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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