The films of Adam Curtis

"One of the main functions of politicians – and journalists – is to simplify the world for us. But there comes a point when – however much they try – the bits of reality, the fragments of events, won’t fit into the old frame."

Adam Curtis (born 1955) is a British television documentary producer. He currently works for BBC Current Affairs.

He is noted for making programmes which express a clear (and sometimes controversial) opinion about their subject, and for narrating the programmes himself.

Curtis previously taught politics at Oxford University but left for a career in television. He got a job on the show That's Life! where he learned to find humor in serious subjects.

He went on to make documentaries on more serious subjects but retained his playful tone.

Curtis's intensive use of archive footage is a distinctive touch of his. An Observer profile said: Curtis has a remarkable feel for the serendipity of such moments, and an obsessive skill in locating them. 'That kind of footage shows just how dull I can be,' he admits, a little glumly. 'The BBC has an archive of all these tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown. One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these little news moments, and look for connections.'

The Observer adds "if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts."

Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005. In 2006 he was given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at the British Academy Television Awards.

Selected works:

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, 2011:

The new series, called All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, takes complicated ideas and turns them into entertainment by the use of the vertigo-inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music with which all Curtis fans are familiar. The central idea leads Curtis on a journey, taking in the chilling über-individualist novelist Ayn Rand, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the "new economy", hippy communes, Silicon Valley, ecology, Richard Dawkins, the wars in Congo, the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory, and the computer model of the eating habits of the pronghorn antelope.

It Felt Like A Kiss, 2009:

It Felt Like a Kiss is an immersive theatre production, first performed between 2 and 19 July 2009 as part of the second Manchester International Festival, co-produced with the BBC. Themed on "how power really works in the world", it is a collaboration between film-maker Adam Curtis and Theatre Company Punchdrunk, with original music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. The visitor is immersed in sets based on archive footage from Baghdad, 1963; New York, 1964; Moscow, 1959; in the Amygdala, 1959-69; and Kinshasa, 1960. The title is taken from The Crystals' 1962 song "He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)", written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom, 2007:

If one steps back and looks at what freedom actually means for us today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom. The West apparently fought the Cold War for “individual freedom”, yet it is still something our leaders continually promise to give us. Abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to force “freedom” on to other people has led to bloody mayhem. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the government has dismantled long-standing laws that were designed to protect individual freedom.

The Power Of Nightmares, 2004:

Is the threat of radical Islamism as a massive sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries — and particularly American Neo-Conservatives — in an attempt to ‘unite and inspire’ people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies?

The Century Of The Self, 2002:

To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?

The Mayfair Set, 1999:

The Mayfair Set is a series of films that study how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the Thatcher government in Britain during the 1980s. The series focuses on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland — all members of The Clermont club in the 1960s, and how their distinct financial roles influenced the Thatcher government.

The Way of All Flesh, 1997:

In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, America. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age. They shape the policies of countries and of presidents. They even became involved in the cold war because scientists were convinced that in her cells lay the secret to how to conquer death.

The Living Dead, 1995:

The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past, is a series of films that investigate the way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been manipulated and distorted by politicians and others for various means of control.

Pandora's Box, 1992:

Pandora’s Box, subtitled A fable from the age of science, is a six part documentary series by Adam Curtis that examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power. Curtis’ later series The Century of the Self and The Trap had similar themes.

Further information here, here & here.

Timothy Morton

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.” — Kasino

Blade Runner is the best contemporary reading of Frankenstein. In a version of Romantic irony, the detective Deckard becomes implicated in his analysis of the replicant femme fatale, realizing that he may be (may be) a replicant himself.

The story has a pervasive atmosphere of undigested grief. Does this atmosphere have anything to benefit ecological critique? In 2019, what makes you human is your emotional response to animal suffering ("boiled dog, "an upturned crab"), while humanoid replicants are exploited and "retired" (killed) if they resist. This illusion of psychological depth, extracted in face-to-face interviews, is almost an ecomimetic ethics, like the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The replicants cannot identify with this sensibility, cannot put themselves into a crab's shoes. Yet they weep like little children because their emotional age is far younger than their implanted memories would suggest. But Deckard profoundly puts himself into the replicants' shoes. Deckard's uncanny dream, which makes us suspect that it is an implanted memory (and hence that he is not a human but a replicant) is of a fantasy animal, a unicorn. Society assumes the replicants are "evil." Animals are respected, but when the stranger is too close for comfort, he or she becomes threatening. But in the story, the replicants turn out to be protagonists, fired with a revolutionary politics.

