"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."
Daniel Bell
Isolation and imagined community. Obvious, but why not.

1913 Stravinsky


1951 Pollock

1958 Hitchcock
The beginning of Vertigo renders the infinite of outer space as the infinite of inner space, but the imagery is the same. North by Northwest, 1959, begins with Max Weber via Mies van der Rohe.

More on the title designer Saul Bass, the director of Phase IV, a not unsympathetic portrait of a victorious hive mind

Joseph Kerman on Milton Babbitt 

His writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets. This scarcely contained emotion issued obviously (and openly enough) from the same sense of modernist alienation as was expressed very differently by Schoenberg or, to take an even more extravagant case, Adorno.

"Expressionism in the atomic age is the product of technocracy and the bomb, the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it's the melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar to New York, the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann." 

1961 Ornette Coleman

1965 Coltrane (or better, Ascension from 1966)


1991 My Bloody Valentine

Repeats, again, and again, and again…

Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum -the violence and warmth- of neurological overload.

All of this is obvious. I picked the list from what I had and out of a hat. I could have begun a lot earlier than I did, and I skipped the hippies. I skipped acid and went straight to MDMA. For contemporary megalomania see the back-to-nature fantasies of Avatar; Cameron's hated as a dictator by almost everyone who worked on it. For Detroit and Techno, go here.

2013 A short doc about a DJ, Nina Kraviz


I'm not going to moralize about a decline of culture; forms decay, culture changes. But the fish rots from the motherfucking head, and new life grows in the rot.