Roy Christopher's Blog, page 9

Mistaken Algorithms

Cinema is our most viable and enduring form of design fiction. More than any other medium, it lets us peer into possible futures projected from the raw materials of the recent past, simulate scenes based on new visions via science and technology, gauge our reactions, and adjust our plans accordingly. These visions are equipment for living in a future heretofore unseen. As the video artist Bill Viola puts it,

the implied goal of many of our efforts, including technological development, is the eradication of signal-to-noise ratio, which in the end is the ultimate transparent state where there is no perceived difference between the simulation and the reality, between ourselves and the other. We think of two lovers locked in a single ecstatic embrace. We think of futuristic descriptions of direct stimulation to the brain to evoke experiences and memories.[1]

When we think of the future, the images we conjure end up on the screen.

“Long Live the New Flesh.” David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, 1983.

With only one adaptation, director David Cronenberg proved perhaps J.G. Ballard’s most effective cinematic interpreter. Roger Ebert said of his version of Crash, “it’s like a porno movie made by a computer: it downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm.”[2] These visions of intimate machines give both versions of Crash a sense of malign prophecy. Before Crash in 1996, an adaptation Ballard loved, Cronenberg had already established himself as the preeminent body-horror director with such films as The Brood (1979), Scanners, (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), and Naked Lunch. (1991). Jessica Kiang writes of Crash, “Koteas’s Vaughan explains that his project is ‘the reshaping of the human body through technology,’ a pretty perfect summation of a recurring theme in the first half of Cronenberg’s career, best exemplified by his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome.”[3]

In Videodrome, CIVIC-TV’s satellite dish operator, Harlan (played by Peter Dvorsky) pirates the signal of a plotless show of pure violence called “Videodrome” being beamed from bands in between. In search of unique programming for the station, Max Renn (played by James Woods) authorizes its rebroadcast. Renn soon finds that the footage is not faked and is PR for a socio-political movement weaponizing the signal for mind control. Professor Brian O’Blivion (played by Jack Creley) helped develop the signal to unify the minds of the viewers. Videodrome gave him a brain tumor and subsequent hallucinations. He sees the resultant state as a higher form of reality. As his daughter explains, “he saw it as part of the evolution of man as a technological animal. […] He became convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn't afraid to let his body die.”[4] He tells Max, “the battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.”[5] It doesn’t take long for the reality in this film to devolve into a hallucinatory state itself. As the dialog of the last scene goes, “to become the new flesh you have to kill the old flesh. Don't be afraid.  Don't be afraid to let your body die. […] Watch. I'll show you how. It's easy. Long live the new flesh. Long live the new flesh.”[6]

Videodrome is another example of the view of the body—and the brain inside it—as an antenna, picking up signals from television broadcasts and the airwaves themselves. As Warren Ellis once said, “if you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”[7] It seems relevant here also that Albert Einstein wrote the preface to Upton Sinclair’s aptly titled 1930 treatise on telepathy, Mental Radio, which he described as being “of high psychological interest.”[8] These are visions of escape through media, escape routes as media.

The character of Professor Brian O’Blivion was inspired by Marshall McLuhan, one of Cronenberg’s college professors at the University of Toronto.[9] McLuhan famously appeared in a fourth-wall-breaking scene in Annie Hall (1977), where Woody Allen introduces him, speaking directly to the camera. That wall is the contested barrier of Videodrome. McLuhan’s concerns about information overload and media reconfiguring our brains were not lost on Cronenberg, and Cronenberg’s own concerns about the technological manipulation of brains and bodies weren’t lost on his son either.

An expectedly large leap from body horror’s origins in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Brandon Cronenberg’s 2020 film, Possessor, nonetheless concerns itself with manipulating flesh for murderous ends. Tasya Vos (played by Andrea Riseborough) hijacks bodies via their brains in order to carry out assassinations unscathed. Through an advanced neurological interface, she takes over another’s body. Once the hit is in, she returns to her own by forcing the host to kill themselves. Like the Sunken Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), the cognitive contrivance in Possessor pushes one consciousness out of the way of another. Once in control of a new body in a new social context, the operative is able to perform heinous acts in their name—namely murder-suicides.

Predator Things: Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, 2020.

When Tasya returns from a mission, she has to recalibrate to the real world in her own body. One of the tests for this debriefing process involves a number of analog, personal totems. This tests the idea that the analog world is our native environment as humans, as we all slide into ever more-digital worlds. The first of Tasya’s totems in the test is her grandfather’s pipe. The second is a mounted butterfly. “This is an old souvenir,” she remembers. “I killed her one day when I was a child and... I felt guilty... I still feel guilty.”[10] As much as the butterfly and her memory of it serve to anchor her here, her guilt is the real anchor. Guilt is our private connection to others.

Even so, when one of her victims, Colin Tate (played by Christopher Abbott), manages to wrest control of his body from her, he calls her agency into question. Using his fragmented access to Taysa’s memories, Colin manages to find her home, infiltrates it, and berates her husband:

just think, one day your wife is cleaning the cat litter and she gets a worm in her, and that worm ends up in her brain. The next thing that happens is she gets an idea in there, too. And it's hard to say whether that idea is really hers or it's just the worm. And it makes her do certain things. Predator things. Eventually, you realize that she isn't the same person anymore. She's not the person that she used to be. It's gotta make you wonder whether you're really married to her or married to the worm.[11]

Verifying the source of a message or an idea is a struggle even outside of our heads. When they pop in unannounced, there’s no way to know where they came from. It makes it difficult to care about the sender.

At the end of the movie when Taysa encounters the dead butterfly again during recalibration, she says she no longer feels guilty for killing it.

Yale University professor Dr. José M.R. Delgado’s 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, provides an intriguing precursor to Cronenberg’s film. In this book, Delgado outlines the methodology for Cronenberg’s fictional conceit. Delgado wrote, "by means of ESB (electrical stimulation of the brain) it is possible to control a variety of functions—a movement, a glandular secretion, or a specific mental manifestation, depending on the chosen target.”[12] While admitting that the brain is protected by layers of bone and membrane, he illustrates how easily it is accessed through the senses, drawing convenient comparisons between garage-door openers and two-way radios, and light waves and optical nerves. Direct brain interfaces through implants have existed since the 1930s when W.R. Hess wired a cat’s hypothalamus with electrodes. Hess was able to induce everything from urination and defecation to hunger, thirst, and extreme excitement.

Given the limited viability of such technology during the writing of Delgado’s book, he speculates the future of what he calls “stimoceivers,” writing, "it is reasonable to speculate that in the near future the stimoceiver may provide the essential link from man to computer to man, with reciprocal feedback between neurons and instruments which represents a new orientation for the medical control of neurophysiological functions.”[13] Though Delgado’s stimoceivers are becoming more and more viable, they still require the mind and the machine to adapt to each other.

Wetware meets hardware: Godflesh’s Selfless, 1994.