Frankenstein and Blade Runner enjoin us to love people even when they are not people. Far from being rational self-interest, ecological thought is shot through with desire.

The task is to love the automatic as automatic. In order to mean anything at all, this love must be more excessive, exuberant, and risky than a bland extension of humanitarianism to the environment. Humanitarianism would leave the environment just as it is, as an Other "over there", a victim. In Blade Runner Deckard orders the femme fatale to say that she loves him and to ask him to kiss her. This could be a violation. Or perhaps it respects the fact that she is a doll, that to go on and on about how much he loves her would not convince her, but that to stage the love as a perverse script would speak the truth. It would acknowledge the objectal quality of the beloved, and thus to love her for herself rather than as a copy of a human. Nature and the body have become Donna Haraway's cyborg, and Frankenstein and Blade Runner are allegories for how to carry on in a cyborg world.

It is time to modify Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto, which still brilliantly articulates the paradoxes of politicized identity. "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," she writes. I'd rather be a zombie than a tree hugger. Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is a vast chronicle of the undead Native Americans that refuses to become a work of mourning for them. Deep Ecology buries the dead too fast (reducing everything to an expression of Gaia), while modernity tries to torch them in a familiar story of a war against matter. Meanwhile clouds of radioactive waste haunt the world. So while we campaign to make our world "cleaner" and less toxic, less harmful to sentient beings, our philosophical adventure should in some ways be quite the reverse. We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we're in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing "hauntology" (Derrida's phrase) rather than ontology.

Extract from - Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2007.

More information here, here and here.

Many thanks to Timothy Morton.

The films of Stanley Kubrick

"I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style."

Born July 26, 1928 in New York City, Kubrick initially earned renown as a photographer, selling his first free-lance pictures to Look magazine while still in high school. By the age of 17 he was working as a Look staff photographer, travelling the world in their employ for several years.

He subsequently enrolled as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University, attending classes taught by the likes of Calvin Trillin and Mark Van Doren. In the late 1940s Kubrick became enamored of filmmaking, attending Museum of Modern Art showings regularly. To supplement his income, he also played chess for money in Greenwich Village.

In 1951, Kubrick used his life savings to finance his first film, Day of the Fight, a 16-minute documentary profiling boxer Walter Cartier. The piece was later purchased by RKO for its This Is America series and played at the Paramount Theatre in New York. Encouraged by his success, Kubrick quit his post at Look to pursue filmmaking full-time.

Soon, RKO assigned him to helm a short for their documentary series Pathe Screenliner. Titled Flying Padre, the nine-minute work spotlighted Fred Stadtmueller, a priest who piloted a Piper Cub around his 400-mile New Mexico parish.

In 1953 the Atlantic and Gulf Coast District of the Seafarers International Union commissioned Kubrick to direct a half-hour industrial documentary called The Seafarers, his first color film.

With the aid of relatives, Kubrick raised some $13,000 in order to finance his feature debut, the war story Fear and Desire. Filmed in the San Gabrielle mountains near Los Angeles with a crew of less than ten people (including Kubrick's then-wife Toba Metz), the picture was filmed silently, with its dialogue dubbed-in later (a measure which ultimately added $20,000 to the final cost).

Shown only briefly on the New York arthouse circuit, Fear and Desire failed to earn back its initial investment and was later disowned by its creator, who successfully blocked a number of planned screenings several decades later. His sophomore feature, the gangland melodrama Killer's Kiss, followed in 1955. A more successful effort, it was sold to United Artists and received worldwide distribution, playing primarily as a second feature.

In 1956 Kubrick directed his first studio picture, The Killing. A heist film told via an ambitious overlapping time structure, the film starred Sterling Hayden, with dialogue from the legendary hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson.

The result was the director's first artistic triumph, and it brought him to the attention of MGM production head Dore Share, where Kubrick was teamed with novelist Calder Willingham to develop future projects. After preparing a screenplay based on Steven Zweig's story "The Burning Secret" which went unproduced, Thompson joined the duo to adapt the Humphrey Cobb war novel Paths of Glory.

Studio after studio rejected the project until Kirk Douglas agreed to star, resulting in a financing deal with United Artists. Shot in Germany, the 1957 film won considerable critical acclaim, and further cemented Kubrick's reputation as a rising talent.

