Philip Sherburne on Sun, 16 Sep 2001 09:52:55 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> the logic of repetition |
[The following is excerpted from today's installment of "Needle Drops," my weekly column of electronic music news for Neumu.net. This week's column is, and is not, something of a departure.] www.neumu.net/needledrops ++ It occurred to me at some point Tuesday, as I watched the umpteenth replay of one of the many videos showing the second plane disappearing into the tower, or of the tower collapsing - the fireball, the collapse, the fireball, the collapse, over and over in finite variations endlessly replayed - that I have at least temporarily lost my taste for repetitive music. The logic of the loop, inscribing the event in a haphazard but inevitable trajectory, is a staple of the contemporary media. The Reagan assassination attempt, the Challenger disaster, a white Bronco speeding along LA freeways - all these have become stripped of meaning, have become hyper-real. We accept those image-facts because they have become history, part of our collective archive; but Tuesday's images fell into their indexed slots in that archive almost as soon as they were created. Given the symbolic power of the twin towers, and their rapid destruction, the endless looping amounted to nothing less than an instant nostalgia in the making, a spooky de-realization. We kept watching, over and over, an event only hours old, which sped further from us with every viewing. The media use the loop as a tactic to package reality, to force possible meanings into a set and predetermined form. And much as I love the looped minimalism of all kinds of house and techno, suddenly I had no desire to listen to music that replicated a logic I found questionable. In the absence of meaning, the logic of repetition began to feel like a crutch, or a defense, against grappling with the still-more-difficult issues now facing the country. I promised that soon I would listen - because I have listened to less music these past few days than at any point I can remember in recent years - to Ekkehard Ehlers' "Plays Albert Ayler" (Staubgold 2001). It's a fantastic piece, written for cello and then digitally post-processed, in which there is no boom-tick, no regular playback and reracking - just a long, fluid line of ebb and flow, interruption and rerouting, an embodiment of energy and strangeness, sad and complex and profoundly beautiful. Even the non-mechanical repetition was getting to me. The first-hand stories that I had found so compelling, so moving, so real, began to wear me down. I could no longer tell them apart. I read them in the Wall Street Journal, in the Village Voice, in the New York Times. I read them as they rolled in from friends and acquaintances. They began to bleed together, and while I understood the need to tell them, I was reaching my limit, and long after having turned off the TV, I was feeling the need to log off, to withdraw from information entirely. But perhaps the logic of repetition is not so easily escaped - especially here, in a story so deeply inscribed with it: twin towers, twin attacks, twin collapses. A building bombed for the second time in less than a decade. The mirroring between New York and D.C. The interior ironies beating with a strange and subtle pulse: the son on a hijacked plane phoning his mother, a flight attendant, on the ground. I sat on my stoop tonight, drinking a beer and reading today's Times, when I ran into my neighbors from next door. The husband works for an investment bank. We chatted in the way that acquaintances share distant grief, careful not to be maudlin, not to overreact. And then he surprised me. "Unfortunately, we're from New York," he said, unprovoked, and I knew what was coming. He paused: "I know a lot of people that didn't make it out of the building." When they had walked on, I thought about how these things touch us, the seeming unlikelihood that I would have any connection to one of the victims. And how suddenly, distantly, I did. The ripples just keep moving out from the center, regular and in perfect succession. I think we would all be wise to mind, in the coming weeks and months, this eerie, awful logic of repetition. -Philip Sherburne +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net