The cover of Selfless, Godflesh’s 1994 record, is a picture of a human nerve cells growing on a microchip. It’s a picture of what’s called neuromorphic computing, a field of artificial intelligence that goes beyond using models of the human brain to physically harness its computing power, either by growing cells on chips or putting chips in brains. In August of 2020, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s Neuralink brain implant, demonstrating the device on three unsuspecting pigs.[14] The small, coinlike device reads neural activity, and Musk hopes they will eventually write it as well, connecting brains and computers in a completely new way, mirroring neurons and computer chips. The Neuralink team hopes the devices will correct injuries, bypass pain, record and restore memories, and enable telepathy. As Ballard and the Cronenbergs warned us, one person’s mind-altering technology is another’s absolute nightmare. “In Godflesh,” Daniel Lukes writes, “the human is subsumed into the machine as an act of spiritual transubstantiation.”[15] Computer processors open another path out of the body.

ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body

The essay above is an excerpt from Chapter 3, “MACHINE: Mechanical Reproduction,” of my book Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, which is available as an open-access .pdf and beautiful paperback from punctum books. It’s really quite good, but don’t take my word for it…

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” —Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

If you already have Escape Philosophy, or even if you do, and you want more of this kind of thing, check out Children of the New Flesh: The Early Work and Pervasive Influence of David Cronenberg, edited by David Leo Rice and Chris Kelso and published by the good people at 11:11 Press. It’s essential.

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Notes:

[1] Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995).

[2] Roger Ebert, “‘Crash’ (1997),” RogerEbert.com, March 21, 1997, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cra....

[3] Jessica Kiang, “‘Crash’: The Wreck of the Century,” The Criterion Collection, December 1, 2020, https://www.criterion.com/current/pos.... She continues, “so, when Vaughan later retracts that statement, calling it ‘a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody,’ it’s hard not to see Cronenberg slyly denigrating his own back catalog, or at least marking in boldface the end of his ongoing engagement with it. Sure enough, with the exception of a watered-down workout in 1999’s eXistenZ, Crash does represent a move away from the gleefully visceral grotesqueries of his early career, toward the more refined psychological grotesqueries of his twenty-first-century output.”

[4] David Cronenberg, dir. and writer, Videodrome (Montreal: Alliance Communications, 1983).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] From Ellis’s defunct newsletter, quoted in Steven Shaviro, “Swimming Pool,” The Pinocchio Theory, January 29, 2004, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?m=200401.

[8] See Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio: Does It Work, and How? (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1930), ix. Arthur Koestler called this a “symbolic act.” Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology (New York: Vintage, 1972), 50.

[9] Ben Sherlock, “Long Live the New Flesh: 10 Behind the Scenes Facts about ‘Videodrome’,” Screen Rant, August 1, 2020, https://screenrant.com/videodrome-mov....

[10] Brandon Cronenberg, dir. and writer, Possessor (Toronto: Rhombus Media, 2020).

[11] Ibid.

[12] José M.R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 80.

[13] Ibid., 91.

[14] See Leah Crane, “Elon Musk Demonstrated a Neuralink Brain Implant in a Live Pig,” NewScientist, August 29, 2020, https://www.newscientist.com/article/.... See also Melissa Heikkilä, “Machines Can Read Your Brain. There’s Little That Can Stop Them,” Politico, August 31, 2021, https://www.politico.eu/article/machi....

[15] Daniel Lukes, “Black Metal Machine: Theorizing Industrial Black Metal,” in Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory, Issue 1, edited by Amelia Ishmael, Zareen Price, Aspasia Stephanou, and Ben Woodard (Earth: punctum books, 2013), 79.

A Message in a Bottleneck

The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that when botanists go out in fields and forests looking for flora, they call it a foray, and when writers do the same, it should be called a metaphoray.[1] Marshall and Eric McLuhan open their book Laws of Media: The New Science with the claim that each of our technological artifacts is “a kind of word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form to another.”[2] That is, each new technological advance transforms us by changing our relationship to our environment, just as a metaphor does with our knowledge.

“Each person is his [sic] own central metaphor,” wrote Mary Catherine Bateson.[3] Bateson saw the perceptual processes of the organism as a metaphor for the complexities of the world outside it. With the spread and adoption of personal media and the internet, the network metaphor has creeped further and further into our thinking.[4] The center thins out to the edges as the network becomes central.[5] Extending it inward, Michael Schandorf writes that “every ‘node’ is a network all its own, each with its own very fuzzy boundaries and interpenetrations.”[6] Expanding it outward, Barry Brummett writes that texts are, “nodal: what one experiences here and now is a text, but it may well be a part of a larger text extending into time and space. Texts tend to grow nodes off themselves that develop into larger, more complex but related texts.”[7] And Steven Shaviro adds, “The network is shaped like a fractal. That is to say, it is self-similar across all scales, no matter how far down you go. Any portion of the network has the same structure as the network as a whole. Neurons connect with each other across synapses on much the same way that Web sites are linked on the World Wide Web.”[8] From texts to networks, our minds are permeable.[9] I belabor the point here because we are complicit in the use of these metaphors.

The connections of a network are what gives it its power. In turn, the network gives each node its power as well. For example, a telephone is only as valuable as its connection to other telephones. Where value normally derives from scarcity, here it comes from abundance. If you own the only telephone or your phone loses service, it’s worthless. In addition, each new phone connected to the network adds value to every other phone.[10] At a certain point, fatigue sets in. Connectivity is great until you’re connected to people you’d rather avoid. Each new communication channel is eventually overrun by marketers and scammers, leveraging the links to sell or shill, forcing us to filter, screen, buffer, or otherwise close ourselves off from the network.[11] There is a threshold, a break boundary, beyond which connectivity becomes a bad thing and the network starts to lose its value.

Fig 6.1: A tetrad of the network. It enhances connectivity, obsolesces isolation, retrieves word of mouth, and reverses into fatigue.

In their Laws of Media, Marshall and Eric McLuhan outlined the ramifications of these media through their tetrad of media effects, which states that every new medium enhances something, makes something obsolete, retrieves a previous something, and reverses into something else once pushed past a certain threshold.[12] In Fig. 6.1, I’ve applied this metaphorical framework to the network.

When we buy into these infrastructures—networks or otherwise—we’re buying into their metaphors. Moreover, we’re buying into the idea that metaphors are an effective way to represent the world.[13] “A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that,” Bateson once said.[14] The word metaphor means “carrying over,” and that’s just what their meanings do. Nodes and networks: eventually, we forget all of these are metaphors. “That is the real danger,” Robert Swigart writes, “unless we pause from time to time to consider how these metaphors work to create boundaries… they will control us without our knowledge.”[15] As long as we’re paying attention though, we can always defy them.

This is another excerpt from my new manuscript, The Medium Picture. This is from Chapter 6, “A Message in a Bottleneck,” which is a theory-heavy chapter about metaphors, machines, nodes and networks.

Author of Smart Mobs and Net Smart, among many other books, Howard Rheingold, says,

Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.