However, the next two years left him in a state of limbo, as a pair of proposed projects -- I Stole 16 Million Dollars, a planned vehicle for Douglas based on the life of safecracker Herbert Emmerson Wilson, and an untitled film about Mosby's Rangers, a southern guerilla force active during the U.S. Civil War -- both failed to come to fruition.

Kubrick then spent some six months on pre-production work for the Marlon Brando western One-Eyed Jacks, only to look on helplessly as Brando decided at the eleventh hour to direct the picture himself. Finally, in 1959 he replaced Anthony Mann on Spartacus, a lavish historical epic starring Douglas, Laurence Olivier, and Tony Curtis. The most costly film produced in Hollywood to date, with a budget of over $12 million, it proved to be a major hit, winning the Golden Globe Award for "Best Picture."

In 1962 Kubrick resurfaced with the controversial Lolita, based on the infamous Nabokov novel about a man's infatuation with his teenaged stepdaughter.

Due to a number of financial and legal difficulties, the film was shot in England, where Kubrick continued to live and work after the project's completion.

He next turned to his first undisputed masterpiece, the 1964 Cold War-era black comedy Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a brilliant adaptation of the Peter George novel Red Alert starring Peter Sellers in no less than three different roles.

In December of 1965 Kubrick began production on what was to become his crowning achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke story The Sentinel, the 1968 film -- a complex meditation on man's instinctive desire for violence, set against a backdrop of an American spacecraft's contact with extraterrestrial intelligence -- quickly emerged as a landmark in motion picture history, growing in status to become recognized as one of the greatest and most thought-provoking movies ever released. A biography of Napoleon was projected as the follow-up, but when expected costs proved too prohibitive, the film never moved beyond the planning stages.

Instead, Kubrick turned to another controversial novel, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.

A satiric 1971 essay on crime and punishment set in a violent future world, the film initially scored an "X" rating in the U.S. but proved surprisingly popular regardless, even netting several Oscar nominations.

In Britain, A Clockwork Orange played theatrically for a year without incident, but was pulled after a number of copy-cat crimes which authorities blamed on the picture's influence, including a brutal gang-rape mirroring a scene in the film.

Moving from the future to the past, in 1975 Kubrick adapted William Makepeace Thackery's 19th century novel Barry Lyndon, a lavish costume drama detailing the rise and fall of an Irish rogue (Ryan O'Neal) during the 1700s.

In 1980, Kubrick helmed The Shining, an adaptation of a horror novel by author Stephen King. While one of the director's greatest popular successes, critical notice was less kind, and he spent the early half of the decade away from the camera, plotting his next move.

The result was 1987's Full Metal Jacket, a Vietnam War drama which scored with both audiences and critics. Despite the film's success however, Kubrick again went into hibernation.

One planned project, an ambitious science-fiction tale dubbed A.I., was reportedly placed on hold because it outpaced the special effects capabilities of the moment, while another, The Aryan Papers, failed to progress beyond the pre-production stage.

Finally, in late 1996 Kubrick began work on Eyes Wide Shut, starring husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

In 1997, Kubrick was given two of the film world's highest honors, winning the D.W. Griffith Award from the Director's Guild of America as well as the Golden Lion Award at the 54th Venice International Film Festival.

Two years later, Eyes Wide Shut was released to extremely mixed reviews; a dreamlike erotic odyssey, it proved to be Kubrick's last film. He died of natural causes on March 7 of that year, leaving behind one of the cinema's most provocative, varied, and altogether brilliant legacies.

Biography by Jason Ankeny.

Director:

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Shining (1980)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Lolita (1962)
Spartacus (1960)
Paths of Glory (1957)
The Killing (1956)
Killer's Kiss (1955)
Fear and Desire (1953)
The Seafarers (1952)
Day of the Fight (1951)
Flying Padre (1951)

Producer:

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Shining (1980)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Killer's Kiss (1955)
Fear and Desire (1953)

Screenwriter:

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Shining (1980)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Paths of Glory (1957)
The Killing (1956)
Killer's Kiss (1955)
Fear and Desire (1953)
Flying Padre (1951)

Cinematographer:

Killer's Kiss (1955)
Fear and Desire (1953)
The Seafarers (1952)
Flying Padre (1951)

Editor:

Killer's Kiss (1955)
Fear and Desire (1953)
The Seafarers (1952)
Day of the Fight (1951)



More information here, here and here.

Jacques Derrida

"There is nothing outside the text"

Jacques Derrida was one of the most original and influential French philosophers in the contemporary world.

He was born in Algeria on July 15, 1931, to a Sephardic Jewish family.

