sorry, Øivind - I meant to be brief....

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

> From: Øivind Idsø:
> > no "next."
> > no "big."
> > no "thing."
>
> This is a very nice and tempting idea, but as long as the world moves
> forward, or at least gives us the impression that it does, I guess the
> problem of fads and Next Big Things is very hard to morph into something
> else.

I think that was I was imagining had more to do with a world
where one is more likely to see locate things on an historical
continuum which traces the rhizome's path from node to node
rather than merely looking at the discrete eruptions of "progress"
[hey, you're spelling Deleuze backwards, so this is fair]. Perhaps
my radio life is at fault for this urge to use the ostensibly "new" as
a way to link with pasts all too often disregarded by a dominant
paradigm with more invested in the currency of cool than with
historically and geographically distributed microcultures of like
mind. This is what I do every time I play come 45-yr-old Musique
Concrete thing and one of my ah....younger and more ahistorical
listeners professes shock that it's not the latest stuttery release from
X. Clearly, she's heard the common interest in microstructure and
timbre and time. One just takes it from there, and Progress is then
free to open out in either temporal direction. With luck, you neither
argue for the primacy of some inertial past full of Great Men, or a
future full of Progressive Visionaries.

> The idea of the next big thing seems closely linked to man's hopes for a
> different/better/whatever future,

Bien sur. I'm thinking more of a set of plural futures [cf Rorty's
"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity."] - the *Mille* part of
the Plateaux. I've got that set of hopes, too - corny as it sounds,
that's the whole reason to do the kind of awful things as a radio
programmer that I do, lumping occasionally disparate things
together and not appearing on air as the Omnipotent Voice Who
Announces What Is To Come. I guess that I think that the act of
listening across our bias set is a kind of socially sanctioned risk of
self whose benefits resonate to the large whole of our activity.

> and if something turns up that is
> tempting to many people (tempting as in "that which will change/"save" the
> world") a lot of people will jump on it (relatively speaking, of course,
> since this kind of jumping can be both Glitchy and Britney). It happened
> in Old Greece, it happened in the Reneissance (sp?) and is getting even
> 'worse' now. Hope I'm wrong, though.

Might I recommend a book I've found a bit uh...Enlightening? It's
Steven Toulmin's "Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity.
It essentially imagines a modernity in which Montaigne rather
than Newton and Descartes inform our views of progress. While
it's nothing to do with reassembling waveforms ground to powder
into sandcastles for the ear, it might be of some interest. :-)


> I couldn't agree more. A lot of things can be said about a person like Jim
> O'Rourke (I have only good things to say about his music and, from what
> I've read in interviews, his general attitude), but when he listed Cher's
> "I Believe" and Stockhausen as highlights in his review of last/a year in
> The Wire I thought: These are wonderful times. Limp Bizkit, Nils Økland
> and Eric La Casa on the same stereo and during the same day? Indeed.

We are really, really lucky to have such a simple way to imagine a world
larger than that described by the momentary bitslice of our bias set. That
ability to imagine a world has been deemed dangerous for such a long time
[Robert Darnton's book on the banned books of the French Revolutionary
period points out that the *really* censored texts weren't pornography at
all, but Speculative Fiction].

I think I'll go listen to some old Genesis :-)

supper's ready,
gregory
_
knowledge is not enough/science is not enough/
love is dreaming/this equation/Gregory Taylor/
WORT-FM 89.9/Madison, WI/ http://www.rtqe.net/