[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Is Mark Dery an Absolute Idiot? Read this and find out....

["Joel Westerberg" <tux@powerbase-alpha.com>]

Great,

>Life is interesting. The writing that gives meaning and some kind of
>hope to life in this world should be interesting as well. The dj
>"mix" is another form of text and its involutions, elliptical
>recursive qualities and repetitions are helping transform an "analog"
>literature that is increasingly becoming digitized.

Life is interesting... but even bad things are interesting, the downside is
interesting too, you must take the good with the bad, as dogma filmmaker
Lars von Trier said in the epilogue to "Riket".

What the counterculture does not need is positivism, that is done and over.
Counterculture needs paradox, the management of conflicting statements,
something that is Mark Dery's strong point. You can like something, but also
dis it. This is what mixing is about, it's not about selecting only the
positive things, because that is so bland. We need a death trip of equal
good and bad, not turning the blind eye to stuff that doesn't fit into our
current overdated cyber-paradigm.

>wants to admit). There's a great scene in Samuel Delaney's "Dhalgren"
>where the main character "The Kid" focuses on the ruins of the city
>that the story takes place in and it reflects his own sense of
>psychological dispersion.

I am interested in how you relate the cozy, positive-force counterculture
towards the utopian landscape of Dhalgren, what could it possibly have to do
with life in Bellona? Dhalgren doesn't even begin to convey a way of
enjoying Bellona, that isn't nessesary, because that is life in the gutter,
doesn't need a glamorous rewrite. Doesn't need to be positive to survive. It
is revolutionary life told as without second thought, higher brain
functions, just pure instinct. What happens when we are not allowed, or
cannot afford distance and perspective by intellectualization.

>yeah, I'm in the middle of setting up a new magazine called "21C"
>that's a re-invention of the "21C" of the mid 1990's - only alot more
>multi-cultural oriented and without a lunatic like Mark Dery. Also,

Why do you hate Dery so much? I read the text, eager to find out why he
would be an absolute idiot, but couldn't find any thing other than
name-calling. I can sense the editorial policy for the new 21C: faking the
funk. Postive emotionalism without substance about the incredible positive
force of counterculture/cyber rights, empty slogans long past their time.

We cannot build a brand new shiny paradigm, of mixalogic happiness, with the
selecta picking only happy countercore tunes in a neverending real audio
stream. We don't need to select good over bad anymore because those concepts
are inherently corrupt. Form is more important that content. The content in
the system could be anything, it works the same anyway. Keith Hudson and Lee
Perry - the scary loonatic and the friendly crazy man - they both dance to
the same pipe.

Counterculture needs to grow up, it is no longer in it's infancy, there is
no spawning ground any more, with the shortened life-span of cultural
movements, we need to get mature at an early age when we are still active
and have youthful initiative. Counterculture cannot play games, it must work
for it's living.


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