Do you have anything on derrida’s theory of hauntology that I would actually understand? its seems to be about communication and the spectral..

One key aspect of hauntology is nostalgia for futures that never were – A good example is Michael Robinson’s Victory Over the Sun, a film which shows footage of now derelict futuristic architecture from bygone World’s Fairs and is named after a Futurist opera performed at St. Petersburg in 1913.

Michael Robinson, Victory Over the Sun

One of the key hauntological questions (Derrida coined the term in a book on Marx) is whether we can recover the impetus and conviction that early C20th modernism and socialism seemed to have, whether we can learn we see the past as other than quaint and naff. As well as mourning futures that never were hauntology is also about nostalgia for memories that never happened or at least never happened to us (hauntological time is fucked up and nonlinear – Derrida quotes Hamlet, who’s, of course, haunted by his dad’s ghost: ‘the time is out of joint’ ).

I am torrenting the Basinski loops right now. They sound phenomenal. What is strange is the process of listening to a digital (compressed…lossy format) representation of a decaying analogue tape process. Even with the digitising of the decay there is still room for it to ‘degrade’ (320 kbps vs FLAC vs 128kbps) etc. However this process is not linear like the tape (feet and inches… more hiss every time it is played) it is discontinuous… you could go back to the ’source’ and get an original version from Basinski.

How paranoid to you find yourself getting about archiving, backing things up, transferring? Libraries are pretty bamboozled right now about how we find enough space to keep everything, what digital formats we use, what we should keep and shouldn’t….

Maybe we can talk about EVP, plus whether you’ve ever fortuitously picked anything up on a field recording that’s been really useful?

First off the EVP thing has certainly happened to me. At least on one occasion. I was transferring some files from an MD to my ‘puter and I got what I have now sampled as a ‘reallyreallycoolsound’ which sounds kindof like a robot voice. we could use the sample and/or the track i dropped it into in the podcast…

Circs beyond my control meant I never got to see Moon (this, I guess = an instance of hauntological socialising) but  given the fact that 2009 was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and we’ve pretty much given up on space travel that probs qualifies as hauntological sci fi.

As I say, will hopefully get some pdfs to you tomorrow. Meanwhile, just read a pretty interesting interview with Sarah Turner which becomes relevant from the line “Whereas in Perestroika there’s a more explicitly autobiographical trigger, isn’t there?”

That film looks amazing… is it showing in London?

Preservation

Preservation’s actually at odds with ever playing anything, of course – just as cell degradation and replication’s perennial and eventually fatal. William Basinski’s ‘Disintegrtion Loops’ came about whenwas attempting to transfer some tapes and noticed them flaking, disintegrating. He decided to record them playing/decaying.  It so happened that this was 9/11/2001, so the tapes now are kind of a record of that event, though its not like you can hear the planes.

How paranoid to you find yourself getting about archiving, backing things up, transferring? Libraries are pretty bamboozled right now about how we find enough space to keep everything, what digital formats we use, what we should keep and shouldn’t….

Maybe we can talk about EVP, plus whether you’ve ever fortuitously picked anything up on a field recording that’s been really useful?

I am torrenting the Basinski loops right now. They sound phenomenal. What is strange is the process of listening to a digital (compressed…lossy format) representation of a decaying analogue tape process. Even with the digitising of the decay there is still room for it to ‘degrade’ (320 kbps vs FLAC vs 128kbps) etc. However this process is not linear like the tape (feet and inches… more hiss every time it is played) it is discontinuous… you could go back to the ’source’ and get an original version from Basinski.

First off the EVP thing has certainly happened to me. At least on one occasion. I was transferring some files from an MD to my ‘puter and I got what I have now sampled as a ‘reallyreallycoolsound’ which sounds kindof like a robot voice. we can use the sample and/or the track i dropped it into…

Do you have anything on derrida’s theory of hauntology that I would actually understand? its seems to be about communication and the spectral..

One key aspect of hauntology is nostalgia for futures that never were – think I sent you a link to a michael robinson film a while back but a good example is his Victory Over the Sun, a film which shows footage of now derelict futuristic architecture from bygone World’s Fairs and is named after a Futurist opera performed at St. Petersburg in 1913. One of the key hauntological questions (Derrida coined the term in a book about Marx) is whether we can recover the impetus and conviction that early C20th modernism and socialism seemed to have and whether we can learn we see the past as other than quaint and naff

As well as mourning futures that never were hauntology is also about nostalgia for memories that never happened or at least never happened to us (hauntological time is fucked up and nonlinear – Derrida quotes Hamlet, who’s, of course, haunted by his dad’s ghost: ‘the time is out of joint’ ).

