Tower of Sleep

It’s instructive to picture what this guy would actually look like IRL, some clown with a real emotional haircut, Crocs hanging off his feet, Urban Outfitters leather jacket hung over his IKEA futon, remnants of that Taco Bell burrito with the Fritos in it congregating at the corners of his mouth as he binges on Skyrim, blasts “Pumped Up Kicks” on infinite repeat, and gargles dozens of shots of, like, Goldschläger.

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Rob Harvilla imagines the guy Lana Del Rey is singing about all through her album Born to Die

Rob Harvilla wins the zinger award of the year with this review! Probably the most sympathetic take on Born to Die I’ve read yet, but I was dying laughing the whole way through it. He treats it with the sense of absurdity it deserves.

(via perpetua)

It’s impossible to write about precarity without writing about gender because undifferentiated labor is reforming along these lines. Lucy’s passivity and her eagerness to please, her vulnerability and blank demeanor would look incredibly strange on a young man. Her willingness to keep treading water without the promise of anything better to come, her ability to communicate nonthreateningly and stay quiet at the right times are parts of what Nina Power describes in the chapter “The Feminization of Labor” in One-Dimensional Woman:

All work has become women’s work, even that of men. No wonder the young professional woman beams down at us from real estate billboards as the paradigmatic image of achievement … At this point in economic time, those character traits [of precarious professionality] are remarkably feminine, which is why the pragmatic, enthusiastic professional woman is the symbol of the world of work as a whole.” (emphasis added)

***

I feel like all those “virtues” mentioned in the first paragraph are exactly what I’ve learned from years of work in service, retail, and internship. As Malcolm Harris says earlier in the article, “It’s more important that a worker know how not to ask for a raise, more desirable that she be adaptable than cutthroat.” And it does feel strange to be a young man who needs to conform to these pressures. There’s a reason why virtually all gallery assistants are girls (being a “gallery girl” is a thing, but nobody says “gallery boy”). The flattery and self-effacement that the work requires are more conventionally feminine attitudes. Clients don’t expect it (or even necessarily want it) from a man. These circumstances may be no less demeaning to women, but I suspect they can adapt to it easier (for better or worse). 

The point here is not that men are increasingly at a disadvantage in the marketplace of precarious and immaterial employment, but that all workers are rendered increasingly powerless and deprived of opportunities to actually advance their conditions. How do you resist when you have no leverage?

Unlike mortgage or credit-card debt, student debt is premised specifically on the value of the debtor’s body. The exorbitant size of U.S. college debt is justified by the students’ imagined future productivity; if you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans for school, it’s because the debt will enable you to command enough on the labor market to pay it back. But when lots of workers need jobs, employers need any particular worker much less. In a sick twist, the known size of the general debt keeps wages down and young workers desperate, making their personal debt even harder to pay back, making them even more desperate, and so on until the wage goes literally negative in the form of unpaid internships. Sleeping Beauty dramatizes this debtor relationship: The old men who sleep with her might as well be the banks holding Lucy’s loans, taking payment in time with her flesh.

There’s no such thing as too much discussion of precarious labour, student debt, and unpaid internships.

As a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously “out of joint” (Hamlet is one of Derrida’s crucial points of reference in Spectres of Marx). There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the “end of history”. Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of “non-time” that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé’s non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a “crisis of overavailability” that, in effect, signifies the “loss of loss itself”: nothing dies any more, everything “comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective” like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher).

—Hauntology | guardian.co.uk

(via culturite)

Grimes, aka 23-year-old musician Claire Boucher, talks of her music as “post-internet… The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything, so the music I make is sort of schizophrenic. Basically, I’m really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do.” Digital technology makes the artistic self at once hollow (buffeted by torrential, every-which-way flows of influence) and omnipotent (capable of molding sound and melding styles at will). Having access to so many resources and being able to manipulate them so extensively lends itself to a certain grandiosity. Grimes talks of being a maker of worlds and envisions her discography unfolding with Tolkien-esque endlessness: “I want to make a tome— access every genre of music, and also create new genres with them. I want to have, like, 30 albums.” Her forthcoming LP is titled Visions and apparently draws on everything from Enya to Aphex Twin, New Jack Swing to New Age, K-pop to glitch. This makes her an exemplary exponent of the new post-everything: a genre that refuses to make up its mind what it is or what it’s for, shifty and evasive, slithering hither and thither across the entire past and the whole wide world of music.

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Articles: Maximal Nation | Simon Reynolds | Pitchfork

I’ve heard this about Grimes before, and her music definitely has an epic, sci-fi, world-birthing sweep to it (which is already suggested by all the Dune references on Giedi Primes), but this idea of her as a costume-switching curator just doesn’t jive with the consistency of her sound. Grimes is always instantly identifiable. She has an incredibly strong personality and aesthetic: she can contain multitudes and still be absolutely herself.

Digital maximalism doesn’t just affect the vividness and hyperactivity of the music, it also expands the range of sources it draws on. Which is why you can find similar properties of post-everything omnivorousness, structural convolution, and texture-saturated overload in such disparate, often outright non-electronic entities as Montreal solo act Grimes, Battles, Sun Araw, Dâm-Funk, Florence and The Machine (and “my “incorrigible maximalism,” as Ms. Welch put it), and Gang Gang Dance. The latter’s latest album Eye Contact starts with the maximalist maxim: “I can hear everything. It’s everything time.” A proposition that sounds very 2011 but is also very 70s, echoing not just the ambition of prog and fusion, but their hubris too.

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Articles: Maximal Nation | Simon Reynolds | Pitchfork

Thought I’d read this since it recycles certain parts of Retromania, but I actually hadn’t. It’s great! Reynolds is really in his element here (talking mainly about electronic music), top form.