more record reviews from the millennium…
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The Story of Michael Alig – King of the Club Kids
Sceptre 1999

This is a true story from New York City, ca. mid-90’s. It’s the story of a final episode of glam club culture and a story of drugs, a story of murder. With the sensationalising “he came, he partied, he killed” printed on the cover do we detect some triumphalism here? A scene that wasn’t good for anything but make up, at least achieved a murder? La da doo. [Read more →]

Anselm Jappe: Guy Debord
translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith with assistance from the author (University of California Press 1999)

The situationists declared somewhere that boredom was counter-revolutionary. They forgot to add that it is also wearisome and stupid. Jappe’s squib is both the most boring and by far and away the most stupid book to be written about a situationist to date – and in saying this I’m conscious of the fact that the competition consists largely of art monographs and the throughput of Andrew Murray Scott. Aside from the fact that it is printed on paper of some character – soft, off-white and pleasant to touch – about all that can be said in favour of Jappe’s handbook is that it is not a biography at all. The publishers puff Jappe’s guff as an intellectual biography – but a low-brow, one-sided and woefully inadequate introduction to situationism would be a more accurate description.

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Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Shut [Warner Brothers]

“That’s what you say now, so at this moment you may even believe it.” (1)

1. A yuppie nightmare movie segues into the enigma of its director’s death. There are no more questions that could be answered. As there were previously no answers to be had. The director could be anonymous. But the author too is dead. Schnitzler died in 1931 and his traumnovelle lays it out: traum as dream and as trauma. The two almost interchangeable if it is that the dream is that which can present the ‘demand of the other’ and present it in such a way as for us to feel it as a pressure to respond (to our ‘other’ so to speak). But dream is fantasy too and the core here, the propulsion, comes as an imaginary infidelity. That it is desire that is beyond the demand. But is it good? Is it bad?
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‘Communist’ Seven Inch
Product Blueprint

Side A Cornelius Cardew: Smash Smash The Social Contract
Side B Royal Family & The Poor: Vaneigem Mix

(Could have cut-up readings from Marx (see over) as small tracks on either side to be recorded as layers with different amounts of echo and with Eastenders on in the background and including repeating turntable samples of Scritti Politti’s politico-pop hit ‘Wood Beez’ – particularly the lines “Oh lets forget our ownership” and “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do not to meet with your approval” as puncturation between quotes?)

Cover : Bright Red
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