist for any of these people, and nothing for them to do. they live lives in which nothing will happen. they are economically and socially disqualified, but will persist on some basic scraps of social security or insitutions or pan handling if it comes down to it. you get the impression that even if they had public voices, there would be nothing to say. the title "airless spaces" evokes this odd sense of life being compressed into imperceptible vacuums. that's what's happened to peoples lives. living in post war consumerist societies in the 20th century - safer and more prosperous than at anytime in history, living in impenetrable homelands. and we enjoy hearing this squalor pornographized and mythologised in musical form, and celebrate it - even though it's just awful. VU and Nico is just guys fucking about and doing skag and they manage some good songs, but it still reeks of this american banality.

firestone was an incredibly sensitive woman, who seems to have collapsed into herself in slow motion. its something a stretch to bring up her book in relation to this album but theres nothing to say about the fucking album in the first place.

it was the last thing firestone ever published and her slippage into madness is apparent. but if this book can be said to have an aesthetic then its the human real of the kind of narcissitic, fascinating banality of warhol. the life depicted on this album is of the honeymood period of urban addiction - but the majority of the people who ever heard or owned it won't have become famous or rich. or if they become the former, then never the latter, and the former won't last for long. they end up living lives like the ones in firestones book.

something like vu and nico comes from this same world, but it presents it as one of exotic hedonism, careless bohemianism and self satisfied coolness. it repackages this into rock n roll and becomes widely popular with middle class hipsters and rich people. postcards from lives they don't lead.

noone can lead the rock n roll lifestyle anymore and make enough money to sustain it. thats why this album just seems like an irrelevant decadence. its a celebration of a moment long past, and offers absolutely nothing to anyone living today but bad ideas and postures.

the fact that this album became enshrined as a classic in the 00's and generally recognized as some indie masterpiece is telling. although the music has merit, it's also bland, vacuous and mainly concerned with petty hedonists reflecting on their vacuity and thus coolness. this album was made solely for money by people solely interested in money. indie tried to make it "mean" something, man, which was a retarded idea.

i dont know what else needs to be said about this album or why it has to be listened to or spoken of at all.

fuck this shit. you should all read BEATRIZ PRECIADO - TESTO JUNKIE and PHILIP MIROWSKI - NEVER LET A SERIOUS CRISIS GO TO WASTE

listen to WITCH

fuck indie fuck rock fuck this fucking middle class sunday supplement columnist music. hipsters are infantilized talentless idiots.

indie tried so desperately to emulate this album especially forever since then but you can't play like this self consciously. it's a kind of one off. all those shitty cutesy twee jangle indie pop type bands tried to play like this and it sucked. its regressive to try and want to "recapture" this innocence. maureen tucker became a teabagger. that shows you what happens when you follow the indie lifestyle to its extreme - to the point wherein the search for a rediscovery of a child like, innocent joyous relationship to the world becomes narcissistic rage at the fact you can never recover this illusion and the world does not adhere to your so fucking shitty and so utterly fucking stupid political and economic ideas. lady gaga had lou reed killed because he wouldnt appear on her shitty new album. la monte young is to vu what glenn branca is to sy, sy used to literally la monte young in some of their noise passages. john cale had cool pink hair. maureen tucker realized cymbals were shit but noone else in indie rock ever understood this. john cale fuck all yall for making me write about this.

in conclusion , 9 ding dongs out of 10 but still who cares

shit review!!! it's obvious you and Geental take turns sniffin each others dick with anal cheese passion. of course your fans like mr curse word will greet you with appalling genius totallity and the like. your gross and you will fade away like me.

yea!!!! i said you BIATCH!!!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by foreverasskiss

shit review!!! it's obvious you and Geental take turns sniffin each others dick with anal cheese passion. of course your fans like mr curse word will greet you with appalling genius totallity and the like. your gross and you will fade away like me.

yea!!!! i said you BIATCH!!!

you = batterie solanas
him = warholio
?

[EVOLghost]

Did you really have to quote that.? Thanks.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by EVOLghost

Did you really have to quote that.? Thanks.

me or him?

[EVOLghost]

Forever.

It's very unnecessary.

[foreverasskiss]

so much knowledge but so little worth. not very insightfull nor funny or offensive to those that love this album.

face it.... you're just a little man like the ones you loathe.

[foreverasskiss]

taking pot shots are we? im just saying dead_battery sounds more like a rockist than sway.

[floatingslowly]

so. much. edge.

[foreverasskiss]

like a young matt dillon and friends? i hate slash dash coming here. you fuckers make me laugh everytime.

[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by foreverrimjobs

face it.... you're just a little man like the ones you loathe.

oh well.

your trolling is sub par, and comes off more like bitter attention seeking. i don't mind but i wish you'd try a little bit harder.

[dead_battery]

if c of r means church of rome, well then you've got a contradiction there.

my dream is seeing all the churches burn and all the paramilitaries dead

because in reality the churches rule everything and the paramilitaries murder innocents.

the churches control education, and keep the schools divided so that the two tribes grow up separately. this feeds the fear and division, and the paramilitaries exploit this to murder/extort/control drug trades/destroy the economy for their own ends.

the churches in this town believe witches are real. they tell themselves that they live amongst witches and people practising "the dark arts".

they make american fundies seem like modernists.

[Nefeli]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

one can disagree with him on a lot but he's always interesting/ challenging/ refreshing..

well yeah. it has always been funny to me, how disagreements on music can get so personal in here. mostly the unreasonable personal attacks.
it has been the reason this place can get lively and i really dont mind it, only when it gets too pointless and abusive.
i mean, i wont attack you as a person because you like celine dion.
oh no, thats a bad example.

anyways.
i been meaning to watch 'nebraska'..
and i was looking all over for an 'airless spaces' pdf..i ll just have my bro buy it for me!