GORDON BURN (1948 - 2009)

A belated tribute to Gordon Burn who died of cancer in July 2009 aged 61. Indisputably, Burn was an extraordinary presence in British literature, whether functioning as novelist, biographer or critic. At his best, he linked the weird coincidences that haunt British life and stitched them together to document something frequently melancholic, often tragic, about England in the late 20th Century. From his terrifying portraits of Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West, through the evocations of British celebrity culture via Alma Coogan, Duncan Edwards and Alex Higgins, to his last weird hybrid of fiction and news media, 'Born Yesterday' - Burn consistently held a mirror up to the nation, angling it carefully so we saw our culture reflected back at us in a way that was always fascinating, however painful to witness. If his career lack precise definition on account of the wide scatter gun of his interests, his prose never did - his was a writing style both precise and atmospheric, absorbing the reader in a way too few modern British writer's can emulate.

Indeed, if a single exhibit was required to prove the case of Burn's genius, then his biography of The Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, 'Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son' would be all that was required, a book that ranks alongside both Truman Capote's 'In True Blood' and James Ellroy's 'My Dark Places' as a bona fide classic of the true crime genre. Posterity then is assured even if, sadly, there will be no more of Burn's acerbic and compelling prose to light up the here and now and expose who we actually are. And in the absence of that British culture is already a much poorer place.

THE SHARD, LONDON BRIDGE, UK

The changing face of SE1 continues with this scene stealing venture. The Shard will be 72 storey's high and part of the 2bn redevelopment of the London Bridge Quarter. It's extraordinary to think that as recently as 1997, London Bridge wasn't even part of the London Underground, yet just over a decade later it is gradually fulfilling it potential for inner-city living - and dreaming. I have written of SE1 before, the curious pockets of silence the area possesses, its excessive brown-fill land and dead spaces. They lend it a unique atmosphere distinguished from the rest of London, far more evocative of Berlin. And, like the German capital, there are curious gusts of wind that sweep through the brickwork almost in isolation (notably on St Thomas Street) that add to this otherworldiness.

As such perhaps The Shard in its warped, Sci-Fi ambition is a fitting addition to the terrain. No doubt there will be opposition voices to both the aesthetic, and what it signifies politically and socially. But still, I could not help feel anything other than a sudden jolt of adrenalin when I first learned of the plans - and frankly, who doesn't want to live amongst architecture that triggers such an intense physical response?

More details: The Shard London Bridge

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

“Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like --Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything -- but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.” - Clive James.

Consider New York. From whatever angle you film it, it's recognisably New York. Its brown colours, its Heaven-bothering buildings, the buzz of its streets - they always give New York's identity away. Not so with Los Angeles, contends Thom Andersen in his dreamy film essay 'Los Angeles Plays Itself', because unlike New York, Los Angeles is everywhere and nowhere already. It remains forever elusive on screen because it is a City that stands apart from reality, and as such its geographic truth is always reduced to a muddled and blurred fiction. Scurrilously rebranded by Hollywood to the acronym L.A, Los Angeles is a City where the smog enables everything to dissolve into the distance and remain elusive, just beyond the reach of the image. As Andersen succinctly puts it, Los Angeles is big, but movies are small.

Andersen's documentary is long, but it never outstays its welcome. If it fails at all, it's that his disparaging, often witty dissection of how Hollywood portrays his home City inadvertently fires a love for the liberties the movie makers take. As Clive James once noted, 'Los Angeles dares us to laugh at it, but in the end we can't'. Indeed, Hollywood has ritually abused its geographic surroundings, destroying it repeatedly in disaster films, and, more subtly, reframing popular associations with Modernist architecture as sinister. The Utopian aspirations of Le Corbusier's Unite d'habituation, the 'outside on the inside' visions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry have been re-appropriated by the movies to portray dens of vice. For example, Wright's extraordinary 'Ennis House' - a rare occasion when concrete is indisputably beautiful - always gets cast as the home of a criminal mastermind, usually indicative of the 'Yellow Peril'. Alternativey, in Lethal Weapon II, Mel Gibson tears down John Lautner's luxurious 'Garcia House' - a house built on stilts - using his blue collar pick up, while in L.A Confidential the pimp Pierce Pritchett lives among the distrusted symmetry of Richard Neutra's 'Lovell House'. Confirmation then for the audience that such luxury is always entangled with personal corruption and far removed from the good, honest hard-working citizen.

