Simon Reynolds - C or D

Sterling - I actually haven't read much modern ethnography, and was actually under the impression that it wasn't much practiced these days. Any suggestions about what to read? What I think what makes SR's writing interesting is the same thing that made anthropology interesting before Ed Said and company came along and (necessarily) shook things up. See especially Malinowski's diaries for some problematic/creepy but ultimately insightful and therefore ace stuff about the relationship between the observer and the observed.

Ben - Wasn't trying to use D&G's theory as an alibi for SR's "failure to fully understand" the lit crit terminology he uses. I've already acknowledged that D&G seem to think a thorough knowledge of the cannon is key to understanding their work. The para you quoted is not a misrepresentation of the thought of Gilles Deleuze, but a perfectly accurate representation of the thought of Matthew Cohen. I'm not misunderstanding D&G, but disagreeing with them. No one sits down with the Republic and works their way forward before daring to approach present-day philosophy. Even if such were possible (it's not - if such were the case, we would never have any "in" to philosophy, our search for the first, original thought from which we can precede forward to D&G et al would only come to an end with the ancient, indecipherable scribblings on a cave's wall), I don't agree that it's necessary. One's understanding of a given text is of course refined, improved, etc. when one reads the texts that have come before it, but this is not to say that one cannot reach any of understanding of a given text prior to achieving this refinement. The impossibility of absorbing the cannon in its entirety is reflected in the work of the very continental philosophers we're discussing - there seems to be a gaping hole in their representation of western philosophy, between Aristotle and Kant, which is filled only by Spinoza and Descartes (the latter of which seems to exist only for the sake of taking potshots at, ignoring Spinoza's indebtedness to him).

My point about SR practicing what D&G preach was that he has achieved a form of writing that D&G seemed to advocate - focusing on the heaving, oozing, jiggling movement of (for example) the rave scene, rather than its isolated moments. Which is to say that, wrt the ideas he takes from D&G, he seems to understand them just fine, even if he doesn't get the bigger picture. (and I honestly have no idea if he gets it or not) (and who does, really?)

Mr. Sutcliffe - Still would really like to see some examples of SR's failure to properly grasp lit/cult crit...

Re Penman - the Zappa essay seems very clever, and even more clever if you replace the words 'Frank Zappa' with 'Ian Penman'. Maybe that's why it was so painfully scathing? I think it's funny that somebody who so badly wants to be a culture crit (curries!?) but is reduced to issuing poorly-selling compilations of POP MUSIC reviews criticises somebody for 'playing guitar solos because they weren't good enough to follow a career in classical music'.

I have not read any of these other ppl therefore Simon Reynolds is TOTP

Re: Philosophy.

I am putting off reading certain contemporary works because they assume so much knowledge of earlier philosophers. I don't think it's difficult to come up with a reading list of the names which comes up the most, the thinkers whose ideas had the most widespread impact. There are only so many big ideas to go around. The more minor philosophers may reshuffle them or put a new spin on them, but it's not difficult to get some sense of who the most important authors are (in terms of impact). That doesn't mean there won't be arguments, obviously.

I am very suspicious of a lot of continental philosophy, but I would like to read it eventually. However, I didn't see much point in coming to it without having some Hegel under my belt.

You should probably consider some Heidegger, too.

Hegel fills me with total helplessness every time I try to read him, but I swear, one day, one sweet day, I'll make my way through both the Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

I know diddly squat about Contintental philosophy and not that much about Simon Reynolds but two things I'm surprised no one else had mentioned:

1. The slack-jawed E-gobblers aren't by and large violent at all. I think you are confusing them with those famed Football Hooligans (who, famously but I don't believe a word of it stopped being violent when they all started taking E).

2. This is mad. You're saying Texan students are all recycling Simon Reynolds? His fame extends wider than I could ever have imagined.

But if you hate Simon Reynolds it might be easy to say that any sub-standard attempt to philosophically justify liking aspect X of popular culture/music is a Reynoldism.

Imagine Mark SinXoR as a Texas philosophy lecturer, dismissively scrawling over essays in red ink: "Pah! Another boring Hornby re-run!"

nonsense timF, i wd write "this is yet more sophomoric uber-shyte, tho on the upside it is at least bettah i spose than that thah hornby, yeeXaW! 2/10"

poo i haf just remembered wot i had successfully repressed for three days, that i am meant to be delivering FT a review of that stupid da capo book...