This is why Burial’s elegies for a scene his brother told him about but which he was too young to participate in qualify

I have sent over an Advisory Circle track which is extremely beautiful and reminds me of this odd transplanted childhood I had of watching Doctor Who stories I was too young to see on TV the first time. If you want to see other amazing examples of this check out Steve Moore from progster Zombi. I could listen to that all day long.

Circs beyond my control meant I never got to see Moon (this, I guess = an instance of hauntological socialising) but  given the fact that 2009 was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and we’ve pretty much given up on space travel that probs qualifies as hauntological sci fi.

As I say, will hopefully get some pdfs to you tomorrow. Meanwhile we just posted a pretty interesting interview with Sarah Turner which becomes relevant from the line “Whereas in Perestroika there’s a more explicitly autobiographical trigger, isn’t there?”

That film looks amazing… is it showing in London?

I really like, but can’t quite put my finger on, the differences between movement through time from point of capture to the present. Like the photo is ‘fixed’ in the age it was taken, whilst the sound recording is captured; ready to be relived in new surroundings. What does this say about film? As it is essentially persistence of vision created through different individual images (or it used to be in the age of pre-interlaced digital video.. i’m not sure if the ‘frames per second’ thing still counts does it?) is film more ‘alive’ than just sound recordings as it has a representation of the event?

In terms of the playlist, some of the music this issue’s a bit involved and conceptual (albeit really beautiful) but then some of the music’s gimmicky lo-fi mashups. And Virginia Woolf’s in there, talking about writing. Gratifyingly, it turns out you could cut freighters’ hulls on Woolf’s pronunciation of ‘incarnadine,’ even if Youtube and crackle make her sound (as we remark in the podcast) a little bit like Davros.

Subscribe on iTunes

Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Ensemble Modern – Come Out
• Nico – Eulogy to Lenny Bruce
• Joy Division – A Means to an End
• Jib Kidder – Windowdipper
• The Smiths – Rubber Ring
• Danny Weed vs. Whitney Houston – It’s Okay to Creep
• William Basinski – The Disintegration Loop
• Virginia Woolf -Writing Today

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/cassettes/super/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/and-we-spent-the-whole-week-like-that-2 http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/and-we-spent-the-whole-week-like-that-2#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:44:14 +0000 Jacinta Nandi http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=3037 Jacinta Nandi

“Liv! Liv! For fuck’s sake, you’ve got to wake up! Curtis Stigers has died! In a car crash! For fuck’s sake, wake up, wake up, wake up!”

It was Sunday morning and it was still early and I wasn’t waking up, not even for Curtis Stigers’s sake. I hauled the duvet over my head, squeezed my eyes shut and fell back asleep whilst all around me Jacqui squealed.

“Liv! Wake up! Wake up! In a car crash with Dodi!”

My mind, fuzzy with sleep, briefly woke up long enough to wonder what Curtis Stigers had been doing in a car with Dodi in the first place. But not long enough to stay awake.

“Princess Diana!”

Princess Diana.

“Princess Diana?” I mumbled, suddenly hot and sticky under the duvet. It was like being raped awake, wide wake, breathlessly, hopelessly awake.

Princess Diana….

“Princess Diana.” Jacqui repeated, nodding solemnly, switching the telly on.

“Princess Diana,” I said to myself as we sat there, in her mum’s double bed, staring at the blue screen with the picture of Di with her pretty crown on.

“I thought you said Curtis Stigers was dead at first,” I told Jacqui.

“Who?” She looked blankly at me. I didn’t really know either. I decided to ring home so I could be the first person to tell someone.

“Yes, yes,” my mother interrupted me. “We’re very shocked here, very shocked and upset, everyone’s very shocked and upset here, except for your stepfather, you know what he’s like, too fat and lazy to get upset, in fact he hasn’t been upset since 1976 when his mother accidentally threw away his favourite Wireless Weekly but me and the kids I must say we’re ever so upset, Liv, ever so upset, in fact I might just phone in sick and Sarah well Sarah’s in shock really to be honest, she’s in shock and Paul, well perhaps Paul’s just a little too young to understand exactly what’s going on – Paul – are you upset? He says he’s upset Power Rangers isn’t on. But I’m really shocked. Liv. When you think, like. Lady bloody Di, dead as you like…not that I was a fan or anything…not like your auntie Ange, she’ll be devastated, like, but still, she was an icon, wasn’t she? A fashion icon, a feminist icon, a spiritual icon. I am really shocked, I must say. Perhaps I should ring in sick, what do you think? But they’ll probably have the telly on in work, won’t they? Are you ok, poppet? I s’pose you’re just a bit shocked and upset. How’s Jacqui taking it? Will you be in for dinner?”

