At the heart of the musical micro-genre of hauntology is the sense of atemporality that underpins our present culture. Whether it’s musicians pastiching multiple vintage styles in a single track, the endless cycle of remakes and sequels in cinema, or historical genre mashups in pop literature, our future is looking increasingly like our past, which now looks like the future, which looks increasingly like the past, and so on.

- Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future

Demdike Stare, Coil & Machen. Read it, but listen to the tunes as well!

via the essential Boing Boing.

The reflexive habit — reflexive, at least, in these United States — of falling back on the mythic languages of Hollywood and Madison Avenue when we’re narrating our lives is a fact of life in the Society of the Spectacle. In his essay “This is Not a Movie,” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane noted TV commentators’ tendency, on 9/11, to resort “to a phrase book culled from cinema: ‘It was like a movie.’ ‘It was like Independence Day.’‘It was like Die Hard.’ ‘No, Die Hard 2.’ ‘Armageddon.’”

Apparently, even the severe-clear horrors of 9/11 weren’t immune to the Stepfordization all around us — the replacement of the immediate by the mediated, the physical thing by its filmic image. Reversing the polarities of the real and the fake gives Americans a big, fat, Baudrillardian migraine because, while European philosophers seem to think of the United States as Disneyland with the death penalty, we pay lip service, at least, to the primacy of hard fact and harbor a romantic attachment to authenticity. (Umberto Eco maintains that our longstanding love affair with the simulacrum — Disneyland, Forest Lawn, Las Vegas — is borne, paradoxically, of the fact that “the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”

Read more at The Savage Eye. [via Boing Boing]

The essay immediately brought my thoughts to Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s Mexico portion of the 2002 international response film 11’09″01, which is a very powerful and disturbing short. I’m going to embed it here, but be forewarned that it’s not exactly entertainment viewing. (It’s also mostly sound, so if the screen is black, that’s on purpose.)

I was privileged to see him talk when I was very young (thanks to my father), and will always remember his tales of dinosaurs and Mars.

The edition of his story The Homecoming illustrated by the incredible Dave McKean (who warrants a post of his own) is a treasured part of my collection, along with my ancient and battered copy of SWTWC.

His voice will be missed.

I was lucky to have a few vintage pocketbook collections of Robert Sheckley’s stories handed down to me as a child and have been a fan ever since. He wrote over 400 incredible short stories and 15+ novels, and was a huge influence on the New Wave of SF in the 60′s. Sheckley is well-known inside the SF community, but much of his work has fallen long out of print, and since most of my old pocket books are now mostly held together with tape or stored in ziploc baggies, I’ve been really excited with the recent reprints put out by NESFA and especially excited by this collection, which focuses on his work from the 1950′s.

Lethem and Abramovich describe his style better than I ever could in the introduction -

Sheckley’s stories operate as irresistible language artifacts, like extended puns or paradoxes: off-kilter, provocative, unsettling even if partly silly. They’re like psychedelic lamps that cast an eerie light in one room where they’re encountered, but then turn out to transform one’s view of all subsequent rooms. These are the kind of stories which, if young or otherwise inattentive at first encounter, you may forget the titles and the author’s name, only to rediscover them in some anthology many years later, with a sense of recognition akin to discovering someone else recounting a dream that you yourself once had.

- Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, pg. viii

Highly recommended and available at fine bookstores everywhere.

I’ll never forget when License to Ill came out and the impact that it had on me and my adolescent friends, followed by amazement at how the Boys developed over the years.

MCA has left a powerful legacy and he will be missed. RIP

(Background – Amanda is one half of the Dresden Dolls, is an incredible artist & musician and has put out a ton of great music that I like a bunch. Also has great taste in men.)

Over at Aperture’s Exposures Blog, they have an article about Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku, an exhibit of photographs salvaged from areas that were hit by the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

I’ve been meaning to post this here for a few days, but every time I go to look at it, I can’t stop watching the slideshow. Not only are the photographs both beautiful and haunting, the Lost & Found Project (http://lostandfound311.jp/en/) is an incredible effort that’s doing valuable work in reuniting people with their photos.

[via Exposures]

For some reason, this lack of hand-eye motor skills meant that I ended up reading criticism for a bit, specifically Geoff Dyer’s new book Zona exploring Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Drew Daniel’s 33 1/2 entry on Throbbing Gristle’s classic record 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Both Stalker and Throbbing Gristle were pretty important to me growing up, and I’d been really looking forward both of these books.

I first encountered Stalker at a friend’s house when I was a teen. He was a trash horror filmmaker and musician, and one day when I dropped by his place there was this amazing film playing on his TV, full of Russian angst, beautiful industrial landscapes and mystery. I’ve long since forgotten why I was there that day, but I’ve never lost the 20 minutes or so of Stalker that I saw there.

Since then, the film has become one of my favorites, a true desert island pick, and Dyer’s Zona (full, incredibly appropriate title – Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room) is the book that Stalker has always deserved. Geoff Dyer is a great writer, and not only is his discussion of Stalker both informative and personal, it is also extremely entertaining and often very funny; something that’s not the easiest thing to do when discussing Tarkovsky and a film like Stalker, which isn’t exactly a laugh fest.

Similarly, Drew Daniel’s 33 1/2 entry on 20 Jazz Funk Greats was equally entertaining and informative, diving into the minutiae and cultural impact of an album that I’ve always enjoyed. Drew is one half of Matmos and has both the musical knowledge and cultural background to really dig into his subject, which, when combined with extensive first person recollections from the band, allows him to document and make vital a record that generally wouldn’t be considered TG’s most important.

I was exposed to Throbbing Gristle and the rest of the early industrial scene at a very young age, and bands like TG and Einstürzende Neubauten have been (and are!) extremely influential to me. I’ve always had a soft spot for 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and I really enjoyed this. Plus, listening to the record at full volume while zoned out on medication was somewhat appropriate, especially Walkabout.

Both of these books are superlative and entertaining bits of criticism, and like pretty much most else I mention here, I highly recommend them. They are available via fine booksellers everywhere.