#225: ... And the System Pre-Recorded (2 of ?)
Added 2024-09-27 08:20:34 +0000 UTCWord falling – photo falling – 26 tons of cyclotron shit wrapped in erectile audiotape sarcophagus –
We're very close: help a family escape Gaza.
Comments
Any chance you’ve read YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS by Vollmann? Seems like it has some resonance with the subject matter here. Its a bit derivative of Burroughs and sort of mess of a book all things considered, but it definitely has some interesting stuff on mediums of recording and recorded information. Been awhile since I’ve read it but the weird scenes in the darkroom of a photo store comes to mind. Pretty wacky read and a hell of a first novel.
Nathan Voelker
2024-11-21 01:40:44 +0000 UTCAnd it's all so valid
Michael S. Judge
2024-11-03 18:02:05 +0000 UTCJesus Christ dude this one destroyed me. If you have something uplifting or positive to say about the world please include that in the next episode thx
Quasimoto Miyamoto
2024-11-03 17:35:05 +0000 UTCNeither here nor there but Come Out by Reich is sampled by Madlib on America’s Most Blunted
Pear Is A Patsy
2024-10-09 14:52:38 +0000 UTCwe can tell
Geoffrey Bozos
2024-10-09 14:06:07 +0000 UTCMichael, have you heard or read Steven Jesse Bernstein? In his "spoken word" work he reminds me a lot of WSB, in part because of his cadence and general manner of speech.
low_art
2024-10-07 16:37:49 +0000 UTC“Those are fighting words” Will you ever do an episode on Mumbo Jumbo
Jamar Zeppelin
2024-10-01 18:46:25 +0000 UTCOh. Oh wow. We used to be a proper country.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-30 15:56:37 +0000 UTCI know 10,000 times more information that "should" put my country's politicians in jail for life than *anyone* in 1975 could've known – but the little bit they knew in 1975 got them the Church Committee and the HSCA. Now the infinite sprawl asexually reproduces in all directions, and all the dates and names and processes and schematics in my head can achieve exactly one thing: getting me kicked out of public events
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-30 15:34:02 +0000 UTCthe next show is gonna be about some specific examples, but the one after that will be complexity in general, and you're absolutely right – all talk of mass information "horizontalizing" or "de-hierarchizing" society is absolute bullshit. What ACTUALLY happens is that there's way too much information for anybody to take in, so the functionally infinite sprawl is reduced to that tiny blistered fraction of a percentage point which is given institutional backing & approval, and we end up "knowing" a trillion things that don't matter, with an actionable range of information even fucking narrower than before, and less capable of being dislodged
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-30 15:30:56 +0000 UTCThe feeling of "unreality" becoming more pervasive over the last decade, and us as a society approaching this sort of 'consensus reality' has been one of the most unnerving and impossible to articulate feelings, whenever I try to explain this to others, I feel crazy, I'm so grateful to hear someone else whose knowledge and ability to communicate I respect greatly echo all of these feelings.
Gorgo
2024-09-30 15:28:06 +0000 UTCNo, he was right, we WEREN'T getting paid in coke. The guy who gave us the cocaine was a stranger in the audience. He was essentially tipping
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-30 15:11:10 +0000 UTCI keep forgetting to mention the main thing that stuck with me from your Chapo appearance is that Felix seemed to think coke was just getting handed out everywhere, rather than that you were being paid in coke for your gig. Anyway…
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-30 14:59:27 +0000 UTCThis is one of the most important episodes you’ve done. I’ve spent most of my adult life manipulating recorded images and sound and I immediately thought of the mirror images of Margherita Erdmann and Leni Pokler
Bruce Malm
2024-09-30 01:26:18 +0000 UTCNoooooooooo
Heath Iverson
2024-09-29 19:48:39 +0000 UTCI've been a practitioner of many artforms (if that's what this is) in my life, and in every single one, I have found that I'm capable of making something via extreme preparation and extensive schematic notation, but that thing can only ever attain the condition of "not failing." If you know exactly what you wanna do, the only possible results are "I fucked it up" or "I didn't fuck it up," and I have never really liked or been proud of anything that consisted merely of me not fucking up. The other way is to irradiate yourself as much as possible with whatever part of reality hits your brain & sticks to it in a given moment, often for reasons you can't explain, and learn a combination of focus and non-specific vigil, a vigil for somethiing you can't name until it arrives, such that you're capable of sitting right in the core of the reactor until your DNA gets broken in the right way & you can chase after it toward something you couldn't have prepared. This way is extraordinarily