He moved to France in 1949 and studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, where he wrote his dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s genetic phenomenology (Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl [The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy], 1953-1954).

In the 1960s Derrida published major works concerned with the limitations of phenomenological and structuralist thought in the human sciences. Prior to his death, he was the director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socialies in Paris and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Derrida died on October 8, 2004.

"Without disappearing, use-value becomes, then, a sort of limit, the correlative of a limit-concept, of a pure beginning to which no object can or should correspond, and which therefore must be complicated in a general (in any case more general) theory of capital. We will draw from this only one consequence here, among all the many other possible ones: if it itself retains some use-value (namely, of permitting one to orient an analysis of the "phantasmagoric" process beginning at an origin that is itself fictive or ideal, thus already purified by a certain fantastics), this limit-concept of use-value is in advance contaminated, that is, pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely, what will be born from the wooden head of the table, the commodity-form, and its ghost dance. The commodity-form, to be sure, is not use-value, we must grant this to Marx and take account of the analytic power this distinction gives us. But if the commodity-form is not, presently, use-value, and even if it is not actually present, it affects in advance the use-value of the wooden table. It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being "out of joint."

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.

The "mystical character" of the commodity is inscribed before being inscribed, traced before being written out letter for letter on the forehead or the screen of the commodity. Everything begins before it begins. Marx wants to know and make known where, at what precise moment, at what instant the ghost comes on stage, and this is a manner of exorcism, a way of keeping it at bay: before this limit, it was not there, it was powerless. We are suggesting on the contrary that, before the coup de théâtre of this instant, before the "as soon as it comes on stage as commodity, it changes into a sensuous supersensible thing," the ghost had made its apparition, without appearing in person, of course and by definition, but having already hollowed out in use-value, in the hardheaded wood of the headstrong table, the repetition (therefore substitution, exchangeability, iterability, the loss of Singularity as the experience of singularity itself, the possibility of capital) without which a use could never even be determined. This haunting is not an empirical hypothesis..."

Extract from: Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.

Works of note:

Derrida, Jacques. 1962. L’Origine de la géométrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. English trans.: 1978. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. English trans.: 1974. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. English trans.: [1973] 1979. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allinson and Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil. English. trans.: 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1969. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso.

Derrida, Jacques. [1972] 1982. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit. English trans.: 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Brighton, U.K.: Harvester.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Mémoires: For Paul de Man. Trans. Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Culler, and Cecile Lindsay. New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Further information here, here, here & here.

Mark Fisher, There Are Non-Times As Well As Non-Places: Reflections On Hauntology

The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture & NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program present - There Are Non-Times As Well As Non-Places: Reflections On Hauntology, a talk by Mark Fisher. Wednesday 4th of May 2011, 6:30pm, Room 471, 20 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003. Free and open to the public.

“Through their generic and transient qualities – workstations devoid of personal effects, relations with colleagues as fleeting as those with passengers on a commuter journey – many workplaces now resemble non-places, either literally, as in the case of a hotel, corporate coffee chain or out-of-town supermarket, or symbolically, in the form of temporary assignments for faceless employers (dis)located in anonymous buildings, where the worker-commuter then follows the same global timetables, navigates the same software applications and experiences the same sense of placelessness, the feeling of being mere data in the mainframe.”

So writes Ivor Southwood in his analysis of precarious labour, ‘Non-Stop Inertia’ (2011). In the last decade, the proliferation of corporate non-places has been accompanied by the spread of cyberspace-time, or Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality. It’s no coincidence that, as this unmarked time increasingly came to dominate cultural and psychic space, Derrida’s concept hauntology (re)emerged as the name for a paradoxical zeitgeist. In ‘Specters of Marx’, Derrida argued that the hauntological was characterised by “a time out of joint”, and this broken time has been expressed in cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present. Sometimes accused of nostalgia, the most powerful examples of hauntological culture actually show that nostalgia is no longer possible. In conditions where pastiche has become normalised, the question has to be: nostalgia compared to what?

James Bridle has recently argued that “the opposite of hauntology ... [is] to demand the radically new”, but hauntology in fact operates as a kind of thwarted preservation of such demands in conditions where - for the moment at least - they cannot be met. Whereas cyberspace-time tends towards the generation of cultural moments that are as interchangeable as transnational franchise outlets, hauntology involves the staining of particular places with time - albeit a time that is out of joint. In this lecture, Fisher will explore the hauntological culture of the last few years in relation to the question of place, using examples from music (Burial, The Caretaker, Ekoplekz, Richard Skelton), film (Chris Petit, Patrick Keiller) and fiction (Alan Garner, David Peace).

