The Visceral Extends Its Domain: The Rules Of The Game Continues

[koganbot]

Here's the first ever Rules Of The Game Followup Column. Contains metal and morality, romance and longing. Quotes Martin. You're encouraged to comment here, there, everywhere.

EDIT, JUNE 8: Strangely, the link I'd posted in the previous paragraph didn't work after a few days, so I had to track down where the piece was and fix the link.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

My intuition is that trying to engage Mark K-Punk in a discussion on this issue would be an exercise in codependence. Reading him further might not be, or engaging with him on another issue, but my intuition is that he's no Meltzer or Adorno. Of course, I am speaking in ignorance, and intuition can be wrong since, being intuition, it's not thought through. But this sentence is a giant warning flag to stay away: "Popism's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture are very much like being told (by our class superiors, natch) to be content with our lot."

In my book I'd said that Rorty needed to reengage the people who'd beaten him up in high school. But I'd add now that he shouldn't pick one who's only there to try to beat him up again. And maybe putting Rorty in a room with Meltzer would be pointless - depends how hostile or delusional Meltzer turns out to be. But then, maybe one of us could stand in for Meltzer.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[(Anonymous)]

Hi! I feel dumb to be talking with some people that are like heroes to me and doing it to defend (or contextualise) K-punk in some points. Also I’m sorry if my English skills are so poor and some sentences didn’t make much sense, the typos, etc.
First of all, I also don’t get this nu-rockism thing. I mean, if Popism is a response to Rockism, and so is working with the same set of values and rules (and prejudices and problems) that the second one, and nu-rockism is something like a response against Popism, we are exactly on the same place… Also I don’t know any real blogger or musical critic that shares all of the characteristics that define “popism”. Sometimes they look like the people who post on the Popjustice forums, other the people in Poptimists, other personal attacks to specific persons, so they are kind of really gross generalizations. So my post is to try that people here doesn’t do the same about K-punk.

K-punk is Marxist, and so is set in a specific discourse, with words meaning definite things. All the “paranoia” that is running in the text cited above, is his fight, or the fight of a collective, against Kapital, etc. But I mean, this is part of the lot and if you disagree with those ideas or ideology,or you could not dig that, doesn’t mean is the only thing he is talking about, the same way that if you can’t stand the metaphors about high school or sociology, doesn’t mean Frank Kogan is just only about that.
This paragraph is him at his worst.Probably when he means “high culture”, he doesn’t mean “classical music” (I know he cites the example there, so it’s confussing…). What it is supposed to be so great about post-punk is not that they used recourses from classic music (I don’t know: dissonance, atonality, this and that from concrete music, tape collages, improvisation, etc.) that less or more were used before (Velvet Underground, prog rock, psicodelia, etc.), but from contemporary philosophy (I mean, Adorno give lectures on Darmstad about dodecaphonic music, so there was an interdisciplinary discourse of currente ideas on high art, etc.). So if people uses ideas or applied them to their music taken from Gramsci, or Scritti Politti had this background based on Lacan and Derrida, etc., they are liberating those ideas from academia and bringing them to people who could not access to those texts (and yes, they only should go to a library to buy the book, but the thing is how you get to know which are the books and the guys and the time which you could invest to do it). And you then had people like Morley, or Penman, discussing the same things on the musical press and talking with the artists about them, so people get this background even if they had left school to work with their fathers or whatever and couldn’t find time to work his way to that. Probably much elaborated memories from that time, but, well, their ideal of debate on the public arena.

This thing about philosophy isn’t a small problem at all. In “Real Punks Don’t Wear Black”, pages 342-343, you can read the following:

“Philosophy. Chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” are important not merely for his demolition of philosophy, but for the never-quite-articulated question, “So why do these guys care?” I like Rorty’s vision later in the book of the postphilosopher: “the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed pratices. Disagreementes between disciplines and discourses are compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation” (My mission once this book is published is to get someone to back me financially on starting a Department of dilettante Studies somewhere, sort of the son of WMS, maybe, or an ILX that pays.)

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

This post makes me extremely happy. I hope we hear from you again, whoever you are.