on Neu! imitators...

they can be entertaining enough, but at the end of the day, it's old Neu!s innit? 

whereas the original...

So how come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?

The paradox of modernism - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time thanks to the 20th Century miracle of recording, recreates the original moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read). Is somehow eternally new, like fresh-picked fruit flash-frozen.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year -  even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.

(I also feel that the groups reactivating - if not quite reenacting  -  the breakthroughs made by other earliers, have evaded all the hard work that went into actually breaking through into the new / Neu!. Their undoubted youthful energy masks an idleness (an Idles-ness, even). They have started with the outcome of the process, rather than instigating an equivalent new-generative process themselves. 

"It's promotion. But you get asked questions you'd only answer under psychoanalysis."

- Kate Bush, on doing interviews

 "Just A Cunt in A Clown Suit would be a perfect memoir title, or epitaph, for Bowie - and many other people.  

"Sometimes I think we're all clowns, all lost and trapped in our own ridiculous obsessions and self-importances -  but I guess if we could achieve some kind of above-it-all 'true' perspective, then we wouldn't be human. Or at least, it would be impossible to function - everything would seem futile. 

"On the cosmic scale, being obsessed with the minutiae of musical subcultures that are ephemeral, or sports, or whatever microworld of culture or fashion or writing or aesthetics that you want to nominate - it's really not that much different than being obsessed with Shakespeare or the Ancient Greeks or Rembrandt or Beethoven.  It all will pass, all of it is very parochial and fleeting in the enormity of time-space. The importance is the excitement and urgent feeling of life that it gives you in that moment. The quickening"

 “A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult to pick up.’ It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don’t know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh. The less it’s understood, the slower it opens its petals, the later it will fade.” - Jean Cocteau

 "This is why the electronic human lives faster and faster. He is forced to see everything and to hear everything.” 

—Bernard Parmegiani, 1973

I have been reading Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker, having read First and Last Men a year or two ago. He has an amazing imagination for 'worlds' - a Spengler-derived (I suspect) sense of civilisations that rise and fall, 'races' that come and go. First and Last Men was like a million-year history of Earth, and the many forms of human being and human society that develop, including a completely aerial stage of bird-men.  

With Starmaker the same impetus has taken his imagination into the far reaches of space, life-supporting planets in distant galaxies. But so far I would have say the worlds he imagines are rather anthropocentric -  they all have things like class, industrial revolution, racism, property, sex, religion etc. There's one where a piscine civilisation develops where the creatures evolve into boat-beings, with sails and rudders etc. Yet they still have factories and rich and poor. 

If they're not anthropocentic, they are Earthcentric - so there's yet another alien race where consciousness develops across flocks of birds, each bird is like a neuron in a sort of mind, connected by magnetic waves of information. So that is just starlings and their murmurations projected into some alien solar system. 

It's a weird combo of very imaginative yet also trapped within the conceptions and frameworks of our world. The classic fault-line of science fiction maybe - and showing how impossibly hard it is to conceive of the utterly otherly. Lem's Solaris and Fiasco come closest. 

Stapledon was left-wing and had political involvements, as did H.G. Wells another figure I have recently become fascinated by. In large part it's because of the insane, awe-inspiring amount of work these early 20th Century authors did - book after book, fiction and non-fiction,,, an endless stream of critical essays and reviews, often they had political involvements in various reform movements, did lectures and radio programs...  They were probably tremendous letter writers as well, giving the epistolary norms of the time.  

J.B. Priestley is another one. A book a year was the average rate. I guess they didn't have the Internet or TV to distract , and if they were married, they weren't exactly doing any domestic stuff or helping raise the kids. Still it's pretty extraordinary, I always imagine them rising at 7-am and cranking out 2000 words before lunch - a big chunk of the latest book, a review for The Listener. Then bunking off to go down the pub, walk the dog, or read. Pipe smoking all the while. 

 

(via Sean Albiez)

Age changes your perspective on everything, not just music. It would take a small book or long essay at least to discuss all that, but let’s say that some of the urgency and obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of proportion about things. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and the music took precedence. Nowadays my life is full – I’m a couple of decades into a marriage, I have two children. I don’t have the huge space of time or of emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession. When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you got older, your identity is (hopefully) formed. You’re not looking to music to explain yourself to yourself, or be a savior, or the primary source of excitement and solace in your existence. Music remains my passion but it competes with other passions much more than it did when I was 22 and starting out as a music critic.

I also know a lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things become more contextualized and perhaps I have sense of how cycles repeat in rock culture. By the age of 49 you’ve seen so many hype cycles kick off and then exhaust themselves. You are also less easily impressed. But that’s good I think - "SR, 2011