The three pieces of audio presented here, were taken from the concluding moments of Mark's talk, including a selection from the following Q&A. Thank you to Mark Fisher, without whom this post would not have been possible.

Non-Times/Non-Places: Excerpt 1


Non-Times/Non-Places: Excerpt 2


Non-Times/Non-Places: Excerpt 3



Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism and the editor of The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (both Zer0, 2009). He writes regularly for, frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk.

Further information here, here and here.

Philip K. Dick

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago, December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life.

Dick became a published author in 1952. His first sale was the short story "Roog." His first novel, "Solar Lottery," appeared in 1955. Dick produced an astonishing amount of material during the 1950s and 1960s, writing and selling nearly a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so novels during this period, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", "Time Out Of Joint", and the Hugo-award winning "The Man In The High Castle".

A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick would later maintain that reports of his drug use had been greatly exaggerated by sensationalistic colleagues. In any event, after a layoff of several years, Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said". Perhaps more importantly, though, this same year Dick would have a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life.

Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event.

At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme schizophrenic behaviour. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick.

Despite his award-winning novels and almost universal acclaim from within the science-fiction community, Dick was never especially financially successful as a writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. In fact, one of the reasons for his extreme productivity was that he always seemed to need the advance money from his next story or novel in order to make ends meet. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53.

Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously. Mini Biography By: Rudyard Kennedy.

Novels by year of composition:

1950 Gather Yourselves Together
1952 Voices from the Street
1953 Vulcan's Hammer
1953 Dr. Futurity
1953 The Cosmic Puppets
1954 Solar Lottery
1954 Mary and the Giant
1954 The World Jones Made
1955 Eye in the Sky
1955 The Man Who Japed
1956 A Time for George Stavros
1956 Pilgrim on the Hill
1956 The Broken Bubble
1957 Puttering About in a Small Land
1958 Nicholas and the Higs
1958 Time Out of Joint
1958 In Milton Lumky Territory
1959 Confessions of a Crap Artist
1960 The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
1960 Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
1961 The Man in the High Castle
1962 We Can Build You
1962 Martian Time-Slip
1963 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
1963 The Game-Players of Titan
1963 The Simulacra
1963 The Crack in Space
1963 Now Wait for Last Year
1964 Clans of the Alphane Moon
1964 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1964 The Zap Gun
1964 The Penultimate Truth
1964 Deus Irae
1964 The Unteleported Man
1965 The Ganymede Takeover
1965 Counter-Clock World
1966 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1966 Nick and the Glimmung
1966 Ubik
1968 Galactic Pot-Healer
1968 A Maze of Death
1969 Our Friends from Frolix 8
1970 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
1973 A Scanner Darkly
1976 Radio Free Albemuth
1978 VALIS
1980 The Divine Invasion
1981 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Further information here, here and here.

La Musique des Sons #5

Welcome to the fifth in a series of musical snap-shots, entitled: La Musique des Sons. Unable or unwilling to expand on the whys and what-fors of a particular artist/project, etc, two for one seemed like the way to go. Less is in no way more, but maybe less is enough.

When putting together these LMDS posts, I sometimes try to feature artists that have a previously unconsidered connection, or, who contrast each other. I don't always succeed. However, on this occasion, as far as the latter is concerned, I think I'm onto something...

Much has been written about Dubstep producer William Bevan, aka, Burial. I will, however, for the purposes of this little introduction, assume that you are ignorant of his work. In genres such as Dub and Drum & Bass, musicians are often refereed to as producers.

In this context, a producer is not just someone who takes care of productions duties, for material recorded by another, but for someone who takes control of every aspect of the process, from start to finish. As stated, William Bevan is a Dubstep producer, recording under the name Burial. Dubstep, is essentially a combination of Dub and Drum & Bass, however, as stated previously, Dubstep is a difficult genre to describe. It encompasses and combines many different genres, as any decent genre should.

As with Various Production, Burial's sound is an interesting variation on the traditional themes of Dubstep. Eschewing the usual ingredients; programmed rhythms, breaks, Dub style basslines, etc, Burial tends to build his tracks from sound effects, plundered from video games; shell cases hitting the ground, digitised rain and crackle, being particular favourites. In addition to this, harmonic and melodic elements are, more often than not, only ever suggested. Drifting in and out the mix, filtered through delay, as if heard from a distance, in the dead of night. Another key component is fragmented samples of soulful vocals, that speak of longing and heartbreak, bent to Burials will, using auto-tune. That is to say, tuned to a sequence of notes. Once all of these ingredients are blended together, a beautiful and evocative feeling of melancholy is the result.