I can’t wait to share this one with you!

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Notes:

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013, 46; With thanks to Michael Schandorf.

[2] Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988, 3; As Eric McLuhan notes in The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan, “Metaphor and the tetrad on metaphor are the very heart of Laws of Media.”; Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan, New York: O/R Books, 2017, 200n; So much of Marshall McLuhan’s work was done with metaphors. As he wrote, interpolating Robert Browning, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a metaphor.”; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964, 64; See also, Yoni Van Den Eede, “Exceeding Our Grasp: McLuhan’s All-Metaphorical Outlook,” in Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Tracy Whalen & Catherine G. Taylor (eds.), Finding McLuhan: The Mind, The Man, The Message, Regina, Canada: University of Regina Press, 2015, 43-61; Roger K. Logan, McLuhan Misunderstood, Toronto: The Key Publishing House, 2013, 39-40.

[3] Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, 284; See also, Gregory Bateson, “Our Own Metaphor: Nine Years After,” in A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 285.

[4] This is a trend that John Naisbitt spotted in newspapers in the late 1970s; See Chapter 8, “From Hierarchies to Networks,” in John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives, New York: Warner Books, 1982, 189-205.

[5] Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 2.

[6] Michael Schandorf, Communication as Gesture, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2019, 108; Latour defines the black box similarly: “Each of the parts inside the black box is itself a black box full of parts.”; Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 185.

[7] Barry Brummett, A Rhetoric of Style, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008, 118.

[8] Shaviro goes on to flip McLuhan’s claim that electronic networks are an extension of the central nervous system to write, “every individual brain is a miniaturized replica of the global communications network.”; Shaviro, 2003, 12.

[9] Nicholas Carr writes, “Those who celebrate the ‘outsourcing’ of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals.”; Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010, 191.

[10] Kevin Kelly calls this “the fax effect.”; Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, New York: Viking, 1998, 39-49.

[11] Using metaphors from epidemiology, Malcolm Gladwell calls this fatigue “immunity.”; Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, New York: Little, Brown, 2000, 271-275.

[12] McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, passim.

[13] Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line, New York: William Marrow, 1999.

[14] Mary Catherine Bateson, How to Be a Systems Thinker: A Conversation with Mary Catherine Bateson, Edge, April 17, 2018: https://www.edge.org/conversation/mar...

[15] Robert Swigart, “A Writer’s Desktop,” In Brenda Laurel (ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1990, 140-141.

Bandcamp Flashback Friday

My first book was an interview anthology called Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, and it’s available on Bandcamp. Today is #BandcampFriday, the day when they waive all of their fees, and the money goes directly to the artists. When you order directly from me through Bandcamp, you also get fun stuff like stickers. And if you’re into it, I’ll even sign the book for you!

Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Eugene Thacker, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, McKenzie Wark, Brenda Laurel, Gareth Branwyn, and many, many more.

Spanning the seven years of the turn of the millennium (1999-2006), Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century — 43 interviews with minds of all kinds. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages, all typeset and designed by Patrick Barber.

Ellis Goddard of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies says,

“Roy Christopher has long been regarded as an insightful (and sometimes inciteful) inquisitor of Internet-age antics. Follow for Now thus drops sufficiently many known and intriguing names in its table of contents (and on its cover) to stay on the shelves of both snooty philosophers and free-thinking subculturalites for decades. But the nuggets those names provide are intriguing enough to justify that stay, on those shelves and others. In short, the content is as intense as the cast.”

And Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, writes,

“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.”

Get yours from Bandcamp today for Bancamp Friday!

And don’t forget the sequel: Follow for Now, Vol. 2 from punctum books!

The Structural Dynamics of Flow

For this auspicious fifth day of May, may I also recommend The Structural Dynamics of Flow by my dudes Alaska and steel tipped dove.

In the years (decades) since his nascent Atoms Family and Hangar 18 days, versatile emcee Alaska has slowed down his flow. Don’t get it deficient: It’s for our benefit, not his. We’re the ones getting lazier, not him. He’s just making sure we can hear what he’s saying rather than marveling at his breath control. His lyrics are as topical as they are personal, and how many emcees do you know who will rhyme “mercy killer” with “Percy Miller” without pausing for effect?

Beatmeister steel tipped dove has worked with everyone from bulletproof lyricists like billy woods, Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire, and R.A.P. Ferreira to the much artier Tone Tank, Pink Siifu, and Nosaj from New Kingdom. Coming fresh off his Backwoodz Studioz debut, Call Me When You’re Outside, Dove’s production here is as jazzy as it is hazy, the beats swing between ambient loops and orthodox boom-bap. He keeps it all tight while still giving Alaska plenty of room to play.

There’s something both timeless and timely about The Structural Dynamics of Flow. The blending and bending of hip-hop sounds like New York, but maybe an area you haven’t been to yet. Pack your blunderbuss and come along with us.

Thanks for reading and listening,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Mystery Loves Company

A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to the loop in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole’s Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998). At the exact moment that I read the phrase “all dressed in white” on page 57 of Rosewater, Courtney Love sang the same phrase in my ears on the song “Use Once & Destroy.”

A few months later, I was clearing some records off my iPod to add a few new things, including the then newly released Jay-Z record, 4:44 (Roc Nation, 2017). When I finally stopped deleting files and checked the available space, it was 444 MB. Just minutes later, while reading the latest Thrasher Magazine (July 2017), I happened to notice the issue number: 444.

Yesterday, I was browsing the clearance rack at Hot Topic (closely guarded fashion secret) as “MakeDamnSure” by Taking Back Sunday was playing loudly overhead. Just as Adam Lazzara sang “You are… you are so cool,” I slid a True Romance shirt into view that read “You are so cool” on the front.

Cliff’s Notes to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in Miracle Mile (1988).

I watched Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988) the other night. A while back, William Gibson posted a picture of the Cliff’s Notes for Gravity’s Rainbow with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether these particular Notes existed.

A couple of years later, I found out that the Cliff’s Notes to Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work were a prop for De Jarnatt’s 1988 apocalyptic love story, Miracle Mile (Gibson also mentions the movie in his 1993 novel Virtual Light, which I recently reread). The movie is wild, overdone in some ways and underdone in others. It reminded me of two of my other all-time favorites, Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), though it’s not as intentionally campy as the former and perhaps not as fully realized as the latter.

Sometimes things just sync up with no meaning outside of the alignment itself. Sometimes it’s a winding wandering with no logic whatsoever. Other times the path is what’s important. Sometimes it’s the difference between searching and finding.

“…myths form from memories.”

Occasionally I get a book in the mail or from the library, and I can’t remember how I found it. In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, finding more Rebecca Solnit and Guy Debord, discovering Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. I remember the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost completely unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates, new discoveries, and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started keeping a research journal.

While those journals — I’ve been keeping them ever since — help me remember things I’ve read after I’ve read them, they’re less helpful in tracing my path to the things I read in the first place.

