La Falk

xmas booty

i love my brother Jonathan Toubin

Capitalist Time

Temporality as a measure of activity is different from a temporality measured by events. It implicitly is a uniform sort of time. The system of work bells, as we have seen, was developed within the context of large scale production for exchange based upon wage labor. It expressed the historical emergence of a de facto social relationship between the level of wages and labor output as measured temporally…
...It was within this social context that mechanical clocks were developed in Western Europe. The introduction of striking clocks placed on towers and owned by the municipalities (not the Church) occurred shortly after the system of work bells had been introduced, and spread very rapidly throughout the major urbanized areas of Europe in the second quarter of the 14th century. Mechanical clocks certainly did contribute to the spread of a system of constant hours; by the end of the 14th century the sixty minute hour was firmly established in the major urbanized areas of Western Europe, replacing the day as the fundamental unit of labor time.
from Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory By Moishe Postone

Utopia
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immermorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzling staight and simple.
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
-Wislawa Szymborska

"from a contradiction, anything follows" - this is the principle of explosion

I have been dead for over 5 years...

Sent to clandestineband by a 'friend'....

 

Earthquake in NYC

"Nature is a bitch...It is one big catastrophe which is from time to time contained in a fragile balance, but then explodes again. Nature itself is not natural: rather it is naturalised". - S.Zizek

...further interpellations

The compulsive use of Purell Hand-sanitizer is another indication that one has been interpellated into the prevailing bourgeois ideology.

Fear of CONTAGION extends not only to viruses and bacterium but logically and inexorably to Class.

Keep away the misery and the bad luck of the poor and the lazzaroni by using Purell.

In this era of bedbugs and flesh-eating bacteria, contagion is the watchword. 

"We know, indeed, that it is the end of the world, and there is nothing illusory (nor 'fin de siecle' nor 'millenarian') about this knowledge...the world today is a heap...and a foul one (un monde immonde)"
                                                                                                - Jean Luc Nancy

MARSHALL MCLUHAN: First of all - and I'm sorry to have to repeat this disclaimer - I'm not advocating anything; I'm merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn't stop them, so why waste my time lamenting? As Carlyle said of author Margaret Fuller after she remarked, "I accept the Universe": "She'd better." I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.

The point to remember here is that whenever we use or perceive any technological extension of ourselves, we necessarily embrace it. Whenever we watch a TV screen or read a book, we are absorbing these extensions of ourselves into our individual system and experiencing an automatic "closure" or displacement of perception; we can't escape this perpetual embrace of our daily technology unless we escape the technology itself and flee to a hermit's cave. By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. Thus, in order to make use of them at all, we must serve them as we do gods. The Eskimo is a servomechanism of his kayak, the cowboy of his horse, the businessman of his clock, the cyberneticist - and soon the entire world - of his computer. In other words, to the spoils belongs the victor ...

The machine world reciprocates man’s devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty. Man’s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it’s only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology. Electric technology is a qualitative extension of this age-old man-machine relationship; 20th Century man’s relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man’s relationship to his boat or to his wheel - with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive. Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man. A recent cartoon portrayed a little boy telling his nonplused mother: “I’m going to be a computer when I grow up.” Humor is often prophecy.

Rock and roll both invites and repels biography in equal measure

Old Fashioned from Bad Timing

04 Old Fashioned from Bad Timing
Old Fashioned
I’m in love with the trash-man, ‘cause he’s so old fashioned…
A pack of smokes rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve
And he looks like Rock Action
Like a space/time contraction
Back to the Year of Our Lord, 1973
He don’t have no phone
It makes him feel too alone
He’d rather be out crawling, on his belly while the stars are falling.
I’m in love with this actress
But she only fucks black chicks,
‘Though when she’s stoned, she likes dancing with me…
She says I look like a fascist
With my black moustaches
And my field jacket from 1963
She ain’t never home...
She can’t stand being alone.
She’d rather be out crawling, on her belly while the stars are falling.
She got a real flair for theater
She’ll hit you in the face with a phone receiver...
A girl like that, she digs an old fashioned scene…
Well, don't ya know is it’s a crying shame,
This new regime
It really feels the same…
I fear it’s curtains
For her and me…
And the Sick Ones send me Christmas cards,
They say my baby she's still at large;
In one version, she got a terminal disease
…In Houston I played in a rock and roll band
In Portland, Maine I drove a taxicab
And then just like that, she walks out on me...
Because she’s old fashioned.....

(Per Request of E. Effort)

Vintage Violence

"The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production" - Jean-Patrick Manchette 3 to Kill

Bifo

"In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche".

All non-sleeping time is work time

...Dallas Smythe wrote about the dissolution of the boundary between an individual’s role as worker and buyer. Smythe believed that all non-sleeping time is work time. Work time is devoted to the production of commodities, producing and reproducing labour power. Time away from work, but not asleep is sold as a commodity to advertisers. This is the audience commodity, which perform marketing functions and work at the production and reproduction of labour power...