Ennis House - Frank Lloyd Wright

Another point that Andersen makes that is well worth highlighting is that more often than not the best films about L.A subliminally explore modes of transportation. Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - in all the hero's plight worsens as soon as he loses his car and is reduced to that most retched of experiences - using public transport. Andersen derides Joan Didion for claiming that 'nobody walks' in L.A, correcting her to suggest, 'nobody rich and white walks in L.A'. Actually, he asserts, L.A has one of the most used bus services in the world, it's just Hollywood doesn't realise it. Perhaps it is because it is too busy obsessing over the L.A.P.D rather than the people it is there to protect? Indeed, more than any other City L.A is obsessed with depictions of its police force, but who can blame it? It is after all the only law enforcement agency in the world to put its slogan "To Protect and Serve" in inverted commas.

DAVID LYNCH - MAPPING THE LOST HIGHWAY

There is a perpetual danger when academia ventures into the world of David Lynch that only hot air will be achieved because, as the excellent Roger Luckhurst made clear in his opening lecture at the Tate Modern's 'Mapping The Lost Highway', Lynch's work is "curiously resistant to intellectual theorising". It is what it is. Yes, it may seem to permit any number of theoretical interpretations (Freudianism, Postmodernism, Existentialism - take your pick!) but ultimately none really get you any closer to the actual work simply because, as an artist David Lynch doesn't function within such parameters. He doesn't do metaphors. He doesn't make Postmodern references to other art. He doesn't even know what his own work 'means' - as anyone can tesitify who has witnessed the documentary 'Lynch' about the making of INLAND EMPIRE. None of which deterred a group of academics gathering in the Tate Modern to 'map the Lost Highway' and try and enhance our understanding of Lynch's work. The results were decidedly mixed.

The finest contribution of the day came early from Roger Luckhurst who brilliantly contextualised Lynch's work as part of an American tradition he defined as 'the Weird', the heritage of which bares similarities to 'American Gothic' and includes writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P Lovecraft along with the post-war work of both Robert Bloch and Richard Matheison. Certainly, all these writers share a fascination with eldritch material, and in the words of Lovecraft a predilection for "a profound sense of dread" and the "assaults of chaos". Moreover, Luckhurst's "Weird" is a blur of so-called High and Low Culture, into which he suggests Lynch's films effortlessly fall as virtual collusion between Fellini's artistry and George Romero's schlock. Luckhurst's contextualising of Lynch's work was ultimately convincing largely because it depended upon a historical reality against which to off-set his claims. Yes, Lynch does seem to fit into such a lineage, and the similarities are there for all to see, just as the few influences Lynch has admitted to (Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, William Eggleston, Fellini's '8 1/2', Hitchcok's 'Vertigo' and Wilder's 'Sunset Boulevard') obviously echo in his work. Crucially, Luckhurst made no attempt to explain what David Lynch meant, only going so far to identify that Lynch's best work was unified by a 'violent event cracking opening the temporal order', and 'the throwing of reality into chaos'.