Skateboarding/zine-making/movie flowchart, December 8, 2019.

I’ve tried to keep up with the paths with flowcharts like the one above. It’s not a new idea. Early versions include Paul Otlet’s 1934 Traité de Documentation and Vannevar Bush’s memex from the 1940s. The memex — a portmanteau of memory and expansion — was a dream machine for navigating and researching with the vast stores of information of the time using cameras, microfilm, and print — an annotated analog hypertext system. In his 1945 article “As We May Think,” Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”1 The problem with the way that Bush proposes such “associative trails” is that they are of little use to anyone aside from the researcher who’s trod them. I mean, do you find the above flowchart useful without some narrative context? As Donald Norman puts it,

Following the trails of other researchers sounds like a wonderful idea, but I am not convinced it has much value. Would it truly simplify our work, or would all the false trails and restarts simply complicate our lives? How would we know which paths would be valuable for our purposes? [...] If you, the reader, were to follow these trails, you might not be enlightened.2

Maybe the mystery is better. I have so many precious books and movies and ideas that lack provenance or pedigree. I might wonder how I found them, but does it matter? Whether by an alignment of events or a meandering path, neither changes the end result.

You can plan not synchronicity nor serendipity, but magic happens every day.

Thank you for reading.

KYEO,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 176 (1): 101–108.

2

Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011, 134-135.

Taxonomy Season

Hey, I wrote another piece for Lit Reactor called “Building a Mystery.” Kev Harrison included it in his “5 Must Read Horror Articles 27 March 2023” for This is Horror, writing, “Writer Roy Christopher looks at the moving parts of some well-known stories and explores how writers can use these examples to create their own, in this fascinating writing advice piece for LitReactor.”

More on that below.

But first…

Talk Your Talk

I’m on Talk Your Talk with my man Alaska this week. I’m the first guest on this spin off from his usual show, Call Out Culture with Curly Castro and Zilla Rocca, on which I was also the first guest. I did the artwork for their Michael Myers/Nas-themed “Killmatic” episode, too.

In this new one, we talk about my books, new, old, and not-out-yet, as well as a few high-minded social-science theories… and the raps, of course.

You can listen to our brief discussion via the podcasting network of your choice.

Building a Mystery My own sketchy rendering of Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko (2001).

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), has been a source of inspiration for me for years. I recently wrote another piece for Lit Reactor called “Building a Mystery,” in which I speculate about what might constitute a taxonomy for storytelling, something akin to the usual concerns about character, plot, and structure, but different. Donnie Darko is one of the movies I analyze in the piece. Here’s an excerpt:

In a 2005 interview with Daniel Robert Epstein (R.I.P.), Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar, so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.”

Now, when watching a movie or reading a book, I often find myself trying to break down its constituent parts. Also, when writing or creating, I sometimes try to establish a loose taxonomy of the elements involved in the project, a list of the salient aspects of the story. These are orthogonal to the usual concerns about structure (e.g., the three acts, beat map, midpoint, climax, etc.), but they’re as important. Necessary but not sufficient.

Read the whole thing over on Lit Reactor.

No Sell Out.

The first print run of Boogie Down Predictions has sold out! There are copies still available at shops and various places online, but a second printing is imminent.

Mad thanks to everyone who copped one! We are stoked to have moved so many so quickly.

And if you don’t have it, what are you even doing?

Thank you for your continued interest,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Dead Precedents: Four More Years

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release and some information on a related project you may have heard about.

Also, we’ll be returning to Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago in July for an event with Boogie Down Predictions contributors Ytasha L. Womack, Kevin Coval, and others! Look for more details on that in a future newsletter.

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Read on!

We launched Dead Precedents properly at Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago with readings by me, Krista Franklin, and Ytasha L. Womack.

Krista Franklin, me, and Ytasha L. Womack. [Photo by Lily Brewer.]

Ytasha and I went on to do a talk at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park, and I spoke at SXSW again, this time specifically about the ideas in Dead Precedents.

Talkin’ beaks and rhymes at SXSW. [Photo by Matt Stephenson.] As Pecos B. Jett called it, “Biz Marquee!“

A couple of months later, I ventured to my adopted home in the Pacific Northwest. I got to speak at Powell’s City of Books in Portland with Pecos B. Jett. I was even on TV!

Next up was a fun chat at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle with Charles Mudede.

Me and Charles Mudede yuckin’ it up at Elliott Bay. [Photo by Lily Brewer.]

I was also on my favorite hip-hop podcast, Call Out Culture with my mans Alaska, Zilla Rocca, and Curly Castro.

I know Amazon is wack, but Dead Precedents was also a #1 New Release in both their Rap Music and Music History & Criticism categories.

Take that, Beastie Boys Book!

Dan Hancox reviewed Dead Precedents for The Guardian, writing that it is, "written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic."

Dead Precedents in The Guardian. Review by Dan Hancox.

Mark Reynolds at PopMatters wrote, "In Christopher’s construction, hip-hop is is not merely party music for black and brown Gen-Xers and millennials, but the first salvo in a radical, transformative way of understanding and making culture in the technological era — the beginning, in essence, of the world we’re living in now."

My photographer friend Tim Saccenti, who has several photos in the book, sent me a picture of it with the hands from Run the Jewels’ RTJ3, the cover of which he also shot.

Dead Precedents with the hands from Run the Jewels' RTJ3. [Photo by Tim Saccenti.]

Many thanks to all the people who bought the book, said nice things about it, came out to hear me talk about it, gave me rides, put me up at your home, or spread the word.

Companion Compendia BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

If you already have Dead Precedents, and you’re interested in more about hip-hop, cyberpunk, and Afrofuturism, a bunch of my friends and colleagues and I have put together a companion collection of essays called Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism. Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin says,

“How does hip-hop fold, spindle, or mutilate time? In what ways does it treat technology as, merely, a foil? Are its notions of the future tensed…or are they tenseless? For Boogie Down Predictions, Roy Christopher's trenchant anthology, he's assembled a cluster of curious interlocutors. Here, in their hands, the culture has been intently examined, as though studying for microfractures in a fusion reactor. The result may not only be one of the most unique collections on hip-hop yet produced, but, even more, and of maximum value, a novel set of questions.”

Cover Art by Savage Pencil.

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is available directly from Strange Attractor or from the outlet of your choice! If you're still not convinced, here are more details, including the table of contents, back-cover blurbs, and a nice review from The Wire Magazine!

More Companions

I also have two companion volumes of interviews: Follow for Now (Well-Red Bear, 2007) and Follow for Now, Vol. 2 (punctum books, 2021): two decades worth of discussions, 80 interviews in all. Too many to list here. Check them out!

Thank you for reading.

Hope you're well,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Shooting Starlets: Girls Gone Wildin'

As if the transition from adolescence to adulthood weren’t hard enough, fame further complicates coming of age. One is reminded of a young Drew Barrymore, coming out of rehab for the first time at age 13 and the countless stories that didn’t end with her happy present. But there’s nothing quite as cool as youthful nihilism, especially when wielded by young women. Live fast, die young: Bad girls do it well.

