"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 begins with Max Weber via Mies van der Rohe. [More on Saul Bass, the director of Phase IV, a not unsympathetic portrait of a victorious hive mind]


1965 Coltrane


1991 My Bloody Valentine


Repeat, 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. 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.