Before I hand over to a segment from Mark Fisher's 2007 interview, a quote from Derek Walmsley, in response to comments by Burial that he uses Sound Forge Audio Studio software to edit and construct his tracks. Here's the thing, listening to the material, many believe this just isn't possible...

"Inspired by the darkside drum'n'bass of the Metalheadz label, Burial decided at the outset to avoid at all costs the rigid, mechanistic path that eventually brought drum 'n' bass to a standstill. To this end, his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantized, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm. His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments, and the mix is rough and ready rather than endlessly polished. Perhaps most importantly, his basslines sound like nothing else on Earth. Distorted and heavy, yet also warm and earthy, they resemble the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train" - Derek Walmsley, The Wire.

Mark Fisher: Your tunes connect this time with a different era, one that’s gone.

Burial: I hear tunes, I seek out tunes that used to be everything to someone but they probably can’t listen to them now.

I know there are tunes I’ve put on, I’ve seen people cry, Moving Shadow tunes, old tunes, because this music is old enough now for it to mean that. Even a single sound, they’ll hear a sound and it’ll just slay them. And you’re right, culture doesn’t seem to notice this. Where I’m from you're more likely to be sitting around talking about a Rufige Kru or 4hero tune, how much it meant to you, than some other kind of music. I like normal life. It’s weird now, people die and they’re still on Facebook or whatever the fuck else.

Mark Fisher: What other influences do you have outside music?

Burial: PlayStation games. A lot of my drums are just people picking up new ammo and weapons in games. I love shells falling to the floor, power-ups, like when you get extra life. It would be good if you could do that in real life: pick up extra lives, fight end-of-level-guardians down by the shops, use cheat-modes. I spent all my pocket money trying to complete Silent Scope at the arcade. I was brought up on that stuff. My Dad when I was really little, sometimes he used to read me M R James stories. On the South Bank last year, I was walking along, and I found a book of M R James ghost stories. I bunked that day off from my day job and I got this book, and now I’m well into M R James ghost stories.

Mark Fisher: You’re joking, really?

Burial: There’s a few ghost stories, the one that fucked me up when I was little. 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad'. Something can betray how sinister it is even at a distance. Something weird happens with M R James, because they’re short - and I don’t read much – and even though it’s in writing, there’ll be a moment, when the person meets the ghost, where you can’t quite believe what you’ve read, you go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It's like you’re not reading any more. In that moment it burns a memory into you that isn't yours. He says something like, ‘there’s nothing worse for a human being than to see a face where it doesn’t belong’. But if you’re little, and you’ve got an imagination which is always messing you up and darking you out, things like that are almost comforting to read. Also, there is nothing worse than not recognizing someone you know, someone close, family, seeing a look in them that just isn't them. I was once in a lock-in in a pub and the regulars there and some mates started telling these fucked up ghost stories from real life, maybe that had happened to them, and I swear if you heard them. One girl told me the scariest thing I ever heard. Some of these stories would stop a few words earlier than seemed right, they don't play out like a film, they're too simple, too everyday, slight, those stories ring true and I never forgot them. Sometimes maybe you see ghosts on the underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go. They are smaller, about 70% smaller than a normal person, smaller than they were in life.

Mark Fisher: Where I live now, in Suffolk, was where James set many of his stories. Some of the names of the places in the stories are thinly coded names of Suffolk towns.

Burial: I love that, like old churchyards, factories, places out of the way. I used to get taken away to the middle of nowhere, by the sea, I love it out there, because when it’s dark, it’s totally dark, there’s none of this ambient light London thing. We used to have to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where you were and then you’d walk on, and the image of where you’ve just were would still be on your retina. You couldn’t see anything, but you’d see stars. Loads of the drums on the new album are just a lighter. I love lighters and Swan Vesta matches, the drums on every tune are the same, this little noise.