Unfortunately, from this promising beginning the day began to take a series of wrong turns down the 'Lost Highway' as a procession of muddled, over-intellectualised, often highly selective interpretations of Lynch's work took centre stage. Essentially, the difficulties encountered by the subsequent talkers revolved around the question to which an artist is capable of understanding their own work, and the degree to which the audience has final say on what the artist actually meant. Tom McCarthy, who delivered a thorough and intriguing examination of the images of deformity that haunt Lynch's work, contended that artists are never impartial and they didn't invent the symbolic order into which their work is released, firmly supporting the notion it isn't down to David Lynch to provide an explanation for his work, but for the audience. Therefore, that Lynch may not know what his work 'means' either was irrelevant. Simon Critchely took this position one step further and derided Lynch's explanations for his own work as 'bollocks', expressing particular vitriol towards Lynch's book 'Catching The Big Fish'. This made for some entertaining exchanges, but they also distanced the work under discussion, largely because they ignored the lack of conceit with which Lynch operates. As such, rather than simplifying the diagnosis, we were soon being served up wild interpretations of INLAND EMPIRE by Parveen Adams ("the film sticks to the film and does not represent something else") along with a frankly self-indulgent psychoanalytical citation of INLAND EMPIRE by Critchely and his wife Jamie Webster, both talks way more confusing and cryptic than the film they were attempting to decode.

The balance was finally redressed with the last speaker of the day, Lynch's biographer Chris Rodley, who restored a lightness of touch to proceedings that proved genuinely enlightening. Significantly, Rodley has spent an enormous amount of time with Lynch and witnessed him at work. Quickly he rattled off a series of revelations that got us closer to the man and the way he works than any amount of academic pontificating. What emerged was a portrait of an artist who was decidedly, unself-consciously, anti-intellectual, but one who intuitively understands things from a very unique position. Rodley's Lynch possessed an almost agoraphobic relationship with inanimate objects, capable of finding malice in everything. Indeed, Lynch once told him that coffee went cold simply because you've ignored it, not for any scientific reason. As such Lynch is given to panicking and overhauling his furniture just as much as he is contented to sit and stare at a blank wall. Lynch doesn't like leaving rooms if he can avoid it, savouring the insulation the four walls provide, just as his shirts provide extra security with that top button done up. Most revealing, Rodley reminded everyone that Lynch approaches his work on a fundamentally textural level. First and foremost he's a painter, but he also loves making furniture and working with organic matter. The physical reality of existence is what focuses him, not abstract concepts or metaphors or satire. Ultimately then, Lynch's work quickly emerged as a catalogue of his own over-worked, hyper-sensitive nervous system and its specific relationship with existence, one devoid of intellectual reasoning. Lynch has previously hinted at this himself, noting his sensibility can be traced to the sorry experience he endured living among the "violence and hate and filth of Philadelphia" in his formative years as an artist.

After blundering into the confusion of Psychoanalysts trying to 'crack the code' earlier in the day, returning the focus to the Literal was a shrewd move, because despite their often cryptic narratives Lynch's films strike me as extremely literal. This is roughly how David Foster Wallace interpreted Lynch's work in 1996, in what remains to my mind the finest piece of writing about Lynch - "David Lynch Keeps His Head"* - the full text of which is well worth seeking out. Wallace contended that Lynch was unknowingly an Expressionist in the European tradition, a 'G.W Pabst with an Elvis ducktail' writing: "Most of Lynch's films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies (certainly avante garde movies) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch's movies are 'to be experienced rather than explained'." Wallace concluded "the Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they're deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they're deployed in an old fashioned, pre-postmodern way i.e nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernisms abstraction or irony....nobody in Lynch's movies analyzes or metcriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything, including Lynch himself."

Indeed, with the Symposium returning itself to this rather candid and simple interpretaion of Lynch's work, the day weirdly completed itself rather as it had begun, with Luckhurst's initial observation that Lynch's oeuvre remains "curiously resistant to intellectual theorising" reclaiming centre stage. The moebius strip was complete then, and we found ourselves back on the Lost Highway, still map less, but content to simply drive and see where we end up - which is pretty much what Lynch told us to do in 'Catching The Big Fish' - "Life is filled with abstractions," he observed. "And the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. (45) "

*David Foster Wallace makes another brilliant observation about Lynch's films that is worth consideration. He writes: "This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)"

LOS ANGELES - SUNSHINE OR NOIR?