demanding: it requires constant attention, a life's-worth of research, years of methodological work to tune your brain into the right kind of radio receiver, specialized and often bizarre behavior that will almost certainly alienate the people you know and disqualify you for most other social roles, and the willingness to accept that sometimes the work itself is going to make you sick, very literally sick, that if things go *right*, you'll be pushing yourself to extremes that are capable of inflicting serious and permanent damage upon your mind and body, and that, even if you avoid the most serious forms of such damage, you will not make it out uninjured and unimpaired – you probably won't "make it out" at all. There won't be anywhere left to "make it" to; you will have been forced either to transmute or to amputate all chances of escape. But this way is also the only way I've ever made anything that I care about having made, anything that I'm glad is in the world, anything that would never have been made by someone else; it's also the only way in which making the thing, book music show whatever, is worthwhile *in itself* regardless of the results, because I will discover things in real time that I flat out didn't know, or at least wasn't aware I knew, and when it's going right, I can attain a kind of fluid anonymity in which "I" am nothing less or more than the radio frequency that everything is pouring through, the quite literal vessel or medium, and "I" don't simply stop existing, "I" become a thing called Nobody, like any artist I've ever admired or cared about had to become Nobody to get their best work done. It's very hard to become Nobody, it hurts badly while entering & exiting, and if you do it too hard or fast it can kill you or drive you out of your mind, but if I hadn't trained for years and years to do it, I don't know what else I would be here for.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-29 19:30:34 +0000 UTCI've been listening to that periodically since it came out, and during this last DNC, I saw a tweet from Basinski about how he was crying tears of joy watching Tim Walz. I hate the fucking internet
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-29 19:11:19 +0000 UTCFriedrich Adolf Kittler! And one of the main criticisms lobbed against him – and in certain respects rightfully so – is that he's so focused on technology/media as the levers of war that he didn't attack the actual cadre of actors (like Hitler). But these fusty post-structuralists all have skeletons. Kittler tuned me into IG Farben beyond my work with magnetic tape and he's an incredibly insightful Gravity's Rainbow scholar.
Conor Walker
2024-09-29 18:25:59 +0000 UTC🎵When the historians find us we'll be in our homes Plugged into our hubs Skin and bones A frozen smile on every face As the stories replay This must have been a wonderful place🎵
John H
2024-09-29 03:46:40 +0000 UTCHeath: To give you some idea, the age I was when I read Bazin, I thought his name rhymed with "Basin" as opposed to "Kazan", much to the amusement of my cinephile elders. 🤣 But yeah, I believe he was quite the character. Died too young. I have a yellowed and dog-eared copy of WHAT IS CINEMA? but I haven't cracked into it in ages. I should heed my own advice and do so. I tend to associate with him the view of the cinema as being - much as you cited - a shroud over the dead, taking an imprint of it. What I remember of Eisenstein writing about his own theories and practices was, of course, the whole montage bag, the "thesis + antithesis gives you synthesis" (paging Dr. Judge), but also the discreet image being a system of shapes, geometries, horizontals here, diagonals there, etc. (ALEXANDER NEVSKY, not POTEMKIN, was the film he was most apt to dissect and explain to his readers.) I can't position Bazin as being opposed to Eisenstein but for the sake of shorthand, I think of him - and not just him but the generation he influenced - as preferring the analog to Eisenstein's digital. The curve versus the geodesic panels. So, my dull head isn't always up to the task of grasping what MSJ is on about, but there are many moments in a given episode where his preoccupations speak to mine.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-28 21:47:50 +0000 UTCI was always struck by Bazin’s notion of cinema as the “mummification of time”. He was also a very catholic weirdo and very much thought of film as having the potential to make imminent the mystery of the divine, the logos incarnate.
Heath Iverson
2024-09-28 20:25:38 +0000 UTCI'm reading it during a 6 month panic attack so it tracks. You have to turn the front of your brain off to read it. I know it's just my brainstem making it up, but I would wager you were on a lot of Albert Speer, Meso American anthro and dead languages at the time. Phonecian with its clitics maybe? I've actually used bits of it in therapy and dissociative disorder patients really like it.
Joel Blackstock
2024-09-28 19:52:21 +0000 UTCYou ever check out William Basinski’s DISINTEGRATION LOOPS? This episode in a nutshell, or 9 LP box set, to be precise.