"stupid da capo book"

well, no reason to read the review then, ho ho.

Much respect to Cohen and Daddino for asking the crucial questions, and much contempt for Sutcliffe for not answering them.

(SR did EngLit didnt he? not even a Real Subject, only introduced in 20th century) -- mark s ([email protected]), February 04, 2002.

guess what was in my tutorial readings for english this week?... it was a mark sinker article! :) (ok, technically it was for cultural studies, but that's in the english department, and same diff, it's still not a real subject)

minna wwaaggh!! what article was it though?

blimey this puts a crimp in my DECLINE OF ACADEMIC STANDARDS riff

haha me too minna: i was assigned the (awesome) paper "concrete, so as to self-destruct: the etiquette of punkZor..." for a cultural studies class in college

ooer

Here ya go foax, btw. The footnotes are all screwed up though (by me, not on purpose). And Oh no! I've lost Colette's VENN DIAGRAM! OH NO!!

haha this

haha it is now ok to wear flares geeta

If Sutcliffe reads this, I want to apologize for the "contempt" remark above - or at least elaborate on it by saying "Much contempt and EMPATHY for Sutcliffe." The guy seems twisted and angry out in Texas, intellectually isolated and frustrated - in other words, VERY MUCH LIKE ME - and he was acting out, bashing at the boys in glasses. Very much like me again; that is, being a boy in (figurative) glasses and being enraged at the boys in glasses. Jeez, the thread was three months old, why did I have to open my trap, even? But anyway, now that I'm here, my disappointment in Sutcliffe was that, though he kept calling himself a crank, he wasn't a very good crank. Which is to say that real cranks (hello, me) are so obsessed with their own ideas that they'll tell them to anybody, any chance they get, buttonholing old Mexican ladies in laundromats to discuss "the PBSification of rock," gesticulating wildly at parking lot attendants, engaging kindergarten students on the subject of Thomas Kuhn's indifference to philosophical skepticism. Whereas Sutcliffe just doesn't have the fire in him.

"the PBSification of rock"

!!!!

i <3 mr. k

"!!!!"

Geeta, you must seek to get your hands on a copy of Frank's zine Why Music Sucks. As Ned might say: it is good, oh yes.

(Frank I've decided that I owe you a Mix CD - how does that sound?)

distressingly i haf misplaced two issues of my COMPLETE RUN PH34R M3 of wms (it is not possible i threw them away) (cf thread about keeping pennies) (but #5 and #14 are not where i can currently lay my hands on them, hmmmm)

perhaps they are with my copy of METAL MACHINE MUSIC which still hasn't turned up in a year and a half of ilm-ing

As Ned might say: it is good, oh yes.

I'll have to second that, and I still have yet to read a word. ;-) Chuck Eddy mentions Frank and WMS prominently at the end of Stairway to Hell, and I now curse myself for never writing away to the address listed there all those years back. I've missed years of good thoughts, musical and otherwise, as a result.

what article was it though?

it was about decadence and iggy pop's penis.

was it any good?

yeah! if you really want to know it was one of the best articles in the whole binder... better than the simon reynolds one (and i like sr). listen here kids: mark s makes learning fun.

Mark - There is no #14. (Did you mean #4? It was the best, and I hope you didn't lose it, since I'm all out and can't afford the xeroxing at the moment. Still do have a few 5's, the famous Sex-O-Lette issue; 4 and 5 were the first I sent you, which may be why they're not with the others.)

Tim - I've always wanted a mixtape but was too shy to ask. Address is Frank Kogan, PO Box 9761, Denver CO 80209-9761 (the addresses listed in the back of the Eddy books have long since been abandoned; this one won't last forever either, I don't think).

People actually interested in WMS should email me rather than sending $$$ to the address, since prices vary depending on where I'm sending it and which issue I'm sending.