Jacqui and I installed ourselves in front of the telly, eating Pringles and crunchy nut cornflakes straight from the packet. They were showing all these fat, black women, wailing. Tony Blair rallied the nation. Lots of presidents and celebrities kept on personally offering us their condolences. Madonna said how Di had once told her that she, Madonna, dealt with the press better than she, Di, did. They interviewed some cancer kid who was blatantly telling lies about how Di had said she wanted to adopt her, only no one mentioned how it was blatantly a lie. They also interviewed a florist. Jacqui had snot sliding down her face the whole time – I hope he gives the profits he makes to poor little black landmines babies, she sobbed – but I didn’t cry till we watched the Channel 5 documentary on Di’s style through the ages, showing how as she’d matured she’d actually grown into her looks, using the trends of fashion to complement her natural, elegant beauty. That’s what did it for me, all her different haircuts flashing through the TV screen. I started crying like I’d never stop.

And we spent the whole week like that, crying and watching telly. Everywhere you went and the telly was on and women were sniffling. My mum spent the whole week telling everyone who’d listen how she’d cried much more now than when her uncle Stan was stabbed to death and set on fire. Yeah, agreed Jacqui when she told her. I’ve cried loads more than when my cousin committed suicide.

“Dave hasn’t cried at all,” said my mother of my stepdad, in a tone of disgust. “Liv hasn’t cried much. You’ve not cried much, have you Liv?”

“I’ve cried enough,” I said. “I’ve been crying in private, like.”

Oooooh, said mum and Jacqui.

“I’ve not stopped crying for longer than an hour at a time,” announced Jacqui, welling up as she spoke. “I went up to Kensington Palace yesterday and I couldn’t hardly find the place what with my hay fever and my eyes full of tears and I was all dizzy you know? But I just followed the crowds and there I was.”

“Did you sign the book, like?” Asked my mum.

“Yes.” Jacqui sighed. “And I left some flowers and my old teddy bear. I just wanted to show I care.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said my mother. “I can’t stand crowds else I’d go up myself. Although people are also leaving flowers outside the town hall so that does save you the trip, doesn’t it? Coz Di opened that town hall, she did.”

“They’re leaving flowers outside Goodmayes Tesco’s now,” said Jacqui. “They’ve got a condolences book and everything and a big pile of flowers outside the entrance and then again by the bottle bank.”

“Outside Tesco’s?” My mum’s voice was full of scorn and disbelief. “She never opened that Tesco’s now, did she?”

Me and Jacqui laughed at that a bit. But mum’s brain was ticking away.

“I can understand not wanting to go up to town, mind you, what with all the crowds and what have you.”

“Mum,” I warned her, “you’d better not sign the Tesco’s condolences book.”

“The whole country’s gone fucking mad,” said my stepdad, coming in from fixing the car.

My mum said me and Sarah and Dave had to go and get the shopping in, coz she couldn’t face it, she was done in, like, and my stepdad sighed deeply. He did want to work a bit more on the car you know, but in the end we went and it took half-an-hour to get round the car park because of all the people queuing to sign the book.

“Fucking peasants,” said my step dad. “You know what’s wrong with this country, girls? You want to know what’s wrong with this country? The people of this country are a bunch of fucking peasants,” he spat through the window.

Sarah and me giggled.

“A nation of morons,” he continued. “An entire nation of fucking cretins. What would be the best thing that could happen to this country, girls? The best thing that could happen to this country would be if a nuclear fucking bomb was dropped on it.”

It wasn’t till we were finally parked and inside that my sister said she wanted to sign the book, too. My step dad swore.

“The Russians had the right idea,” he said darkly.

“Oh go on, Dave, let her,” I said. “We can wait for her in the coffee shop, have a cup of tea. Meet us in the coffee shop when you’ve signed it, OK, Sares?

In Tesco’s Coffee Shop my step dad wanted a flapjack but then got really upset when he found out they cost £1. 10.

“£1.10 for a flapjack,” he said. “What a fucking life.”

He started complaining about mum.

“I mean, your mother is basically mentally ill, isn’t she, Liv? After 10 years of marriage I’ve basically come to the conclusion that your mother is basically mentally ill. You know what she wants to do now. She wants to change the living room carpet. I mean, it’s a perfectly adequate carpet. She’s sick that’s all. It’s a perfectly adequate carpet.”

“It is a bit 1970’s,” I said.

