For the past few months I’ve been mostly been listening to classical music in its broadest possible definition, everything from 17th century baroque pieces to the work of 20th century composers like Bernd Alois Zimmermann here.
Listening to his Intercomunicazione today it struck me that this is Zimmerman doing in 1967 something not too dissimilar from what bands like Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten or Nurse with Wound would be doing roughly a decade later, just with classic instruments rather than electronic ones. It activates the same neurons as their music in my head. A far cry perhaps from a Mozart or Beethoven or even a Mahler of Schoenberg, but even Beethoven’s Ninth was said to be deliberately unplayeable when it was published. Apparantly it’s only due to the improved skills of musicians today that we even stand a chance of hearing it in its intended form. Not that different in intent perhaps from what Zimmermann does here.
How can it be that this song and this slogan from it is once again relevant, forty years after it was first sung?
I love Bérurier Noir and this song, but it’s fucking frustrating that the same issues they sang against back in 1985 are still alive and kicking now in 2024. François Guillemot gets it exactly right her in this interview in The Guardian:
Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.
It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.
She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.
I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.
The past four decades all through Europe and America we’ve seen our political choices being steadily reduced to one between cynical centrists slowly destroying the world to enrich their friends and literal fascists promoted as their main opposition as they’re less dangerous to the status quo than anything even vaguely leftist. Whenever anything on the left has had even a small change of getting near power it is stomped to death (cf. Corbyn) while people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen are activily promoted. So now in France you have a choice between Macron, already executing the sort of policies Le Pen would kill for and Le Pen, but at least there there still is a leftist movement to oppose both. In the UK meanwhile the only thing you can chose is the colour of the tie the leader of the crackdowns and austerity party will wear, while in the US it’s between genocide Joe and cheeseburger Nazi Trump. Forty years of neoliberal centrism really has achieved a lot.
Everybody has played Tetris right? I remember when my little brother got the original Gameboy for his birthday and that was one of the games he also got for it: everybody in our family played it. Simple but addictive, something you play for five minutes or an hour and you can put down again.
But of course there are always people who get obsessed even by this. Ever since it first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, people have been trying to beat it. But what does that even mean? That’s what this video tries to explain by diving into the history of people trying to beat Tetris:
This is not normally the sort of thing I’m interested in, but I got it through a Twitter recommendation or maybe it showed up in the Youtube algorithm and I ended up watching it when it struck me that this was the future we had always been promised. This is basically the sort of shit the people in the Culture fill their days with. Beating Tetris really doesn’t matter, it’s neither useful nor will advance your career but it is something that people rather than AI excel in: stting yourself arbitrary challenges as part of play. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties the assumption always was that automation meant we would need to work less and would have more leisure time to fill, but instead we got shittier jobs for worse pay. In a better world everybody could be a Blue Scuti and follow their obsessions like he did.
16bit Sensation: Another Layer gets the immediate appeal of Kanon eaxtly right. One bit of warning though: come for the uguu, stay for the heartwrenching grief.
Bill Watterson and John Kascht talk about their working process on The Mysteries, a genuine collaborative process in which nothing was planned and each decision was taken unanimously: “we didn’t know what we wanted but we knew what we didn’t want once we saw it“.
Nothing better than hearing two passionate people talking about how they worked together and managed to create something despite of or maybe because of the huge differences in their prefered way of working.