The thing I love about M R James, it’s almost like you learn a lesson off the stories, which is to be obsessed with a similar kind of effect until you get it right, because you’re basically circling similar ideas. It’s not about things sounding the same, they’re just, I don’t know what the word would be, singular. Like Photek used to be. The techniques hit you between the eyes because they are so fucking focused, obsessed by the same devices. With M R James, it’s that ghost story thing, someone told me this story, or I knew this person – it’s a device to deliver the story into your world. Urban legends get woven so you're unable to be sure it's untrue. A statistician would say: of all the millions of ghost stories ever told, what percentage would have to be true for ghosts to exist? The answer is that only one story would have to be true. The new tunes are a tiny misdirection, so I can steal away unseen to the next place... Read on.

Kindred - Kindred EP (HDB059):



Ashtray Wasp - Kindred EP (HDB059):



Further information here, here and here.


I came late to the Young Knives party. This was due in part to what I'd call misdirection. I first became aware of them via issue 72 of Artrocker.

I picked up a copy whilst passing through a train station. I wasn't impressed. I certainly found nothing that I would refer to as Art Rock. Quite the contray. It's pages were devoted to music for people, or rather children, with very short attention spans. What I used to call jerky bands. A jumble of physical and musical ticks, attempting to channel the spirit of the golden age of new-wave, but amounting to nothing. The flash in these particular pans was over in a fraction of a second, and didn't even burn very brightly. However, something about the Young Knives stuck in my mind. When I reached my destination, in this case Chichester, I popped into the local HMV, on the way to the Pallant House Gallery. The only reason for visiting Chichester, as far as I can see. Having almost forgotten why I went in there, mindlessly wandering up and down the aisles, disinterested in all I saw, I ended up thumbing through the Neil Young section, as usual, when an interesting sleeve caught my eye. Upon closer inspection, lo and behold, it turned out to be the Young Knives' 2006 album 'Voices of Animals and Men'. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Whilst settling into the my hotel room, I popped the CD into the MacBook. At first I was concerned that I'd made a mistake, and purchased something by the kind of band described above. However, I listened more intently, and sure enough, something interesting began to emerge.

Lyrically the Young Knives reflect a kind of Social-Hauntology: "We tread with people in their paths, Follow their signs and mystic marks, A mug of tea a cup of Sake, A Virgin Mary with the Marquis, By canoe and coracle, I solely own my carryall, Counting different coloured cars, We've got the same decrepit Stars, My plan has failed, Tremblings of trails, Yearning comforts of the dales, I'm sorry, sorry".

Musically? Flipping through the booklet, I notice that the record was engineered, mixed and produced by none other than Andy 'Gang of Four' Gill. Well, if your going to channel the spirit of the golden age of new-wave, you might as well do a good job of it. And they have.

Also in the booklet, a series of intriguing images: The Straw Bear, Whittlesea - John Slinger, Morris Dancer, Lancaster - Tom Harrington MBE, Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestler, Carlisle - John Chapple, Beekeeper, Ealing.

Jermy Leeuwis, April 15, 2008... A muscular clatter of pulsing guitars, head-spinning percussive thuds, and harmonic, brotherly vocals provide the backbone to a rich throng of giddy, excited ideas and ageless, wry lyrical themes. Truly, Young Knives are a band for our times, and all times.

It's been quite a spell for this distinctive trio of respectably dressed men. Based upon a tight, irreplaceable unit, comprised of brothers Henry and Thomas "House Of Lords" Dartnall, and school-friend Oliver Askew, (who all met in Ashby De La Zouche near Loughborough), their formative years were spent making rather rubbish music and ironic cover versions before anything particularly viable was to form. Then university got in the way altogether, rendering the band temporarily redundant.

Eventually, the rolling Welsh hills that surrounded their stint at university led to a cultural and physical shift, to Oxford. It was here that it started to make sense to take this music thing a little more seriously. Exploiting the town's rich musical heritage, set of venues and arch promoter types, the Knives began a vigorous assault of constant gigging and recording.

Early results include their first, mini opus; the jagged and unrelenting, Brit-Pixies jar of "The Young Knives...Are Dead". It was an early nod to the band's penchant and celebration for home-grown eccentricity and close-to-home irreverence, surreal and infectious in equal doses. An unofficially released EP - "Rollerskater" - and several hundred, band-pressed "Nolen's Volens" LPs surfaced afterwards, but it was with the arrival of some thunderous, brand-new material in winter 2005 that audiences began taking particular note. It all suddenly clicked.

The abrasive guitars and stop-start rhythmic somersaults were merging with new melody-drenched choruses that stuck in heads and shifted feet. What's more, Andy Gill of the legendary Gang Of Four started phoning them up to hastily organise some recording sessions in his home-studio.