David Hockney - A Bigger Splash (1967)

"The visible aggregate of the whole of Los Angeles churns so confusingly that it induces little more than illusionary stereotypes or self-serving charicatures - if in reality it is ever seen at all. What is this place? Even knowing where to focus, to find a starting point, is not easy, for perhaps more than any other place, Los Angeles is everywhere. It is global in the fullest sense of the word. Nowhere is this more evident than in its cultural projection and ideological reach, its almost ubiquitous screening of itself as a rectangular dream machine for the world. Los Angeles broadcasts its self-imagery so widely that probably more people have seen this place than any other on the planet." - Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion Of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989) P222-3.

As the jacket cover to Mike Davis's definitive biography of Los Angeles 'City Of Quartz' (1990) states no metropolis has ever been more loved or more hated than the City Of Angels. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To its detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". Indeed, LA's personality has long been so fractured that an elusive 'reality' has been contested for much of the 20th Century. The absence of a physical centre or of a defining elite who can shape its character has enabled its persona to remain up for a grabs in a way that would be unthinkable in London, New York or Paris. Yet like all Cities, allegations of both utopia and dystopia remain forever located in each individuals' response. Personally, I love LA. It has a kinetic energy I find intoxicating, a winning mentality and pronunced pleasure principle. Yet paradoxically I can also recall my first experience of LA and it was extremely negative. As the taxi crawled in from LAX airport along the jaded, crumbling streets of West Hollywood, the sprawl around me oozed disconnection and menace. I didn't think I could take it. LA's Raban-esque duplicity then has co-existed within me, even if now I reside very much on the side of the so-called 'boosters'. And with this in mind let us consider the various vantage points from which the City can be viewed by beginning with the City's numerous 'debunkers'.

Collateral - Michael Mann (2004)

THE DEBUNKERS

"Tell you the truth, whenever I'm here I can't wait to leave. It's too sprawled out, disconnected. ....This has got to be the fifth biggest economy in the world and nobody knows each other. I read about this guy who gets on the MTA here, dies. Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A, people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices." - Vincent (Tom Cruise) Collateral (2004)

Words like 'shallow', 'soulless' and 'disconnected' always come up when LA is being negatively scrutinized. Partly this is because of LA's perceived absence of public space; it's contended that the non-existence of a Left Bank-style location means people have nowhere to talk and meet, and thus ideas don't get debated or evolved. Indeed, the fragmented physical nature of LA life is explicitly expressed in the over-reliance on the motorcar. This is not a 'public' City, it is a series of private places in which individuals dwell. Such fragmentation has fired many great thinkers and writers into recoil - The Frankfurt School when exiled here took it to task as illustrative of the dangers of the consumerist society, resulting most significantly in Adorno's reactionary 'culture industry' diagnosis. Aldous Huxley and Horace McCoy, Nathaniel West and Jame M. Cain, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon and Brett Easton Ellis - all have described a dark nausea within the City, a 'moral apocalypse' as Mike Davis extrapolates, and depicted it in their respective key works. It is the same dark heart that pumps a 'nihilistic exhilaration' through film noir and haunts modern existentialist cinematic classics from Citizen Caine (1944) to Chinatown (1974), Bladerunner (1982) to Heat (1995). In short, the debunkers fear LA is a physical expression of where the capitalist model for modern life always leads, a never-ending circuit of dissatisfaction and superficiality. As John Rechy wrote in 'City Of Night' (1963), in LA even 'the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black sea.'

Annie Leibowitz - 'Killers Kill Dead Men Die' (2007)

THE BOOSTERS

But let's consider that 'nihilistic exhilaration' now as we turn towards LA's boosters because there is undoubtedly drama in this City. Indeed, the procession of intellectual big-hitters who have, often reluctantly, inhabited Los Angeles points to a consistent, potent cultural presence in this supposedly vacuous terrain. Because actually, LA's intellectual legacy is breathtaking in its scope. I have already noted the presence of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, but over the course of the 20th Century one can add to that list thinkers that include Einstein, Oppenheimer and their respective scientific luminaries at the Cal Tech Institute. Writers on the run such as Thomas Mann, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood and Raymond Chandler, as well those who have dared call LA home - Charles Bukowski, John Fante, James Ellroy and Brett Easton Ellis. Innovative muscians across all genres, from John Cage to Ornette Coleman, Buffalo Springfield to Dre Dre. LA has never been short of radical popular culture.