“What was wrong with the 1970’s? In the 1970’s you were never paying £1.10 for a sodding flapjack. You know what Marx said. The workers get the fag end of everything.”

“Is that a direct quote?” I asked him. My sister walked to our table, shining. My stepdad touched her briefly on the head. She beamed.

“You wanna know what I wrote? I wrote: ‘ You’ll always be the queen of my heart.’”

This fucking country said Dave as we went to fetch our trolley.

In the end I watched the actual funeral round Jacqui’s house, even though I had promised my mum I’d watch it with her and the kids. I felt like I’d spent the whole week sobbing and didn’t even have much tears left but I managed to squeeze a few out when I saw the card saying mummy. Jacqui though, Jacqui howled like a bitch in pain the whole way through.

When I got in mum was all “mardy” with me.

“You could have been here for the funeral,” she said. “We could have watched it together like a proper family. Sometimes I think Jacqui’s family is more important to you than your own.”

“Jacqui’s mum wasn’t in,” I said. “I couldn’t leave Jacqui on her own, could I.”

“You could have both come here.”

“Jacqui don’t like coming here coz you’re so stingy with the orange juice.”

“Olivia, last time she was here she drank a whole litre of the stuff. A litre. It doesn’t grow on trees you know. Well, what did you think, a lovely funeral, wasn’t it, and wasn’t Earl Spencer magnificent?”

“Elton John’s eyebrow was weird,” I said. The kids laughed.

“Paul and Sarah really missed having you here, you know, I do think you’re mean. And your stepfather. You won’t believe what your stepfather did. Would you believe he actually walked out halfway through to go and work on the car. I don’t know what the neighbours must think of us. Well, at least you’re here now, d’you want a cup of tea? Sarah, make your sister a cup of tea, there’s a good girl. The BBC’s coverage was of a much higher quality than ITV’s, didn’t you think, Liv?”

I told my mum the cameras were penises and the paparazzi gang-rapists and Lady Di violated to death.

“Oooooh, ” she said, “did you read that in the Guardian, like? There might well be some truth in that you know. Well, back to normal viewing, then. I must say, I’m really upset it’s all over. I’ve quite enjoyed this week, to be honest.”

“Mum!” My sister squealed. “How could you have enjoyed it? It’s been so terrible! We’ve lost the greatest living English person ever!”

“Oh yes, yes, that’s what I mean. On a personal level it has been the worst week ever, I’ve been ever so shocked and upset and what have you but as a whole, as nation, I must say, we haven’t had this much fun since World War bloody Two, like.”

Dave walked in from fixing the car.

“Dave, you’re not trailing greasy motor oil through the house, are you?”

“Has Your Mother told you what she did this morning?” He asked me.

Mum put her slightly embarrassed face on. “I went and signed the book, like.”

“Not the Tesco’s book?”

“Hmmm, I just suddenly realized, I’d never get another opportunity.”

“And,” announced my step dad, “and, she went and bought flowers from Penny’s.”

“You dint leave flowers outside Tesco’s, did you mum?”

“I just wanted to show I care.”

“Mum,” I said, “mum, mum, mum, mum, we talked about this.”

“You spent more on those flowers than you did when my mother died. When my mother died you deliberately chose the most anaemic, anorexic, pathetic, sickly carnations in the whole fucking shop.”

“Dave, she was a princess, after all. And anyway, there weren’t any cheap flowers left, love. Penny’s was practically sold out. D’you think it’s so silly of me, Liv? I mean, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”

“This fucking country,” said Dave. “A nation of morons. Idiots. Cretins. If I could just get my hands on some nuclear weapons.”

“Oh, people just care, Dave, people just loved her. Honestly, you’re such a philistine sometimes. Anyway what do you think, Liv, we could get that nice piccy of her with the poor little black boy framed and hung above the mantelpiece?”

“If you do that, I’m moving out.” Dave started walking out the living room.

“You know the thing is, Dave, the thing is, excepting Certain People,” called my mum to him, as he walked out the back door, “she certainly brought out the best in all of us.”

The back door slammed.

Me and mum and Sarah cracked up and little Paul joined in the way kids do when they don’t really know what they’re laughing at.

Remember this? Facing west over the Atlantic, a summer ago.

Dorothy Feaver

Actually the ocean was behind us. Maybe this could have helped.

Clem Blakemore

Hindsight: the view widens…

Dorothy Feaver

Reveal – revelation.

Clem Blakemore

Pungent…

Dorothy Feaver

Serene…

Clem Blakemore

. .. … d is t o r ti ons .. … .

Dorothy Feaver

(. . . . . . .)

Dorothy Feaver

You and I?