Grand Mal Selected tracks 1995-2010

Grand Mal Mixtape 1995-2010 by Howell Ray

Viscount Lascano Tegui

"I write out of pure voluptuousness, I confess. I write for myself and for friends. I don’t have a large audience or fame and don’t receive awards. I know all the literary strategies intimately and despise them. The naiveté of my contemporaries pains me, but I respect it. I’m also conceited enough to believe I never repeat myself or steal from other writers, to believe I never repeat myself or steal from other writers, to believe I’ll always remain a virgin, and this narcissism doesn’t come cheap. I have to suffer the indifference of those around me. But, as I said, I write out of pure voluptuousness. And so, like a courtesan, I’ll take my sweet time, and begin by kicking off my shoe."

-epigraph of On Elegance While Sleeping, 1925

GRAND MAL /// Guitars Strum in Dejection from kenny curwood on Vimeo.

Kenny Curwood, experimental, underground filmaker...has directed a video for Guitars Strum in Dejection, a track off of Clandestine Songs....He shot, edited and animated the Super-8 film...

Ratner's Star

"Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land."  Don Delillo 1976

check out that DFW marginalia, yo....when all the paper books are burned and replaced by hideous, obscene e-books...treasures like this will be lost

In a seminar, Giorgio Agamben was asked: Do you believe in Capital Punishment?
His answer?  I believe in no punishment.....
The room broke into applause...

(That is the correct response...)

Against Bourgeois Art

Amiri Baraka


"revolution sweeps the world but bourgeois poets stare at crumbs of dust in the light...
like vultures they snack on open graves...the world is heavier than they know..."

it begins at 30.48

Arthur G.

"I will maintain that rock music is late capitalist romanticism. Romanticism we will take to mean artistic and philosophical impulse toward unification of the fragmented whole. The original romantics were mostly pantheists or deists and were concerned with the fall of man, his separation from god. High period rock and roll, the music of the long sixties (1963-73) was the dynamic source of a counter culture (as opposed to subculture) that sought to liberate humanity from social and sexual atomisation". - Richard Seymour

Update

...even more so than an Ipad or an Iphone, posession of a yoga mat indicates that the subject has been fully interpellated by the prevailing (bourgeois liberal) ideology...
(recording postponed due to death threats and intrigues...another day in the year of the insane... will resume in one month at an undisclosed location)

Mahler

the Great Bolano

“Reading is more important than writing.”  - Roberto B.

...listen to the entire album

Grand Mal - Clandestine Songs by Groover Recordings

one can buy it here

Accione Mutante

...Mutant Action:
...a terrorist group of disabled people who see themselves as mutants take arms against their oppressors to rid the world of "beautiful people" and superficiality.

Gnossos Pappadopoulis

16 House Un-American Blues Activity Dream by Richard Farina by Howell Ray

I am immune....
(so far the only rock singer ever to write a decent novel...so far)

Luftmensch

an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income

Recording Began August 7th....

....h...working title of the album:  I am Only a Reflection of You, Catechism of Rock and Roll,  Here's to Our Estrangement, Convulsively Yours, The Part of No Part

Arielle Falk / Lego My Ego

Arielle Falk // Lego My Ego

LZ Project Space, 164 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 

Reception: July 30, 7-9 pm

A Critical Reading of Mork and Mindy

Mork provides a hedonistic, anarchist philosophy, a penchant for oppositional inversions, and an alternative language of rationality to the instrumental rationality of the market, bureaucratic structure, and modern science. Mindy, on the other hand, is consistently the voice of Western reason speaking in the interest of order, benevolent paternalism, competitive individualism, and bourgeois morality. To confuse matters more, Mindy's liberalism qua humanism is a contradictory amalgam of the hackneyed defense of endangered bourgeois institutions plus a humanism that extols the virtues of a nonsexist, nonracist society. Mindy never raises the subject of social problems, but reacts to them with the constricted vision of her class or with superficial humanist pleas against the irrationality of the socioeconomic world. The conflict between these two positions is exemplified in an episode dealing with children's rights and the legitimacy of parental authority. In the episode, Eugene runs away from home "because of my mother, she acts like she owns me." Mork takes seriously Eugene's account of parental domination, whereas Mindy defends the benevolence of paternalism - parents are simply doing what is best for children, although children are frequently incapable of recognizing this. When Mindy attempts to take Eugene home to this parents, Mork intervenes.

Mork: No, no! (Grabs arm of Eugene and pulls him away from Mindy.) You're not going to take him back to that tyrant. I grant him parental asylum.Mork and Eugene: (Chanting with clenched fists upraised)
Hell no. We won't go. Hell no. We won't go.

