A Pause In The Paranoia.

"You're so lame," she said with a hug, "And superficial."

"And you're insincere. And shallow," I said, holding her tighter.

"They Gesture Toward The Heavens," Alex Ross Writes, "But They Speak The Language Of High-End Real Estate."

He once described classical-music concerts as "mass anal retention," and began his cult-hit 2004 essay "Listen to This" by blurting, "I hate 'classical music.'"

Ross hasn't turned against the music, but rather the "cult of mediocre elitism" that has strangled it for decades, from the unnecessary stiffness of concert-hall behavior to the absurd institutional ban on new music.

"The American middle-class carried the worship of the classics to a necrophiliac extreme."

Ross wants to call it simply "the music," like jazz lovers do. He wants to talk about it as if it were popular music, without the pretentious Italian words and the endless musicological descriptions that clog American mainstream classical-music criticism and contaminate the concert experience, starting with the program notes. "Yes, the music can be great and serious; but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics," Ross writes. "It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane."
The Stranger

Bands Like Interpol, Bloc Party, And To Some Degree Franz Ferdinand Have Taken The Superficial Trappings Of Post-Punk And Re-Fabricated Them From An Assembly Line Of Poseurism And Bullshit Hipness.

I've encountered two types of people who like She Wants Revenge: the ignorant and the misguided. Perhaps I pity the ignorant more: they like She Wants Revenge because to their tin ears and their lack of context, the band fits in somewhere in an imaginary revival of post-punk.

I say "imaginary" because not even a single one of the so-called post-punk revival bands have exhibited any of the qualities that made post-punk what it was: originality, political sophistication and interesting guitar playing.

In fact, they've utterly exorcised them.

Bands like Interpol, Bloc Party, and to some degree Franz Ferdinand have taken the superficial trappings of post-punk and re-fabricated them from an assembly line of poseurism and bullshit hipness, creating a smarmy bastardization based on Gang of Four beats and harebrained phony aloofness. It says a lot for the gullibility of the record-buying public that bands like this have managed to become cool merely by pretending to be cool.
David Thorpe

No-Pro, Page 374.

If the word in the eighties was 'me,' and in the nineties 'it,' in the millennium it's 'ish.'

Everything has to be vague and qualified. Substance used to be important, then style was everything.

Now it's all just faking it.

. . .

No-Pro, Page 370.

-- We are in. We have product. We live.

Luka & Back With Bad Poetry And Good Bits.

Sermon given to an empty church: "The signs and portents are all there, as numerous and as commonplace as the pigeons, the city bustles with them. take for instance the parakeets of Richmond parkland and Hampstead Heath, harbingers of a tropical future, ozoneless, humid, or the birds which decline to fly south for the winter, the risks being too great now the British winter's mild enough to weather."

"The beastmen we engineered for physical labour. The beastmen we found to be superior to the robots, being cheaper to run and more efficient in their work. They are born not manufactured, they do not need computer progrmmes, liable to malfunction to operate and there is no mantinence required. They need only food and periodic rest. They have far greater manual dexterity and are more adept at problem solving and pre-empting the wishes of their masters."

"This leaves the population at large employed in the act of illusion and artifice. the creation of the world as it was. stage-managed street science, roleplaying, tablaeus for tourists, historical reenactments played out by actors paid by the state, we are all actors now, what you see is, in some sense, no longer real. the beggar in blankets beneath the ATM, the bawling barrow boys, the newspaper vendor blowing warmth into frozen hands (no one reads newspapers anymore, there is no news) the prostitutes in doorways, that huddle of teenagers, slender and beautiful, dressed in the latest fashions, the busker with his ukulele, the marching city workers in tailored suits, the pickpockets, muggers and drug pushers, conversing in impenetrable criminal slang, all of this is makebelieve, while the beastmen toil out of sight, concealed in windowless factories, in subterranean fields lit with electric suns, minotaurs labouring in the labyrinths."
Luka

. . .

No-Pro, Page 296.

-- Lovely chips, I tell him, comforted in the knowledge that the chips here are very good.

. . .

It Is Idiotic To Reproach The Masses.

"If, for example, a contemporary public does not understand Oedipus Rex, I shall make bold to say that it is the fault of Oedipus Rex and not of the public."
Atonin Artaud

. . .