Clem Blakemore

…in the blink of an eye…

Dorothy Feaver

Or two…

Clem Blakemore

…or more (that’s, sadly, Alabama for you).

Clem Blakemore

Rear Window – this city for you.

Dorothy Feaver

White owl.

Clem Blakemore

Night owls.   .   .  .  .     .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . ………    .  .   .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Dorothy Feaver

from Yadz, Iran.

Clem Blakemore

Anyone else find the screen grab of Matt Lucas’ ex-husband’s Facebook page, showing friends ignorant of his suicide commenting on the status update ‘Kevin McGee thinks that death is much better than life’ uncomfortably compelling? How awkward the responses to someone using a forum meant for peacocking and matey badinage to announce their suicide were (“that a bit dark Kev”)? How queasily no-longer-appropriate the infinitive ‘thinks’ grammatically was?

I’ve been reading up recently on the technologies used in Victorian séances – i.e. on devices that were meant (as Facebook kind of ended up doing in McGee’s case) to facilitate interfaces between the living and the dead. From cameras to phonographs, pulley systems to telegraphic motion detectors, ear trumpets to ouija boards, all manner of devices were deployed in order to bring about/simulate contact with the departed.

As Steve Connor has argued, it’s a mistake to see the Nineteenth century séance as a reaction against Victorian society’s obsession with technology, science and rationality; Spiritualism was all about applying scientific principles to supernatural phenomena, using technology to collect and collate documentary evidence. Winnipeg occultist T.G. Hamilton had his special séance cabinet equipped with a battery of twelve cameras, primed to record anything in the least resembling a teleplasmic manifestation (teleplasm, by the way, was considered a more scientific name than ectoplasm, spectral mucuswise) that might occur.  The séance, came into vogue at roughly the same time as the telegraph, a technology mediums quickly incorporated into their meetings. It was even claimed spirits had inspired telegraphy’s invention in order to facilitate communication between this world and the next. If this all seems a bit dotty and quaint, then it’s maybe worth bearing in mind that not everyone did take séances seriously; for many they were merely a creepy, fashionable mode of entertainment, like an infinitely more interesting version of hosting DIY Come Dine with Me nights. Its also worth considering that in a century which had seen humans acquire the ability to conduct and harness electrical impulses, to dissociate voices from bodies and transmit them at incredible speeds, to chemically trap photons, it might not’ve seemed so incredible that ether or teleplasm would be discovered, that there’d be some bandwidth or wavelength out there on which spirits could subsist. The naivety of some Spiritualists is tempered by a jarring degree of scientific nous  – one participant in an 1870s séance testified to the spirit’s having manifested an ectoplasmic larynx – because it would just be stupid to believe a ghost could say something without a material means of causing air molecules to vibrate, right?

The idea of an afterlife – the question of whether there is an afterlife, of whether and in what form anything of the person survives the body’s death – was, of course, central to Victorian spiritualism, and to more recent attempts to conjure the dead such as Konstantin Raudive’s 1960s experiments in Electronic Voice Phenomena, which led to him putting out an LP reputedly comprising messages from the spirit world.  But technologically-mediated interfaces with the dead retain a certain uncanny quality even if you don’t have any truck with notions of the hereafter. The ability to see and (recordings of) people is still pretty new, and sometimes you’re reminded just how strange and obscene-feeling it can be (I’ve already chatted in a comment piece about how amazing I think Herzog’s Grizzly Man is in terms of addressing film’s necromantic capacity). It’s not the (nevertheless weird and lovely) SFX ghosts that make Hamilton’s photos so fascinating; it’s their mediation of bygone and increasing opaque people and cultural waypoints. Its something Susan MacWilliams, the Irish artist who’s got a bunch of stuff about parapsychology at the Venice Biennale right now, and has worked with Hamilton’s photos, understands. Anyway, it feels somehow apt to finish with a tribute to teenage Spiritualist sensation Florence Cook, a Hackney resident who found fame as a medium in the early 1870s, conjuring C17th pirate’s daughter Katie King. Dressed in diaphanous white robes (though sometimes – in the name of Spiritualist inquiry – she could be induced to do away with the robes and manifest more or less in the ectoplasmic altogether) and bearing a marked resemblance to Florrie herself, ‘Katie’ would entertain guests with songs and swashbuckling anecdotes and harmless flirtation, sometimes going so far as to perch on the gentlemen’s knees. Somehow she avoided being rumbled. Basically, she got pretty close to inventing pop stardom roughly a century early, and if someone wants to fund a biopic I’m pretty sure doing justice to her memory would be worthwhile and lucrative both.