Accch! I mistyped my own address; so here it is correctly (the box is 9761 but the tail of the zip is 0761):

Frank Kogan
PO Box 9761
Denver CO 80209-0761

By the way, I think there are some Denverites or at least Coloradons who post on ILx (though I don't check the board enough to remember or know if they still post); keythkeyth for sure, and maybe Mandee (or am I misremembering); and some guy named Tom??? And Nitsuh grew up 100 miles or so south of here, right? Any interest in a get-together?

Oh yeah, and the country is USA. Some postal workers may need to know that.

Frank I meant #13: the Roger Williams one... I have it in various looseleaf formats, of course! And I *really* doubt it's actually left the house: I just can't work out which project bundle pile I put it in to remind me to finish that particular project (I thought it might be "Why Are the Left Such Fucking Chumps When It Comes to the Charts?" but it wasn't. I haven't done a full-on search; I may this weekend.)

Minna I'm delighted. Thank you.

Now that I've read the whole thread on Simon Reynolds' writing (well, quite a lot of it), what is there to say left? I think Tom and Ben Williams and Matthew Cohen and probably some others make sense, but that Daddino ends up helplessly stuck in the joke-trap set for him with that "all of western philosophy" stuff. People just don't know when continental philosophers are being funny. Jean-Luc Nancy would never say that, but for him it would probably be right. I also think that it must be cool to be mark s or Frank Kogan and have fans (although mark s seems to pull more chicks, Frank - while you have to keep on working that xerox machine). My friend Adrian, who writes about movies, once told a class of adoring undergraduates that a good way to write criticism was to walk over to a book shelf and take down any book at random, open a page at random, and write about what that page told you about the movie you were supposed to write about. Actually, he didn't say "good" - just that it worked. I do this all the time - in the sense that whatever I am reading or have liked reading is liable to turn up being an important part of the next thing I write. (This is a disguised plug for Jim Harvey's great book, Movie Love in the Fifties, which is what I am reading - we should all kill to be able to write about anything as well as he does about the movies). One other thing that Deleuze said definitely is that what he did was supposed to be treated like a tool box. People should take what they need, use it, clean it up and put it back. Probably the trouble people have with Reynolds (and notice how *no one* disagreed with shitting on Penman - one good reason I am cautious about joining this thread!), is that he/they actually doesn't/don't seem to operate that way. Like other English-educated people I have known, he/they seems/seem to have read the stuff from before and probably spent time talking about it and that sort of thing. (Note: this does not mean they are *right* - if you can be *right* about folks like that - just that they have done the homework). This does tend to get in the way of what you are doing (and it is what makes so much academic writing so tedious - even academic posts to threads about Simon Reynolds) - and it is also a lot like watching a peacock spreading its tail. But then, they start writing ... and who the fuck cares?

yrs bll

"what is there to say left?"

Oh, you could say something about Simon Reynolds's writing, which almost no one on this thread actually did except in the vaguest terms. Like, open a book, read a page, say something about it.

panic over!! WMS #5 and #13 "filed" in a breathtakingly unlikely place (under a pile of saturday guardian colour mags on my nice front room chair: i looked at it and thought WHY ON EARTH WOULD THEY BE THERE, NO POINT LOOKING!! Then I thought, NO!! They're not in an obvious place, so they might be in a stupid place — and they were...)

A friend once pulled the "toolbox" line on me and I accused him of using the theory more like a crowbar to pry apart anything that was too interesting for him.

Also, if you want to be taken seriously, its best not to identify yourself as a tool.

from my EXTREMELY CLOSE STUDY OF REYNOLDS DELEUZE ET AL this semester (ahem) I haf some suspicions:

the 'plateau' idea that reynolds uses from time to time (not always in those words) seems to me v. useful and pretty close to whatever d. and g. mean by it. EVEN BETTER, d. and g.'s source, gregory bateson, means something v. useful and interesting by it, well applicable to dance music, moreover rap, a-g stuff, indie rock, all kindsa things.

the 'desiring machine' stuff is not v. well developed so it's hard to tell if reynolds' use of it accords with d. and g.'s (whatever the hell that is exactly). my suspicion is that r's use doesn't show any deep understanding of d and g's, but it's along the right lines.