Alex Prager - Undo (2007)

And all this is before we consider Hollywood. Indeed Hollywood has long been more than a place or a business; it's a symbol of the very best (and the very worst) modern life aspires to be. Yet in 2009, despite many major film productions relocating to territories such as Vancouver, its cultural impact remains extraordinary. Hollywood has challenged reality and / or helped us escape it for almost ninety years; as such few modern Cities can claim such influence over the here and now, as James Frey illuminates in his caustic overview of LA's multiple personalities, 'Bright Shiny Morning'.

"To call LA , then or now, a cultural wasteland is, in my opinion, an incredibly ignorant remark. Los Angeles is the cultural capital of the world. No other City even comes close to it. And when I say culture, I am talking about contemporary culture, not what mattered fifty or hundred and fifty years ago. Contemporary culture is popular music, television, film, art, books. The other disciplines, dance, classical music, poetry, theatre, they don't hold any real weight anymore, their audiences are small, and they're more like cultural oddities than the cultural institutions....I didn't want to be part of New York, part of some pre-existing art world that didn't know it was being outdated. I wanted to go to the New World, and I felt this was it." James Frey 'Bright Shiny Morning', P480.

Philip Lorca-diCorcia - Eddie Anderson, 21, Houston Texas, $20 (1991)

THE CITY AS SIMULACRUM

L.A. - parallel worlds then, co-existing in the same place at the same time. But then this is what makes L.A. such a fascinating place. There really is no precedent to the type of existence found in L.A. Indeed, it's uniqueness is what makes it so equally loved and reviled. Jean Baudrillard defined L.A.'s paradoxical nature as an example of the 'simulacrum' stating, "Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system."

Chris Burden '747' - (1974)

Perhaps then it is only by accepting this transient, non-definition of L.A that one can embrace its shape shifting, often weird reality. Indeed, it is the constant seeking out of a future that gives the City its energy making it, as Thomas Pynchon observed 'an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a possible and final reality.' Indeed, Eric Maria Remarque surmised the City in similarly fluid terms - 'Real and false were fused so perfectly that they became a new substance....it meant nothing that Hollywood was filled with great musicians, poets and philosophers. It was also filled with spiritualists, religious nuts and swindlers.' There can be no certainity about LA then; but then, does there really need to be?

Watch one of the great L.A documentaries 'Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles' Here.

SLOWLY DOES IT....

“Every generation needs a new revolution.” - Thomas Jefferson (1762-1826)

"Everyone dressed up but nothing changed." - John Lennon on the 1960's.

The prism of Popular Culture is far too narrow through which to discern significant evolutions in mankind's self-perception; if we're honest it's only ever sufficient to discern changes in Popular Culture itself. Yet this factor has been completely sidelined by the contributors to the current Blogosphere debate about whether in 2009, cultural inspiration has run dry. Indeed, the minute fragment of time against which this debate is being conducted ultimately reduces the discussion to generational rivalries and little more. As such all the contributors - K-Punk, June Rogers, John Harris, Simon Reynolds and Drowned In Sound - share a terrifyingly narrow and short framework of human history and human culture, one that undermines all their positions, irrespective of which polar opposite they have adopted. One must remember that 50 years ago, there was no Popular Culture in the sense we experience it today. Surely it's impractical then to extrapolate sweeping conclusions about mankind's 'cultural resources' from barely a 15 year period, as the representatives of the so-called 'Hardcore Continuum' are given to do?