Ten years ago, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring represented the grown-up debuts of beloved childhood Hollywood princesses, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson in one, and Emma Watson in the other. The two films are also similar for their adult themes and media commentary. Against this backdrop of conflicting contexts, Korine calls his cast “gangster mystics.” No one would say that a refusal to grow up is endearing, but resistance is fertile.

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The similarities between these two movies remind me of when in 2007 the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson both did adaptations of stories set in West Texas, as both camps tend to write their own scripts. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are companion pieces in the same way that Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring are, but here the young ladies are the ones with the guns.

Cautionary Tail: Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine.

These two movies seem to prefigure the ten years of turmoil since their release. Rolling Stone’s David Fear points out that in the decade since, Spring Breakers has ripened more than it has aged. He writes, “its portrait of an all-sensationalism-all-the-time mindset as an extension of American life only feels more on-brand today. You can see that same tabloid mojo online, in the news, and for a while, radiating out of the White House. What a difference a decade makes.” Korine says, “I wanted to make a film that feels like there’s no air in the room. I never wanted the audience to be comfortable or complacent.” If nothing else, he succeeded in that, especially during the movie’s inciting incident.

Spring Breakers’ heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema of the 21st century so far. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive limited visual information while experiencing total exposure. The girls’ mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”

Alien (James Franco) arrives as the girls’ douche ex machina, an entity somewhere between True Romance’s Drexl Spivey (1993), Kevin Federline, and Riff Raff, the latter of whom supposedly sued over the similarities. He bails them out of jail after a party gone astray and takes them home to his arsenal. What could possibly go wrong?

Douche ex Machina: James Franco as Alien.

Selena Gomez does the least behaving badly, but her role as Faith is still a long way from Alex Russo or Beezus. As she tells her grandmother over the phone,

I think we found ourselves here. We finally got to see some other parts of the world. We saw some beautiful things here. Things we’ll never forget. We got to let loose. God, I can’t believe how many new friends we made. Friends from all over the place. I mean everyone was so sweet here. So warm and friendly. I know we made friends that will last us a lifetime. We met people who are just like us. People the same as us. Everyone was just trying to find themselves. It was way more than just having a good time. We see things different now. More colors, more love, more understanding… I know we have to go back to school, but we’ll always remember this trip. Something so amazing, magical. Something so beautiful. Feels as if the world is perfect. Like it’s never gonna end.

Spring break is heavy, y’all. As Korine himself explains,“I grew up in Nashville, but I was a skater, so I was skateboarding during spring break. Everyone I knew would go to Daytona Beach and the Redneck Riviera and just fuck and get drunk — you know, as a rite of passage. I never went. I guess this is my way of going.” Ultimately the movie illustrates Douglas Adams’ dictum that the problem with a party that never ends is that ideas that only seem good at parties continue to seem like good ideas. “It was about this dance of surfaces,” Korine says. “The meaning is the residue that drips down below the surface.”

Speaking of bad ideas and surfaces, Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, which is based on a real group of fame-obsessed teenagers, is a mad mix of both. Not since Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003; which features Spring Breakers’ Hudgens) has a group of teens been so overtaken by expensive clothes, handbags, and bad behavior. This crew of underage criminals used internet maps and celebrity news to find out where their targets lived and when they would be out of town. They subsequently stole $3 million worth of stuff from the empty homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Orlando Bloom, and Audrina Patridge. Once caught, The Ring seem more concerned with what their famous victims think than with the charges brought against them. “That part of our culture used to be small — that pop, ‘guilty pleasure’ side of things,” Coppola says, “Now it just won’t stop growing.” It’s an attitude that has only grown further and faster in the era of Instagram and TikTok.

It would be remiss of me not to note that two of my favorite composers, Cliff Martinez and Brian Reitzell, respectively, put the music together for these movies. The mood of Spring Breakers is mostly set by Martinez in collaboration with Skrillex. “I love them both,” Korine says, “and wanted to take a certain element of what each does best and have them merge. I wanted the music to have a physical presence.” Atlanta rappers Gucci Mane, who’s also in the movie, Nicki Minaj, and Waka Focka Flame also add texture to the sound. “The movie was always meant to work like a violent, beautiful pop ballad,” Korine adds, “something very polished that disappears into the night.” Seemingly just the right mix of music always accompanies Sophia Coppola’s films, and The Bling Ring features a blend of hip-hop, Krautrock, and electronic pop that reads more eclectic than it actually sounds: Sleigh Bells, Oneohtrix Point Never, CAN, 2 Chainz, M.I.A., Azealia Banks, Klaus Schulze (R.I.P.), Frank Ocean, and others. Discounting the importance of music in creating the pressure that permeates these films would be an oversight.

One more film celebrating a ten year anniversary that deserves mention here is Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. It’s intimately connected to the other two movies: It’s based on James Franco’s short story collection of the same name, and it was adapted and directed by Sophia Coppola’s niece. Palo Alto beautifully captures the gauzy grey areas when the boundaries between adolescents and adults blur beyond recognition. More so even than Spring Breakers, it foreshadows Franco’s embodying the worst parts of his characters off-screen in the years since.

James Franco and Emma Roberts in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto.

The AV Club’s Hattie Lindert notes, “Spring break, by nature, is fleeting—but […] the cultural appetite for brazenly vibes-first content against a high-stakes backdrop of violence, sex, and ecstasy, endures.” Life is what you can get away with, and though these films are cautionary tales of an extreme nature, they prove that caution isn’t cool. Youth might be wasted on the young, but our heroes don’t concern themselves with consequences. There’s a decade of evidence piled up right behind us.

Happy Spring!

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

New Fossils, New Futures

In mid-March 2019, Repeater Books published Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop are the cultural practices of the 21st century. In what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences, I use evidence from cyberpunk and Afrofuturism to make the book’s many claims.

Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop and co-editor of Freedom Moves, says, “Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Dead Precedents is sharp and accelerated.” Samuel R. Delany calls it “a book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”

What follows is the brief essay that serves as the Preface to Dead Precedents.

If you don’t know, now you know.

How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

“Space, that endless series of speculations and origins — of rebirths and electric spankings — is here not so much a metaphor as it is a series of fragmented selves, a place of possibilities and debris and explorations and atmosphere.”
— Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness

“Let us imagine these hip-hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation: create sustain- ing narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them.”
— Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

Several years ago, on one of my online profiles under “books” I listed only Donald Goines and Philip K. Dick. If you don’t know them, Donald Goines wrote about himself and his associates and their struggles as street hustlers, pimps, players, and dopefiends. Philip K. Dick wrote about the brittleness of reality, its wavy, funhouse perceptions through drugs and dreams. Goines wrote sixteen books in five years and Dick wrote forty-four in thirty. Both were heavy users of mind-altering substances (heroin and amphetamines, respectively), and both helped redefine the genres in which they wrote. They interrogated the nature of human identity, one through the inner city and the other through inner space.

