There is a cornucopia of free downloads of DJ/rupture's mixes available on his Mudd Up! blog. Dating from Gold Teeth Thief (2001) and running up to Sunset Park Rent Strike (2012), the mixes provide a sonic history of our contemporary age.
There were a few moments of sunny relaxation during the low-wage full employment of Slick Willie's second term. Rents, while rising, were still manageable as long as work was readily available.
But then you had the dotcom boom and bust coinciding with 9/11, and things have never been the same. It's the "things have never been the same" that rupture's mixes capture.
Like sliding a analog radio dial on a global digital receiver, rupture's sonic world is a world of the marginalized black and brown of the periphery. The master narrative no longer rules. There is chaos.
That is why I thought it was appropriate to feature rupture's music today, the day of Trump's inauguration as the 45th POTUS. The Trump presidency cannot be sustained. The system is failing.
The system would have failed if Hillary had triumphed, but it could, from an elite perspective, have been a more managed failure. With Trump the system is hurtling toward abject, near-term failure.
My favorite rupture mixes are Uproot (2008) and, with Matt Shadetek, Solar Life Raft (2009).
When last we left off, with Nihilism #6, I had mentioned that a perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism could be found in a movie, The Couselor (2013), written by Cormac McCarthy:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
But I have been thinking about this, and I should retract "perfect" as a distinction for this statement as a formulation of nihilism.
The founding father of nihilism as a school of philosophy and not just a label (Friedrich Jacobi coined the neologism, seeing it pejoratively as the Enlightenment's strange fruit) is Friedrich Nietzsche. And for Nietzsche the crowning achievement of his philosophy is the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, the idea that what we do in the here and now will replay itself infinitely.
In other words, this world that we have created will not cease to exist because our existence is forever present.
When I broke up with my last girlfriend I decided to wake up early every morning, around 3 AM, and read from Nietzsche's last work, the posthumously published The Will to Power (1901).
I needed an emetic to cure me of my debilitating addiction to romantic love. I thought at least one page a day of the sagacious bachelor who famously wrote, "You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" (Derrida wrote a book, Spurs (1979) about this line.)
I stuck with it for for a month or two before moving on to something else. But this morning I returned to The Will to Power thinking about this issue of the Eternal Return of the Same.
The last section of The Will to Power is devoted to Eternal Recurrence. This from Note #1058:
Everything becomes and recurs eternally-- escape is impossible!-- Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!).
Ripeness of man for this idea.
I always thought of the Eternal Return as a regulative concept, the palm at the end of the Western mind, a final refutation of all opposites, something that says the mental world and the physical world are one and all is possible.
Nietzsche solves the riddle of time-past and time-future, much like T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1943), by saying both are eternally present. There is a great deal of power to be tapped here. (Next nihilism post, an exploration of barbarism.)
BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
Matt Shadetek's new album, The Empire Never Ended, came out at the end of March. I purchased it right away and have listened to it numerous times over the last several weeks. It's solid. But I had yet to experience that metaphysical moment when one bonds with a recording. Today was the day. It was at lunch in the file room sensory deprivation chamber on the first floor. The track was "Cracks." I can't find it on YouTube; the only cut from The Empire Never Ended that I can find is the track that follows "Cracks" -- "La Vida Loca" featuring Troy Ave:
I drifted -- on my back on the floor in the dark -- in and out. Following Matt Shadetek's "Cracks" was Bob Marley performance of "Crazy Baldhead" at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh about eight months before he died in May of 1981. I was someplace else:
On my walk home through the blossoming trees a smile-inducing double play greeted my ears thanks to the alphabetical sort by song title. First, the DJ/rupture-Matt Shadetek remix of Telephathe's "In Your Line":
But what I wanted to talk about is Last Tango in Paris -- the Bernardo Bertolucci directed film from 1972 starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider -- which I saw again last night for the second time in a year. When I first saw the movie with my wife I was a young man in my early twenties. I didn't really understand it. I understood the basic plot -- a guy who is mourning the suicide of a wife with whom he lived but was alienated begins a relationship with a young woman who he meets one day by accident when they're both looking at an empty, old apartment; I got that. What I didn't get was the guy's attempt to keep the relationship depersonalized and confined to the old apartment, which he ends up renting and which serves as the lovers' "walled garden." And what I was completely baffled by was the ending tango competition where he suddenly loses his cold, dominating demeanor and becomes a giddy lovesick school girl.
I think I saw Last Tango again a decade ago. And while I was better able to follow everything, I still didn't really appreciate it; I thought the ending foolish. Then again, a decade ago I couldn't imagine not having a girlfriend.
But when I saw it again last year, streaming it this time from Amazon, it hit me head on. This is a manifesto labeled ration for a burdened bachelor:
Paul: You want this man you love to protect and take care of you.
Jeanne: Yeah.
Paul: You want this golden, shining, powerful warrior to build a fortress where you can hide in. So you don't have to ever ... have ... You don't ever have to be afraid. You don't have to feel lonely or empty. -- That's what you want, isn't it?
Jeanne: -- Yes.
Paul: --Well, you'll never find it.
Jeanne: --But I find this man.
Paul: Then it won't be long until he'll want you to build a fortress for him out of your tits and your cunt and your hair and your smile and the way you smell. And ... and some place where he can feel comfortable and secure enough so that he can worship in front of the altar of his own prick.
Jeanne: -- But I find this man!
Paul: -- No, you're alone. You're all alone. You won't be free of that feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face. I mean, that sounds like bullshit, some romantic crap, until you go right up into the ass of death. Right up in his ass ... till you find the womb of fear. And then ... maybe ... Maybe then, you'll be able to find him.
Paul/Brando's mistake is that he thought he could control the man-woman dynamic. And he was doing pretty well there for a while, keeping the relationship bottled up in the old, empty apartment in Passy; he was talking and walking a good game. Then he falls in love, which is what always happens eventually, and she kills him.
Lately, the last couple of months, I've been cautiously approaching the idea that the root of war is the relation between the sexes. Man and woman try to make two into one. But two is not one and cannot be one. Nonetheless man and woman keep on trying. So there is a lot of devouring, a lot of pain and suffering. This is nature. But multiplicity cannot be reduced to sameness. There is no going back to that fortress of tits and cunt and hair. To mommy. You can try though. That's what were stuck with. Good luck.
Check out Matt Shadetek's web site. There's a free download of Purple Flowers located there; here's the blurb for it:
On the Valentines Day before the release of Matt Shadetek’s new album The Empire Never Ended on March 26th, the Brooklyn producer has assembled a gift for his fans containing a previously unheard mix and alternate versions which re-imagine his 2010 project Flowers as hazy baby-making music for paranoid shut-ins. Dragging Flowers to a halftime crawl Shadetek connects the dots between the bouncing effervescence of Flowers and the heavier, darker tone of Empire. In addition to the mix the Purple Flowers EP features remixes from Dubbel Dutch, Lamin Fofana & Shiftee. The Empire Never Ended is released March 26th on Dutty Artz.
Grab the project for free over at the Dutty Artz Bandcamp.
I listened to it this morning and greatly enjoyed it.