Heath Iverson
2024-09-28 19:42:06 +0000 UTCThat would have been assigned reading for me at some point, long ago. Two contemporaries of Brakhage that you might enjoy are Hollis Frampton and Peter Kubelka. Very different from one another (I'm long out of practice of being able to talk about such things with anything approaching savvy but I believe both men can be called structural filmmakers) but frequently use repetition, oscillation, plus fun & games with things like alphabet matrices and systems of measurement. I don't know how you would get a line on their stuff; short of driving to New York City and haunting Anthology Film Archives, it might need to be a "fell off the back of a truck" kind of deal, internet-wise. Although Criterion put out a very fine Blu-ray of assorted Frampton films. ZORNS LEMMA seems to be the fan favorite among them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorns_Lemma
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-28 18:20:39 +0000 UTCdog I have no idea WHAT is in that book; I wrote it during a 6-month panic attack
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 18:02:35 +0000 UTCThis is a fascinating perspective that further exposes the roots of some chunks of Lyrics of the Crossing I've been re reading. So far the Nile river cat gut cage is my favorite passage and the ashes of women section. I love too many of the architecture references to list.
Joel Blackstock
2024-09-28 17:53:02 +0000 UTCOther than getting the Burroughs quote word-perfect, this particular episode required no notes and was drawn from things I've been thinking about for 20 years Sometimes I'll do a more tradltional data-heavy episode with notes, but aside from a couple short pointers to remind myself of things I wanted to get around to, about 95% of all the shows I've done have been improvised When I do a guest spot or have an interview, I'll put together a more specific list of stuff I want to address, but if the show is any good at all, the currents of the conversation itself will overrule all but the 1 or 2 most important notes/questions But, in the main, I don't consult notes much at all, and I only have a very very general idea of what I'm about to say until I hit "record"
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 17:50:26 +0000 UTCSounds too much like "Hitler." Canceled. (I've read some Kittler a long time ago & would have to reacquaint myself)
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 17:43:28 +0000 UTCYes, also hoping for Kittler!
rwncd
2024-09-28 17:36:54 +0000 UTCEvery day, about 82 years of video gets uploaded to YouTube.
Bombs Over Rome
2024-09-28 16:45:08 +0000 UTCI think there's a free .pdf on Stan Brakhage's METAPHORS ON VISION, and that must be read
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 16:20:41 +0000 UTCAbsolutely, that’s what I meant by the first type - poorly phrased by me, I’m sure.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-28 16:14:50 +0000 UTCEisenstein’s books are worth reading btw, but I would also strongly recommend, if you aren’t hip to the guy, Andre Bazin’s WHAT IS CINEMA?
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-28 16:13:12 +0000 UTCThere are definitely some that scan by signal strength – I've been in plenty of cars where the radio will scan from (say) 93.3 to 98.9 if there's not a commercial-wattage signal between them
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 16:12:36 +0000 UTCCar radios: there are two relevant scanners, one that “finds” stations in the manner you described. The other moves at set increments across the spectrum. So like 101.3 to 101.5. Station strength immaterial. Very possible to be “between” stations. The super fine tuning - yes I remember that as well - seems to have been cast off. (Unless it’s been buried deep in the settings??)
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-28 15:54:35 +0000 UTCIncredible episode
Gabi
2024-09-28 13:32:11 +0000 UTCmy writing includes a lot of technical terminology (some of which I've almost certainly forgotten) from a lot of different fields, and that seems to me one of the simplest and easiest-to-find resources for anybody who wants to write something serious – there are now SO many words that have never been used for anything good. Time to jailbreak ’em
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 09:55:41 +0000 UTCI think it's fair to say that the whole of poetry (not just literal stanzaic poetry, but any use of language that qualifies as "poetic") is an attempt to redeem words from the nightmare to which they've been exposed
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 09:53:40 +0000 UTCAin’t nothing like a Diddy party.
Sam
2024-09-28 08:50:52 +0000 UTCHi Michael, been a while since I checked in but feel compelled after my 16 hour shift on the psych unit. The last 15 mins ring true to my work and life. As always, thank you and I hope you are as well as can be. And I legit guffawed at “solved!?” Love as always.
Ben Degnan
2024-09-28 07:03:52 +0000 UTCOne of the funniest lines in that movie, and I laughed so hard in the theater and nobody else laughed and I felt pretty weird, was when he's already said "A pussy," "A cock going into a pussy," and then one of his answers is QUELL: A pussy. [Pause.] A lady's pussy.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-28 03:51:09 +0000 UTCI think it was Burroughs at the start saying "image flakes" that reminded me of that
Tyson Settle
2024-09-28 03:35:08 +0000 UTCAre we getting into Bergson here? Is this idea of a voice as such at all similar to his proposal in memory and matter regarding the externality of images and the nature of consciousness and the brain as possibility or potential action selecting from images it receives rather than constructs?
