Bromst is not even going to have music; it will only exist in live performance. Dissatisfied with how late he came to the audiovisual phenomenon with Ultimate Reality, Deacon has decided to transcend these media in his next album by pioneering several new techniques, the already-rumored semantic chords and three-dimensional film reconstruction among them. The visual component of the album will be reconstructions of celebrated films in three dimensions using only information within the original film, created without computer assistance; these reconstructions will be projected on top of live theater. Deacon will eschew music entirely, instead layering multiple spoken-word compositions (primarily in English and secondarily in German, but including all langauges ever spoken): dialogue from the original works, unspoken dialogue hidden within the original soundtracks (Deacon terms these lines “inaudible complements”), several original plays, and free-form language poetry. In a forthcoming academic work, Deacon will outline the theories of semantic chord progression and the technique of extracting “invisible and inaudible complements” from traditional media that make Bromst possible.

(Don’t pin this absurdity on me. Just look at Deacon’s slogan: “everything at once all the time forever.”)

The stubborn refusal to recognize, even now and after all, that the synthesizer is an instrument and not an end; the cleverness ignorant of the fealty its mash-up (let’s not dignify it with some successor term) of a cheesy piano riff from 2008 with a cheesy piano riff from 1970 pays to the hegemony of the soft weak heart.

If I am called upon to write two more of these, my veins might run with vitriol.

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I overheard at work today that enrollment in Art History is down.

Found in a recent issue of Country Homes magazine.

This sort of thing makes alot of sense in a campus weekly, where someone needs to write something about the debate that just happened; alot less sense on the internet, where everyone has already written everything. Nevertheless, in the continued decline of this blog into content cannibalized from my campus writing, here’s my (comedic! Really, click through!) debate scorecard.

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Russia’s: Amateurish, with a very laudable increase in sophistication in the last several years. Rather obsessed with shock value—covers included two male soldiers making out, what appeared to be the animated corpse of Princess Diana, and Jesus Christ with bleeding knees being crucified on the wings of an American fighter jet—as well as socialites. Seems to have been imbued with money, its corruption and invigoration.

Italy’s: Conservative, unoriginal, and almost insulting in its disregard for the reader—every issue of one journal came with a supplement, larger than the journal itself, that was nothing but ads and a short biography of a famous dead artist. Did not appear to have experienced modern art. Layout and fonts stuck in 1990s.

materialist minstrelsy,

at least when the range of one’s experience of his self-acted catalog is Deconstructing Harry.

If I were in the vanguard of 70s alternative pop music, I would have made a cosmic opera about the Schwarzkommando, with long heavy sequences named after highways and engineered to sound like a fleet of covert motorcycles;

if I were in the vanguard of 00s alternative pop music, I would make a freak folk concept album, the premise of which would be Jose Padilla, free in several decades time, living in a very small apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant and listening to the future’s Jack FM.

In the process of researching a post about authenticity in pop music, I came across these comment gems, on Chris Brown’s “Forever”:

Witness how, even in the age in which the experience of art has been compressed into copypasta and opinion rendered an up-down/five-star voted average, self-expression pushes inscrutably through.