The newly formed, London-based Transgressive Records, barely three seven-inch vinyl releases in, heard about this regional outbreak - and hopped on a train from Paddington to Oxfordshire to witness what was happening. Greeting them onstage at the homely local venue, The Wheatsheaf, that night were three tweed-clad, English professor-types performing some of the most visceral and feral pop songs of a generation. Barely a month later, signatures were stolen, dreams were made, and a classic album was embarked upon, utilising Gill at the helm.

"I just remember how exciting it was to do it (make the album with Gill); it being our first proper experience in the studio with a seasoned producer, and how much we learnt..." ruminates Henry. "We thought properly about songwriting, song structure...and also how to free ourselves up from ideas we had...getting a bit more crazy. Emotionally, it was a great awakening as a band. He is like your guiding, wise uncle. He showed us a strong work ethic when it came to attention to detail, but also was just a very nice man. He knew when to stop working for a day".

"Voices Of Animals & Men", an Adam & The Ants reference, was eventually christened. It reached silver record status in the U.K., featured the most-talked-about launch party of the year (a peculiar outdoor summer fete in the heart of Camden Town, featuring coconut shies, a tombola, and a raffle), and spawned several hit singles in the form of "The Decision", "Here Comes The Rumour Mill", "She's Attracted To" and "Weekends & Bleak Days (Hot Summer)".

Each song also boasted a unique and band-based video that - in an age of YouTube-whored, visionless artistry - reintroduced the beauty of the music video. The band could be caught in any manner of scenarios, whether dodging uncompromising, violent in-laws, recreating "The Wickerman" (not Nicholas Cage's version, mind you), or mustering dance routines in the deep seas, and it always worked... Read on.

Further information here, here and here.

Video content here, here and here.

Silent Hill

In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill. You promised you'd take me there again someday, but you never did. Well I'm alone there now... in our 'special place'... waiting for you...

Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl are on their way to a family vacation in the resort town of Silent Hill when a mysterious figure walks into the road. Startled by the dark figure suddenly silhouetted in his headlights Harry panics, jerking the steering wheel, and sends his jeep careening through a guardrail and off the road. Harry wakes to find his jeep has come to rest just inside the town of Silent Hill and Cheryl is missing from the passenger seat. Worried for his daughter’s safety, Harry heads into the town to find her; instead he finds a deep rooted evil that pervades the misty town of Silent Hill and somehow ties to his daughter’s disturbing past.

Conceived by game designer, Keiichiro Toyama, Silent Hill was released in 1999 for the Sony Playstation as a third-person adventure game. Told from Harry’s perspective, it starts with his arrival to Silent Hill and follows him as he searches for his missing daughter.

Despite the initial thoughts by gamers and critics alike that Konami’s Silent Hill was just another Resident Evil clone it was obvious after its release that Silent Hill embodied a very different kind of horror. While Capcom’s Resident Evil relied heavily on action and visual scares that usually startled the player, Silent Hill relied more on an unnerving atmosphere built up with subtle visuals and nerve racking sounds to fill the player with a constant dread. The game’s music composed by Akira Yamaoka in particular had a big hand in helping Silent Hill stand from the crowd. The game’s use of real-time 3D environments, the fog, grain and darkness used to hide the Playstation’s limitations not only gave Silent Hill its signature look but also enhanced the town’s look of dilapidation and decay.

Even though Silent Hill’s sound and visuals were well received many felt the game’s voice acting and clunky controls brought down the mood of the overall game experience. Unfortunately all the game’s dialogue was recorded line by line which resulted in awkward pauses during character conversations. This not only made the character’s speech come across as rather halting but the lack of natural flow in their speech made many serious scenes come off as rather comical and spoiled the creepy atmosphere built up by the visuals and ambient music.

Years after its initial release Silent Hill is not only still wildly popular but still often recognized as a leading horror title.

It has made several “best of lists” these past couple years placing 14th in IGN’s “best PlayStation games of all time” list in 2000, named 15th “best” in a 2005 article by GameSpy and earned the top spot in Gametrailers.com video feature in 2006 for the top ten scariest games of all time. With the title’s enduring popularity it’s no wonder Konami decided to revisit the original plot for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Hopefully this re-imagining will also stand the test of time.

Developers: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, Climax Studios, Double Helix Games & Vatra Games

Publishers: Konami Digital Entertainment

Creator: Keiichiro Toyama

Composers: Akira Yamaoka (1999–2009) & Daniel Licht (2011)

Platforms: PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii & Microsoft Windows



More information here, here and here.