Historical interpretation of this joke reveals that the audience's capacity to laugh at it is based on their grasp of 1) the political content of the concept of asylum as an escape from tyranny and 2) the resistance to authority signified by the gesture of the raised fist and the chant associated with the opposition and resistance to the Vietnam War. Whereas this appears as a statement of defiance toward the hegemonic notion of parental authority, it is a gesture of stereotyped defiance that the audience is not expected to take too seriously (because both Mork and Eugene are depicted as childlike). In the course of the narrative Mork directs the wedding of Eugene and Holly (not only are two children married together, but one is Black and one White) so that they may seek a "better world" in which fun reigns supreme. 
The overwhelming message seems to be that we have a basic need for "otherness"; in the absence of that otherness or relatedness the self becomes shriveled or distorted. This scenario of intense individuation and the subsequent estrangement from self and others is presented in a variety of ways. In the commentary that concludes one episode, Mork observes that loneliness may be anticipated in a society that counsels its children not to speak to strangers, prohibits speaking to those next to you in both school and work, and attaches stigma to those who openly speak to themselves. Alternatively, he contends that the development of the self requires interaction with others in an atmosphere of trust. This is highlighted in an episode satirizing singles bars....
Robert Goldman, HEGEMONY AND MANAGED CRITIQUE IN PRIME-TIME TELEVISION: A Critical Reading of "Mork and Mindy". Reprinted from Theory & Society, 11 (May 1982): pp.363-388, Part 4

Grand Mal - Lower Yer Heart by Groover Recordings

Digi-EP out June 15th

Prince is right

Below are excerpts from an invective-laced diatribe, the full text of which, can be found at
Blanco Music
What Prince has figured out is that the proportion of effort/return on pushing the internet user to actually BUY music, is not worth the resources it takes to do so. When 80 – 90% of your PR effort disappears into non-revenue online areas (piracy, Spotify), the PR needs to be 8-9 times as ubiquitous as in the pre-internet era to make the same gains. He’s done the sums, and has figured out that even if he only stands to make a penny profit on each CD that goes out on the cover of various European newspapers, that it’s worth more to him than a hundred million people retweeting a video clip of his track on YouTube. Newspapers are an established physical distribution platform, to make them the sole legal source of your music is a mark of genius thinking. Why SHOULD Prince make his music available to be listened to at will, for nothing (or as close as nothing, dammit) on YouTube, Spotify or Mog.com? For YOUR convenience? So that you can enjoy his work and display your musical credibility to your dinnerparty guests without the painful business of compensating the artist in question? Oh how RUDE of dear little Prince to deny you the opportunity. He’s an artist. Artists reserve the right, in fact, would not be worthy of the name if they didn’t do so, to piss from a height on the money-grubbing mores of the chattering classes. Don’t give me the ‘democratisation of music’ argument. If it were something we could do ourselves, what would be the value in that?! If you want free music, go and get free music from the many, many fame-scrabbling halfwits with guitars and laptops out there who are willing to give it away. That’s how much free music is WORTH.
> Bitter? Moi? Yes. Exceedingly so actually. Because long before (and who can say, possibly long after) BlancoMusic existed, I was a music lover. And even if there comes a point where music no longer provides me with an income, I will still hate this period in music’s lifespan – when even the types of people who buy eggs from farmers’ markets and FairTrade coffee are somehow too eager to blame the decline of music on the malpractice of the music industry and spout fatuous self-serving nonsense about how filesharing is ‘free pr for the artists’. I can make a living without music, that’s not an issue. The issue is that the internet is making music shit. There, I’ve said it. It’s putting the actual making of music secondary to the complicated business of trying to find a way of sustaining a living from doing so. Genius, forced to figure out ways to tour without having to incur excess baggage costs. Virtuosos, giving up music because they refuse to take the whore’s option of product placement or naked dancers in their videos. Music lovers have CD collections, not hard-drives full of shit they never listen to. This all happened before, we call it the dark ages. Yep, the internet is over, it’s killed my first love.
(And)...Don’t tell me you can’t afford to buy CDs. My entire collection is worth less than your phone and laptop.

"...particular rock and roll texts only produce effects insofar as they are located within a larger "rock and roll apparatus" through which the music is inflected.  This appartus includes not only musical genres and practices, but styles of dress, behavior, dance, etc. as well as economic and political relations....the power of rock and roll is located in it's affectivity, that is, in it's ability to produce and organize structures of desire".
Lawrence Grossberg

new album release april 7, 2010 in Sweden, uhh July15th....did i say June 15th (did i say may7th?) in the u.s.a...recorded in my apt...mastered by the master dave fridmann...featuring me & my friends...will be available on itunes etc via Groover Records...you can buy a physical copy here

tracklist:

1unwholesome visions

2lower yer heart
3you mean well

4laugh it off

5call my name

6us vs them

7his death was our punishment
8praxis tape
9children of light

10done my head in

11guitars strum in dejection
12burn the world
13drink 'em up

Clandestine Songs Recording Studio...where the magic happened

Friends....

who were nice enough to play & sing on the forthcoming album..
ken griffin- backing vocals

brad truax - bass
dave sherman - piano, organ, synthesizer
parker kindred - drums backing vocals
mike bones - lead guitar

j.russo - lead guitar
mike robertson - lead guitar
tom whitten - lead guitar
rich meyer - backing vocals, guitar, bass
kevin thaxton - bass
jeff bailey - bass
justin russo - piano, synthesizer
jake alrich - drums
mike fadem - drums
karen codd - cello
mark ephraim - bongos, guitars