I'm curious what Josh Kortbein's use of the "plateau" idea would be. (I just got an email that suggests that a plateau is a high form of flattery.)

you'll have to wait for #2 in my currently still unstarted series of NEW SHIT, cuz I think that's what I'm going to write about next (taking the interesting parts out of the philosophy paper I'm writing)

Frank knows that I can't find my copy of Blissed Out and that I lent the Generation XTC book to a guy who hasn't returned it in a year and a half.

So let's try the other thing. I just happen to have a copy of History of Shit on my bookshelf, and I'll open it at random ...

"The individuation of waste, which enjoins all 'to hold and retain matter within their homes' comes attached to a moral homily: it serves as the 'raw material' for a fable whose hero serves a calendar in which singing and dancing days are always a year away."

Surely no one here can fail to see that this is a devastating description of the music critic and of how music criticism actually works (instead of the way our late capitalist society pretends that it works). For example, here we are reading this 'matter' when we could be out dancing, like Simon Reynolds always claims to be. The point is that HE is the 'hero' described in the quote and music criticism is the 'fable'.

See. It works.

"our late capitalist system" vs "our lated much-missed grandmother"

half-assed (or arsed) cultural semiotic gunk of Hedbige
I read his book Subcultures. Even though I was let down by his omission of the role of gender and mainly talks about subcultures formed in the big cities, it was still very illuminating in many ways. I am interested to know why you think it's half-assed.

Bill - The purpose of going out dancing is so that people can talk about it afterwards, or write and read about it. So if we want to stop people from writing and reading (so that they can do something more important, like dancing), we clearly need to stop them from dancing.

Frank - I thought dancing was writing - and, mostly, the other way around. So, see, you wouldn't do it after (because you would have other stuff to do after), but during.

We must reinscribe the text of the body, creating a palimpsest without author(ization), without end(s).

Hi,

I just spent the last half hour reading this thread. Extremely interesting.

Can somebody please explain to me who you people are? Is I Love Music a university thing?, a profession guild, how did you people find one another?

Anyway.

I have done some compiling over the last months and I want you to check out some of my pages:

http://www.jahsonic.com/SimonReynolds.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GillesDeleuze.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/DavidToop.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GeorgesBataille.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/GreilMarcus.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/BlackScienceFiction.html

see other thread to read my introduction

Kind regards
Jan Geerinck
http://www.jahsonic.com

in fact this entire board is written by simon reynolds, david toop, greil marcus, gilles deleuze and georges bataille under a panoply of pseudonyms. we've been rumbled at last.

greil marcus in particular distinguished himself recently when he posted this thread:

YOU SAD BASTARD! Carter Reconsidered Tom Ewing, September 2002

Jan- this is a public board. that's all.

and emmanuel is a troll. but a loveley and kind troll :-)

Wha-hey, Mr. Geerinck! I've used your site in the past; it's been a pretty keen resource. Welcome aboard.

So on re-reading Energy Flash or at least parts last night I have s'more thoughts.

It's almost too much -- the sustained invocations and praise thrown at every bit of every scene, the compulsive political readings and most importantly the accumulative aspect -- each chapter each twist builds on the one before and the fractures get more subtle and complex at once. Most troublesome is that Reynolds ties each change into the social landscape of region in question, but honestly it moves a bit too fast. I mean he's talking about how certain cultural features came to dominance in '93 thanks to unemployment, etc. so what are we supposed to think -- that the U.K was a bundle of peaches and cream until '92? His criteria for class relations, social change, etc. all seem too confined and limited in their scope. Meaning becomes too hermunetic and cloistered by this -- which is itself the dancefloor moment I suppose.

So thus probably the most thrilling part is how he builds and destroys the arguments for and vs. each twist and turn of genre-fracture being the one to liberate mankind bring peace freedom harmony and lemondade oceans. The experience of stepping in and out of the dancefloor, coming up and coming down and worrying and arguing over where next, the immediacy of local change in a minute twist of culture like Douglas Adams' fantasy from his Dirk Gently novels of an alternate reality tuned into by just twisting slightly sideways through a fourth dimension.

Plateau does seem an appropriate metaphor -- discontinuous sheets of social interaction each projecting itself forever into the past and future.

DUD! Everything he says and everything anyone ever says about him is poop. Such is the witch's curse.

lemonade oceans? ew.