The world according to Donald Goines and Philip K. Dick: one through the inner city and the other through inner space.

While I am certainly a fan of both authors, I posted them together on my profile as kind of a gag. I thought their juxtaposition was weird enough to spark questions if you were familiar with their work, and if you weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. I had no idea that I would be writing about the overlapping layers of their legacies so many years later.

To retrofit a description, one could say that Goines’ books are gangster-rap literature. They’re referenced in rap songs by everyone from Tupac and Ice-T to Ludacris and Nas. In many instances, Dick’s work could be called proto-cyberpunk. The Philip K. Dick Award was launched the year after he died, and two of the first three were awarded to the premiere novels of cyberpunk: Software by Rudy Rucker in 1983 and Neuromancer by William Gibson in 1985.

[Ed note: If you’re interested, wrote a bit about the connections between hip-hop and literature for Literary Hub for the book’s release.]

When cyberpunk and hip-hop were both entering their Golden Age, I was in high school. One day I was walking up my friend Thomas Durdin’s driveway. By the volume of the AC/DC sample that forms the backbone of Boogie Down Productions’ “Dope Beat,” I knew his mom wasn’t home. Along with the decibel level, I was also struck by how the uncanny pairing of Australian hard rock and New York street slang sounded. It was gritty. It was brash. It rocked. De La Soul’s 1996 record, Stakes is High, opens with the question, “Where were you when you first heard Criminal Minded?” That moment was a door opening to a new world.

I didn’t realize it then, but that new world was the twenty- first century, and hip-hop was its blueprint.

Boogie Down Productions Criminal Minded, side B, track 1: “Hope Beats.”

I distinctly remember that the label on the record spinning around on Thomas’s turntable incorrectly named the song “Hope Beats.” An interesting mistake given that DJ Scott La Rock was killed just months after the record came out, prompting KRS-One to start the Stop the Violence movement. Where Criminal Minded is often cited as a forerunner of gangster rap, KRS-One was thereafter dedicated to peace. I’d heard hip-hop before, but the unfamiliar familiarity of the “Back in Black” guitar samples in that song make that particular day stick in my head.

Long before hip-hop went digital, mixtapes—those floppy discs of the boombox and car stereo—facilitated the spread of underground music. The first time I heard hip-hop, it was on such a tape. Hiss and pop were as much a part of the experience of those mixes as the scratching and rapping. We didn’t even know what to call it, but we stayed up late to listen. We copied and traded those tapes until they were barely listenable. As soon as I figured out how, I started making my own. We watched hip-hop go from those scratchy mixtapes to compact discs to shiny-suit videos on MTV, from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to P. Diddy, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. Others lost interest along the way. I never did.

A lot of people all over the world heard those early tapes and were impacted as well. Having spread from New York City to parts unknown, hip-hop became a global phenomenon. Every school has aspiring emcees, rapping to beats banged out on lunchroom tables. Every city has kids rhyming on the corner, trying to outdo each other with adept attacks and clever comebacks. The cipher circles the planet. In a lot of other places, hip-hop culture is American culture.

Though their roots go back much further, the subcultures of hip-hop and cyberpunk emerged in the mass mind during the 1980s. Sometimes they’re both self-consciously of the era, but digging through their artifacts and narratives, we will see the seeds of our times sprouting. We will view hip-hop not only as a genre of music and a vibrant subculture but also as a set of cultural practices that transcend both of those. We will explore cyberpunk not only as a subgenre of science fiction but also as the rise of computer culture, the tectonic shifting of all things to digital forms and formats, and the making and hacking thereof. If we take hip-hop as a community of practice, then its cultural practices inform the new century in new ways. “I didn’t see a subculture,” Rammellzee once said, “I saw a culture in development.”

The Equation: RAMMELLZEE. [Photo by Timothy Saccenti.]

The subtitle of this book could just as easily be “How Hip-Hop Defies the Future.” As one of hip-hop culture’s pioneers, Grandmaster Caz, is fond of saying, “Hip-hop didn’t invent anything. Hip-hop reinvented everything.” To establish this foundation, we will start with a few views of hip-hop culture (Endangered Theses), followed by a brief look at the origins of cyberpunk and hip-hop (Margin Prophets). We will then look at four specific areas of hip-hop music: recording, archiving, sampling, and intertextuality (Fruit of the Loot); the appropriating of pop culture and hacking of language (Spoken Windows); and graffiti and other visual aspects of the culture (The Process of Illumination). From there we will go ghost hunting through the willful haunting of hip-hop and cyberculture (Let Bygones Be Icons). All of this in the service of remapping hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world and what that means for the culture of the now and the future (Return to Cinder).

The aim of this book is to illustrate how hip-hop culture defines twenty-first-century culture. With its infinitely recombinant and revisable history, the music represents futures without pasts. The heroes of this book are the architects of those futures: emcees, DJs, poets, artists, writers. If they didn’t invent anything but reinvented everything, then that everything is where we live now. Forget what you know about time and causation. This is a new fossil record with all new futures.

Get Up On It! Your humble narrator with the book at Quimby’s in Chicago. [Photo by Liz Mason.]

Taking in the ground-breaking work of DJs and emcees, alongside writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-cultural history of the twenty-first century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world in which we now live. As the book concludes, “We’re not passing the torch, we’re torching the past.”

Get yours!

I’m really quite proud of this book. If you don’t have it, let me know how we can fix that.

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Ian MacKaye: Epic Problem

Ian MacKaye is a lot of things, but he’s best known as the co-founder of Dischord Records and the bands Minor Threat and Fugazi. One of the ways he came to punk practices was through skateboarding, which he describes as a discipline, a way to reinterpret the world. Punk, as he explains below, is also a way to reinterpret the world. If languages are our lenses, then these are his native tongues.

[Portrait by Roy Christopher]

I found Minor Threat in high school, after they’d already broken up. I got both of their cassettes at a record store in a mall on a trip through in Huntsville, Alabama. From there, I followed Ian through string of bands—Egghunt, Embrace, Pailhead—but when Fugazi came together, it was clear that something else was going on. My friends and I didn’t know that their first self-titled EP was the beginning a phenomenal 15-year run, but we knew it was something special. Where Minor Threat helped define the genre of hardcore, Fugazi was beyond that, a little bit outside of the genres we knew at the time. I remember driving to the skatepark in my 1973 VW Beetle shortly after getting that first tape. My friend Sean Young sat in the passenger seat rewinding “Waiting Room” over and over the whole way there. The opening chords of that song sound as fresh now as they did then.

Fugazi went on an indefinite hiatus the same year that MySpace launched. The timing is significant because MySpace briefly became the online place for music, for bands and fans alike. In 2018 they lost 12 years of their users’ files in a server migration catastrophe. The lost files include everything uploaded between 2003 and 2015, over 50 million songs by 14 million artists, as well as countless photos and videos. As we offload and outsource our archives to these services, we run the risk of losing them without recourse.