Tyson Settle
2024-09-28 03:33:42 +0000 UTCTo quote Freddie Quell from The Master, 'A Pussy!' will solve every Rorschach test ever.
dimdimKing
2024-09-28 02:18:07 +0000 UTCListening to this and casting my mind back 8-10 years to Rand etc articles about the Russian 'firehose of falsehood' and then looking around at the media landscape nowadays
Daniel Nash
2024-09-28 01:26:56 +0000 UTCThis podcast is a good example of how if you look at any one point long enough it can become any point. I never would have believed that I would listen to 100 episodes where the metaphor of a Thomas Pynchon book and AR equipment could become an extended metaphor encompassing all of the modern experience of subjective and object of reality but here we are.
Joel Blackstock
2024-09-27 20:53:25 +0000 UTCI think I commented once before on this series that it has me thinking a ton about how the current consensus is that the earliest forms of writing (at least in the Ancient Near East) were things like tax records. And just last night I found myself thinking about how if that is true, that there is a sense in which all literary art becomes a sort of protest against utility, or effort at redeeming the mechanisms of control. I wonder to what degree the same could be said for other artistic media (there's a resonance with the internet being developed by the US military as well...). Not really any larger point, maybe this is a bunch of of mystical bs, but synchronicitous in a way reminiscent of how you talked about keying into freaking signals and the like last episode. Great show, thanks for this. Oh also, this might be a pointlessly pedantic point that misses what you were getting at anyway, but I'm 99% sure Deleuze had written a few of his historical/critical/buggery works on other philosophers prior to D&R. D&R was definitely his first that is him explicitly philosophizing/theorizing in his own right though.
David
2024-09-27 20:44:11 +0000 UTCJust starting the podcast and it got me thinking about how recording engineers wore lab coats and were trying to get sound as close to reality as possible then Joe Meek got a hit doing the opposite
SkinnyTonySoprano
2024-09-27 20:14:59 +0000 UTCIt’s weird to hear something I’ve felt but been unable to really formulate a clear thought around consistently in your podcast. Thanks for what you do
Rob Dag
2024-09-27 19:27:57 +0000 UTCCurious about your process of taking notes and researching a thing such as this. What’s your ritual, maestro?
recovering.slothrop
2024-09-27 19:23:02 +0000 UTCSaw it come up last night but I thought no, I'd better listen to this in the morning
El Keenan
2024-09-27 18:38:29 +0000 UTCYour story of the non-tonal music/Steve Rei(s)ch made me think of this Blake section. It also reminds me of the process of designing a Logotype, and the point in which, after staring at the word/type for too long, it loses all visual meaning.
Aodhan Banks
2024-09-27 15:07:08 +0000 UTCProphets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
Aodhan Banks
2024-09-27 14:47:18 +0000 UTCMental timing m8
Conor Walker
2024-09-27 14:15:53 +0000 UTCOr we're in Scotland a day ahead ;) but speaking of Ronin, I'm sitting in the cinema during the Intermission of the newly restored Seven Samurai.
Conor Walker
2024-09-27 14:14:41 +0000 UTChttps://momentarycinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/damn-you.jpg?w=620
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-27 13:34:01 +0000 UTCD/C Central European Time gang rise up
K
2024-09-27 12:47:51 +0000 UTCthe american mind can't comprehend that it is - in fact - 2:24 PM right now love you man!
Watermane
2024-09-27 12:24:28 +0000 UTCNm those are too long for that. They’re probably Neumann condensers.
NYCM&AHole
2024-09-27 12:08:18 +0000 UTCDistracted by what appears to be the C800G in the picture.
NYCM&AHole
2024-09-27 12:07:18 +0000 UTConly the true ronin listen when I post the shows at 2:19 a.m.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-27 11:41:04 +0000 UTCAs a magnetic tape archivist, this episode truly hits! Krapp's Last Tape baby. Have you read Kittler? 'Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter' and 'Discourse Network 1800/1900'. I keep dreaming of you doing a Kittler series.
Conor Walker
2024-09-27 09:07:57 +0000 UTCI'm going into this one right now edit: Michael, I'm now 13 minutes in and I just want to say that I love and I enjoy and that I am grateful for you verbalizing your thoughts for us and letting us take part and follow them e2: At minute 36 and just nodding along, agreeing with every point LOL made me smile (homo sapiensly meant)
Watermane
2024-09-27 08:26:14 +0000 UTC
