Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Every website is a neuron, or is it every word on the web? It goes down to the smallest attribute, the tiniest tributary, since you can link from any discrete point to any other. So, the thoughts and images are the ganglia, snaking out to exchange charge across a sea of neurotransmitters. What will happen if the Web has a stroke? Gaps, holes, realms of the inaccessible, the entire schema like a sponge of information - a fractal volume, coexistent with absence.
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
children are an acquired taste.
watching high on fire the other night, trying to stay awake through the battering, i was aware of their music as a finite entity, limited, predictable, relentless. it was not engaging, mysterious, surprising or, utlimately, inspiring. more than anything else, it made me think that the strength (and weakness) of music, as well as the crux of its affinity with magic (and myth), lies in the power of illusion. because the world we perceive, the perception we live, is constructed, provisional, ad hoc, we are susceptible to hallucination, wizardry, and mystification. the evocative quality of music shrouds the performer in dream. but when you see through or past the oneiric veil, you see young men posturing and playing, and (little) more. they assume the forms of violence and fury, and even inhabit them, enact them, manifest them, but always under the banner "as if."
there was also a strange detachment about the band. matt pike (the leader) perfunctorily introduced the band, though not the individiuals, and named the songs, but did not interact with the audience in any meaningful way. was he drunk, out of it, insouciant? case in point: they played "baghdad," one of their best songs, but there was not irony or even indication that "baghdad" might refer to anything in the real world, at a time when "war against iraq" is under constant discussion. was he, by omission, telling us something about the "reality" of the world presented by the media, insisting, unconsciously, on the baseline of their brute, physical presence as existential anchor?
watching high on fire the other night, trying to stay awake through the battering, i was aware of their music as a finite entity, limited, predictable, relentless. it was not engaging, mysterious, surprising or, utlimately, inspiring. more than anything else, it made me think that the strength (and weakness) of music, as well as the crux of its affinity with magic (and myth), lies in the power of illusion. because the world we perceive, the perception we live, is constructed, provisional, ad hoc, we are susceptible to hallucination, wizardry, and mystification. the evocative quality of music shrouds the performer in dream. but when you see through or past the oneiric veil, you see young men posturing and playing, and (little) more. they assume the forms of violence and fury, and even inhabit them, enact them, manifest them, but always under the banner "as if."
there was also a strange detachment about the band. matt pike (the leader) perfunctorily introduced the band, though not the individiuals, and named the songs, but did not interact with the audience in any meaningful way. was he drunk, out of it, insouciant? case in point: they played "baghdad," one of their best songs, but there was not irony or even indication that "baghdad" might refer to anything in the real world, at a time when "war against iraq" is under constant discussion. was he, by omission, telling us something about the "reality" of the world presented by the media, insisting, unconsciously, on the baseline of their brute, physical presence as existential anchor?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
