Wild Combination

"A portrait of Arthur Russell" (2008)



1+1+1+1

100% Dynamite!

Dancehall reggae meets rap in New York city

El sobrino de Wittgenstein

"Nunca había conocido antes a una persona con un don de observación más agudo, a ninguna de mayor riqueza mental. Sólo que Paul tiraba ininterrumpidamente por la ventana su riqueza mental exactamente lo mismo que su riqueza en dinero, pero mientras que su riqueza en dinero quedó muy pronto definitivamente tirada por la ventana y agotada, su riqueza mental era realmente inagotable; la tiraba ininterrumpidamente por la ventana y ella se multiplicaba (al mismo tiempo) ininterrumpidamente, cuanto más de su riqueza mental tiraba por la ventana (de su cabeza), tanto más aumentaba esa riqueza, eso es al fin y al cabo lo característico de esas personas que al principio están locas y finalmente son calificadas de dementes, el que cada vez más y de forma cada vez más ininterrumpida tiran su riqueza mental por la ventana (de su cabeza) y, al mismo tiempo, en esa cabeza suya, su riqueza mental se multiplica con la misma rapidez con que la tiraron por la ventana (de su cabeza). Cada vez tiran más riqueza mental por la ventana (de su cabeza) y, al mismo tiempo, esa riqueza se hace cada vez mayor en su cabeza y, como es natural, cada vez más amenazadora, y finalmente no pueden seguir tirando la riqueza mental (de su cabeza) y su cabeza no aguanta ya esa riqueza mental que se multiplica constantemente en su cabeza y se acumula en esa cabeza suya, y explota. Así explotó sencillamente la cabeza de Paul, porque no pudo seguir tirando la riqueza mental (de su cabeza). Así explotó también la cabeza de Nietzsche. Así explotaron en fin de cuentas todas esas locas cabezas filosóficas, porque no pudieron seguir tirando su riqueza mental. En esas cabezas surge finalmente de forma continua y realmente ininterrumpida la riqueza mental, con una velocidad mucho mayor y más atroz que aquella con la que puede ser tirada por la ventana (de su cabeza), y un día su cabeza explota y están muertos. Así explotó un día la cabeza de Paul y estuvo muerto".

Thomas Bernhard
"El sobrino de Wittgenstein". Acá.

Pharoah Sanders

"Finalmente, decidí no salir a pasear. Decidí no meterme en lo que no me incumbía y quedarme en el interior leyendo hasta que llegara la hora de marcharse de aquel horrible sitio. Por desgracia, no había llevado libros y en el refugio no había discos, así que mi única salvación era la única cinta que Johnny Cactus tenía en el coche. En ella el Cactus había grabado "The creator has a masterplan" de Pharoah Sanders.
Y nada más.
Eso no significa que al terminar la canción había que rebobinar la cinta. Era mucho peor. Johnny Cactus había grabado noventa minutos de "The creator has a masterplan" de Pharoah Sanders, su canción favorita, una y otra vez. Terminaba y volvía a empezar. Eternamente.

The creator has a masterplan
Peace and happiness for every man.

Y otra vez:

The creator has a masterplan
Peace and happiness for every man.

A los dos días de escucharla diez mil millones de veces empecé a comprender a los buscadores de oro del Klondike que sufrían ataques de fiebre de las nieves y descuartizaban con un hacha a toda su familia, arrastrados hacia la locura por el ruido del viento entre los árboles, o el hu-hu constante de un búho.
A los seis días, dejé de poner la cinta y me concentré en lo único que me quedaba: pensar en Rebeca y odiarla aún más".

de "Cosas que hacen BUM", de Kiko Amat.

Y claro, la versión íntegra de "The creator...": 32 maravillosos minutos.

Nudity

“An attempt to think about nudity in all its theological complexity and, at the same time, to move beyond the theological perspective is accomplished in Walter Benjamin's work, Toward the end of his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, he examines the relationship in beauty between the veil and the veiled, appearance and essence, in connection with the character of Ottilia (whom Benjamin saw as a figuration of Jula Cohn, the woman whom he was in love with at the time), In beauty the veil and the veiled, the envelopment and the object that it envelops, are linked by a necessary relationship that Benjamin calls "secret" (Geheimnis). The beautiful, then, is that object for which the veil is essential. That Benjamin is aware of the theological depth of this thesis, which irrevocably links the veil to the veiled, is suggested by a reference to the "age-old idea" that the veiled is transformed by its unveiling, since it can remain "equal to itself" only underneath its envelopment. As a result beauty is in its essence an impossibility of unveiling; it is "non-unveilable" (unenthüllbar)”.

Giorgio Agamben
“Nudities”
Completo, aquí.

Musica para tormentas

Un disco maravilloso y atemporal.



Completito, aquí.

Vienna 1900

"In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete. The story “At the Prophet’s,” written in 1904, begins with an ironic ode to artistic megalomania.

Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals. Here is the end: ice, chastity, null. Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values. Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist. Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here freedom, madness, and death hold sway.

In Mann’s 1902 story “Gladius Dei,” a young man named Hieronymus strides through Richard Strauss’s hometown of Munich, scowling at the extravagance around him. He goes inside an art shop and berates its owner for displaying kitsch—art that is merely “beautiful” and therefore worthless. “Do you think gaudy colors can gloss over the misery of the world?” Hieronymus shouts. “Do you think loud orgies of luxurious good taste can drown the moans of the tortured earth? … Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss; art is the divine flame that must set fire to the world, until the world with all its infamy and anguish burns and melts away in redeeming compassion!”

All over fin-de-siècle Europe, strange young men were tramping up narrow stairs to garret rooms and opening doors to secret places. Occult and mystical societies—Theosophist, Rosicrucian, Swedenborgian, kabbalistic, and neopagan—promised rupture from the world of the present. In the political sphere, Communists, anarchists, and ultra-nationalists plotted from various angles to overthrow the quasi-liberal monarchies of Europe; Leon Trotsky, in exile in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, began publishing a paper called Pravda. In the nascent field of psychology, Freud placed the ego at the mercy of the id. The world was unstable, and it seemed that one colossal Idea, or, failing that, one well-placed bomb, could bring it tumbling down. There was an almost titillating sense of imminent catastrophe.

Vienna was the scene of what may have been the ultimate pitched battle between the bourgeoisie and the avant-garde. A minority of “truth-seekers,” as the historian Carl Schorske calls them, or “critical modernists,” in the parlance of the philosopher Allan Janik, grew incensed by the city’s rampant aestheticism, its habit of covering all available surfaces in gold leaf. They saw before them a supposedly modern, liberal, tolerant society that was failing to deliver on its promises, that was consigning large parts of its citizenry to poverty and misery. They spoke up for the outcasts and the scapegoats, the homosexuals and the prostitutes. Many of the “truth-seekers” were Jewish, and they were beginning to comprehend that Jews could never assimilate themselves into an anti-Semitic society, no matter how great their devotion to German culture. In the face of the gigantic lie of the cult of beauty—so the rhetoric went—art had to become negative, critical. It had to differentiate itself from the pluralism of bourgeois culture, which, as Salome demonstrated, had acquired its own avant-garde division.

The offensive against kitsch moved on all fronts. The critic Karl Kraus used his one-man periodical, Die Fackel, or The Torch, to expose what he considered to be laziness and mendacity in journalistic language, institutionalized iniquity in the prosecution of crime, and hypocrisy in the work of popular artists. The architect Adolf Loos attacked the Art Nouveau compulsion to cover everyday objects in wasteful ornament, and, in 1911, shocked the city and the emperor with the unadorned, semi-industrial facade of his commercial building on the Michaelerplatz. The gruesome pictures of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele confronted a soft-porn art world with the insatiability of lust and the violence of sex. Georg Trakl’s poetry meticulously documented the onset of insanity and suicidal despair: “Now with my murderer I am alone.”

If members of this informal circle sometimes failed to appreciate one another’s work—the bohemian poet Peter Altenberg preferred Puccini and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students—they closed ranks when philistines attacked. There would be no backing down in the face of opposition. “If I must choose the lesser of two evils,” Kraus said, “I will choose neither.”

The most aggressive of Vienna’s truth-seekers was the philosopher Otto Weininger, who, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece, and it made a posthumous bestseller of his doctoral dissertation, a bizarre tract titled Sex and Character. The argument of the book was that Europe suffered from racial, sexual, and ethical degeneration, whose root cause was the rampant sexuality of Woman. Jewishness and homosexuality were both symptoms of a feminized, aestheticized society. Only a masculine Genius could redeem the world. Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ.” Strange as it may seem in retrospect, this alternately incoherent and bigoted work attracted readers as intelligent as Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, not to mention Schoenberg and his pupils. The young Alban Berg devoured Weininger’s writings on culture, underlining sentences such as this: “Everything purely aesthetic has no cultural value.” Wittgenstein, who made it his mission to expunge pseudo-religious cant from philosophy, was quoting Weininger when he issued his aphorism “Ethics and aesthetics are one.

The entire discourse surrounding the Viennese avant-garde demands skeptical scrutiny. Certain of these “truths”—fatuous generalizations about women, obnoxious remarks about the relative abilities of races and classes—fail to impress the modern reader. Weininger’s notion of “ethics,” rooted in Puritanism and self-hatred, is as hypocritical as anyone’s. As in prior periods of cultural and social upheaval, revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set. Many members of the modernist vanguard would tack away from a fashionable solidarity with social outcasts and toward various forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, even Nazism. Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art".

Alex Ross
"The Rest is Noise". Completo, aquí.