If there’s a lesson there, it’s the same one MacKaye lives by: self-reliance. He’s been keeping his own archives all his life, but I’ll let him tell you about that.

Roy Christopher: You and I both came up and were introduced to this culture through skateboarding. How did you initially get into punk?

Ian MacKaye: It was around late ‘78 that I first encountered punk—really encountered it—meaning that I thought about it. I’d obviously seen it years earlier because the media was talking about it, but my friends in high school started talking about it, and I started to really have to give it a think. One of the dilemmas of punk for me at the time was that punk and skateboarding were opposite. So, the punks that I knew would never skateboard because that just seemed silly, and the skateboarders I knew just thought punks were freaks. Of course, the skateboarders were largely guys who were jocks or who just wanted to party, so it made sense that they would hate something new. I had to make this decision about wanting to be a punk or a skateboarder. Now the good thing about skateboarding, given that navigation was so central to the practice, is that it was like learning a language. They say that it's easier to learn a language if you've learned another language, and I think it's because you've gone through the process of reshaping sound already so you understand that it can be done, you can communicate with different sounds. So, I think in the same light, the time I spent skateboarding and looking at the world differently was perfect practice and preparation for punk. Because punk required looking at the world differently.

RC: Oh, yeah.

IM: It was actually in many ways a perfect way to enter it. Now, ironically, as we all know, punk and skateboarding became almost synonymous later on, which is not surprising to me, but at the time it was separate. It didn't occur to me since I wasn't living in Los Angeles where you had the first skaters who really got into punk. They picked up on the sort of the radicalness for the freedom of it or whatever. You have Steve Olson or Dwayne Peters, Tony Alva, Jay Adams, and that crew, once they got into it, then suddenly, like within a couple years, you had skate punks.

RC: Yeah, by the time I came in, which was during the Bones Brigade era, they were already merged.

IM: Right, exactly.

RC: I didn't know this about you, but I found out recently that you don't have any effects on your guitar, and you did that on purpose because you wanted to push those limits.

IM: Not only that, but I'm anti-option. I've been a vegan for 35 years and whenever somebody asks me why, I always say, ‘why not?’ Because there's a million great reasons to think about what you put in your body. The primary one is convenience, which is of course the death of the world, but I think that one of the great silver linings for me, especially in the olden days—not so much now because now it's become more common—but what was so wonderful was that I didn't have to spend a lot of time looking at a menu because there was one thing, and I was going to eat.

I like simple things like just in general. I think options are designed to confuse and delay. Another reason that I think there are so many options in our marketplace especially is to create sort of brand obedience. For instance, if you go to a larger grocery store and you go to their bakery section and you want to buy some bread, there's usually about, 25 different kinds of bread, which is a lot of different kinds of bread when you think about it! Or cereals. There's like 50 cereals! Yeah. That's a lot of cereals, but I think the only way that one can retain their sanity and navigate that many choices every time is to pick the one thing, right?

RC: Right.

IM: They pick the one kind of bread that they like. With the cacophony of options, they just reach in and grab the one, but here's the thing: They're all owned by one or two bakeries anyway.

The illusion is that we have all these choices we can make, but the net effect is that we don't make choices because there are so many that they become incomprehensible. You can't deal with it, so you just end up buying the one thing or getting the one kind of gas or the one whatever. I’m not suggesting that there were some evil geniuses thought this up [laughs]. I'm not like that. I'm not like a paranoid dude or a conspiracy guy, but—and this is a little bit like the skateboarding thing—I just learned how to look at things differently.

So, for me, options sort of get away from the beauty of a simple life. So, when you were talking about my guitar, yes, it's true. I don't like pedals. I never used them. I just thought it was interesting to just have one setup and then to use my body and the available volume knobs, the tone knobs, those things on my guitar and on the amp. What can I do to manipulate those things to create a variety of sounds, without having a computer just dial them up for me. I think one of the reasons that society is in a bit of a malaise is because of computers. The options provided by computers are completely overwhelming.

My original Minor Threat and Fugazi cassettes.

For those of us who were pre-internet and post-internet, we can really see the distinction. I'm not a Luddite and I'm not nostalgic. I don't care about any of that. But the reality is that the relationship I had with music at a time where I would only be able to afford one or two records, and I would just have to go and listen to that record until I get to save up for the next record. I would listen to one record, you know, 40 times in a row. That experience is much more difficult when you have 4 million musical choices at your fingertips.

RC: How do you even know what you like?

IM: Right?! As a resource, it's amazing. There's a lot of times I'll read some book about music, and they'll mention some very obscure recording, and then I look and boom, I find it. I can't believe it's all there. So, I love the resource aspect of it, but I do think that that the relationship that I developed with music, maybe it's harder. I don't know. Because looking at my kid and other kids, they love music, but they're kind of overwhelmed with options and choices.

So, I'm a little tongue-in-cheek when I say convenience is the death of the world, but I think options and convenience are cousins for sure.

RC: You could definitely make the argument.

IM: I like fewer options.

RC: I struggle with my students to get them to take notes or pay attention to things that they don't need right at the moment because they live in such an on-demand kind of culture. You have created an archive—a Dischord archive, a Fugazi archive—and that's one of the things that I've been trying to argue with them is that they need to be holding onto their own stuff and not relying on companies online. So, what was the impetus to build this massive archive of your stuff.

IM: Well, I mean, the Fugazi Live Archive is just one part of a much larger archive of Dischord- and Fugazi-related materials. I think the impetus starts with a very simple reality, which is I am 60 years old, and in my entire life I've only lived in three houses. I own two of them, and my dad still lives in the first one. As a result, I didn't have to make that kind of painful choice about what I'm bringing and what I'm leaving or throwing away. So, there's that. That's just a reality. Then my mother was a journalist in the true sense of the word in that she kept journals for 60 of her 70 years. Not only did she keep journals, but she also typed them up and edited them. She kept filing cabinets of journals, letters, correspondence, genealogical work. She was an absolutely brilliant, brilliant person. She had a Panasonic cassette deck, and she would just leave it recording in a room. I used to think it was nice that mom liked to hear our voices when we were away, that she would record us. It wasn't until she died that I realized, it wasn't for her. It was for us, so we can hear her voice.

There was an emphasis on the idea of hanging on to things because they would take a different form as time passed. Maybe they would become more important, and you can always throw something away later. It's not like you have to make that decision can today. Later you can put it in the trash, but if you don't need to throw it away now, then maybe don't.

Then the next level is that I met Jeff Nelson in high school. He was in the Slinkees, and the Teen Idles. He's my partner at Dischord Records. Jeff is a saver, a collector. I got hit by a car once and years later, I found that he went out and he scooped up all the pieces of the shattered headlight that broke. He still had that stuff. It's just the way he is. He just has that kind of mentality, which I think resonated with my own tendency. So, both of us were just saving things because we thought they were important. I mean, you have to remember that this why Dischord Records was started: Not because we wanted to have a record label, but because we wanted to document something that was important to us. We didn't think the world need to have a Teen Idles record. We wanted the Teen Idles record. It was important to us. So, things that were important to us, we hung onto, and we continue hang onto.

As a result of all those things I've just described you, these different circumstances, I essentially ended up with this massive collection of things. About 10 or 12 years ago, I had a number of friends die, and one of the friends who died, he had named a mutual friend to be the executor of his will. At some point, I asked our mutual friend how it went, and he said it was the greatest of gifts. Our late friend had basically identified, enumerated, and directed everything he had. I thought about it, and you know, my brain is big, and I know everything in Dischord House, but my brain stops when I die. So, I realized that I have all this stuff, but if I died and Amy and the others were going to have to contend with it, figure out what to do with it all. It was all mixed up because my life, my personal life and my musical life and the label life were all tied together. I know everything, but that's what really got me thinking about time to start cleaning up and get things organized. I still have miles to go, but at least now things have been split.

I have all my personal correspondence at home, my other house: 40 years of correspondence. I saved all the letters that people sent me—90% of them or something. So, I had boxes of these letters in my eaves, and I sat for four years with an archivist named Nichole Procopenko, and we went through every letter. We put into a collection. We have a large collection that breaks down into different subsets, and now it's researchable.

RC: Oh, that's amazing.

IM: So, someone calls and says, ‘I'm looking for this early-eighties punk from Des Moines,’ and I'm like, ‘I can help you!’ [laughs] I freak people out because I can lay my hands on things almost instantly that are in the database. It's all organized. Same with the tapes and fanzines and photos. That's the archive. People keep saying, ‘aren't you going to scan everything?’ No, I'm not. I have scanned the flyers because they're the most liquid of things.

The other thing about it, which is interesting, is a part of what has affected your students is that… I can't say this for sure, but I strongly suspect that the punk scene is probably the last youth movement that used paper. Like I know hip-hop came a little bit after punk, I just don't think people are using as much paper. They weren't corresponding as much. I think that there's something really interesting about that. I think it's important too, because the world that I'm a part of and was a part of back then was one that was beneath the radar of the industry, and since the industry controls history, that's their job. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they celebrate industry figures. The Grammys every year hand out awards for best Song of the Year, but every one of those songs, if not on an actual major label, it's distributed by a major label. What are the chances that of all the songs that are being written in the, in the world on any given minute of any given day, that every single best song of the year happened to go through a major? Statistically impossible. But that's the way it works. They own the history. So as a result, knowing that, I feel like it's important to hang on to evidence of prior civilization, the pottery shards that let people know that they weren't the first.

RC: Those are awesome stories, Ian. I won't take up any more of your time. I appreciate it. I'm glad we finally got to do this.

IM: All right, my friend. Good talking to you. If you ever find yourself in Washington, drop me a line, and I'll show you this madness. You'll probably get a kick out of it.

The Medium Picture

This interview was initially conducted to inform my forthcoming book, The Medium Picture, and it did! But it turned out so good that Ian and I decided to share the whole thing with you.

About the book, Howard Rheingold says, “If you want to understand the social, psychological, cultural effects of the media explosions of the past 50 years, The Medium Picture — thoughtful, comprehensive, and deep — is for you. Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, the Gen-X author is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy. The Medium Picture is the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.”

Many thanks to Ian for taking the time, to Howard for the kind words, and to you for reading.

Thank you,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

The Bitten Word

For anyone who’s tried it, writing is challenging in many different ways and at many different stages. The writing process itself is long and full of its own inherent challenges, but getting editors or agents to read and publish your work presents another course of obstacles. Once you’ve written something and gotten it published, the last challenge is getting people to read it.

My friend Gareth Branwyn always says, “Writers write.” Writing and publishing are privileges, and I take both the work and the opportunity seriously. So, I appreciate your time and attention when I invade your inbox every week or so.

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What follows is a roundup of a few things I’ve recently gotten published in one form or another, with thanks to the editors and publishers who found these words worthy.

The Bitten Word

I have a piece (and an illustration) up today called “The Bitten Word” on Lit Reactor. As I did in a newsletter a while back, I propose a writing exercise based on interpolating the work of others. Here’s an excerpt:

Quoting and paraphrasing are common in writing disciplines such as journalism and academia, but plagiarism is anathema, punishable by excommunication. While endemic to the creative practices of hip-hop, the practice of interpolation also hotly debated. The orthodox rule there was no biting, but if you can take what someone else wrote and make it better, that’s worthy of respect. “I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard,” Rakim once rapped, “Flip it, now it’s a daily word.” Because of the perils of plagiarism, in writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted, but it can be quite fruitful.

Read the full column at Lit Reactor.

Phantom Kangaroo Newsletter

My “Calm in the Chaos” security-envelope liner collage that first appeared in issue #26 of Phantom Kangaroo was in the first edition of the new PK weekly newsletter, both of which are edited by the magical and multi-talented Claudia Dawson. You should subscribe to this and her Many-Worlds Vision newsletter immediately.

Irony is for Suckers

I know you read it already, but my essay on irony from a few weeks ago is up on Sublation Magazine. Here’s the beginning:

“Irony used to feel like a defense against getting played,” writes the novelist Hari Kunzru, “a way for a writer to ward off received ideas and lazy thinking.” Broadly speaking, irony is the rhetorical strategy of saying one thing yet meaning another, usually the opposite. It also might be the most abused trope of our time. It’s beyond substance over style. It’s the absurd over the authentic. “It also made us feel nihilistic and defeated,” Kunzru continues. “More recently we’ve seen how it can be a screen for reactionary politics.” In the preface to his 1999 book, For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy frames the overbearing irony of our era as a defense mechanism: "It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us up to these." It’s an escape route, an exit strategy, a way off the hook in any situation, it’s become the dominant mode of pop culture, and we’re all tired of it.

Thanks to Alfie Bown for giving this one a second home. If you missed it somehow, you can read the full piece at Sublation.

“Messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.”

As you know, I have a couple of new books out. I’m still trying to spread the word, so if you know anyone who might be interested in either of these, let ‘em know.

BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism
(Strange Attractor Press)

Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop and co-editor of Freedom Moves, says,

Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.

Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.

Featuring contributions from Omar Akbar, Juice Aleem, Tiffany E. Barber, Kevin Coval, Samantha Dols, Kodwo Eshun, Chuck Galli, Nettrice Gaskins, Jonathan Hay, Jeff Heinzl, Kembrew McLeod, Rasheedah Phillips, Steven Shaviro, Aram Sinnreich, André Sirois, Erik Steinskog, Dave Tompkins, Tia C.M. Tyree, Joël Vacheron, tobias c. van Veen, K. Ceres Wright, and Ytasha Womack.

ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
(punctum books)

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.

The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.

Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet writes, “Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.”

As always, thank you for reading and sharing.

More soon,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Thanks for reading Roy Christopher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.