As Ian Macdonald surmises in his brilliant essay 'Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade', the drift of human culture is a long process, one that remains spiritually characterised in 2009 by the inception of the scientific outlook that began in the late 16th Century. As MacDonald writes:

"The 'death of God', with its non-comitant loss of both reference point and our ancient faith in personal immortality, began percolating down into society from its origins among rationalist scholars around 400 years ago. As its influence spread, altering every sort of assumption and subtly retuning human relations, science's analytical attitude and technological products came to be perceived as a threat to the realm of the imagination provoking regular cultural revolts: the late 18th Century Sturm und Drang and Gothic movements, the 19th Century Romantics and Impressionists, the Symbolists and Surrealists of the 20th Century. At the same time, the loss of transcendent moral index promoted artists to probe the frontiers of personal ethics, rolling back the limits of acceptable behaviour and stressing the authenticity of individual experience over dogma handed down from the past or the ruling class. Received wisdom, traditional values and structures, everything that had once given life form and stability - all were challenged. The Beats were merely another psychic ripple from the rock of materialism dropped into the placid theocratic pond of the Western mind by the early scientists of the late 16th Century." (Ian MacDonald - 'Revolution In The Head').

It is vital to keep the vastness of this timeline in mind when picking over the hyper-reality of Popular Culture at the dawn of the 21st century, especially if one is looking to extrapolate evidence regarding human existence. Reading the discussions that have got the Blogosphere arguing over an alleged decline in Popular Culture, one they contend that is reflective of something deeper, this too often seems to be forgotten. As Mark Fisher asks in the New Statesman "Is the death of rave only one symptom of an overall energy crisis in culture? Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?" The 'Death of Rave'? Surely this is a terrifyingly small fragment of music history from which to draw such Apocalyptic conclusions? Indeed, one cannot help feeling the hunger for new and exciting cultural material demanded by both these critics and the public - demands made every few days now thanks to the efficiency of the Internet - has been hardwired into them by the consumer society within which we all exist as opposed to any primal need. It is not enough to have access to thousands of extraordinary albums, as is currently the case. We must demand millions. Certainly, Luke Haines was on to something when he suggested that the problem with the Internet is that it devalues all music simply because it enables supply to significantly outstrip demand.

True, Post-War Popular Culture has itself has always been tied to technological advances. Within Popular Music this is explicitly demonstrated. From the Electric Guitar that fuelled the 60's Blues explosion, through the Synthesiser in the 70's, up to the current Pro Tools technology, those at the cutting edge are always there due to the new equipment they've embraced. But it also underlines Popular Music's tendency to regurgitate the same thing again and again, albeit slightly differently, something that has enabled a fluid and steady relationship with commerce. But as Alex Ross, author of the titanic and staggering overview of experimental 20th Century music 'The Rest Is Noise', notes the end of the tunnel is some way off:

“Twentieth-century music thrived on innovation and information—the rise of dissonance and electronic sounds in classical music, the advent of jazz, the rapid-fire development of one pop genre after another, documentation by way of recordings of musical traditions from around the globe. At the moment, the pursuit of the “new” does seem exhausted. I hear a lot of retrospective sounds in jazz and rock. Many classical composers, too, are browsing through extant traditions instead of engendering new ones. But I have a feeling some violent surprises are in the offing. M.I.A, Joanna Newsom, Timbaland’s productions, the operas of Kaija Saariaho— we haven’t heard music like this before, we’re not even sure what to call it. The next Rite of Spring may happen next weekend in some warehouse space in Long Island City.”

K-Punk's dissection of youth as not inherently revolutionary in itself is of course utterly valid. It remains a Rockist myth fuelled by the 60's Counter-Culture. But it also signposts the repetition inherent within Popular Culture. For example, James Dean's leather jacket and quiff remain the style blueprint of all young men some fifty-five years after they first appeared, and have featured heavily in every era of the last half century (see below). This is because Popular Culture has only ever mutated subtly. From Hugo Ball to Andre Breton to Marlon Brando to Bob Dylan to Johnny Rotten to NWA up to and including Dizzee Rascal, rebellion has always been in consistent supply, and consumed by audiences. When it comes to Popular Culture it's always been 'the same again but different please'. The changes are only ever superficial. Is it really practical then to demand revolution after revolution in 2009 when there's no great precedent for this in the vast drift of human history?

Pop Icons Are Always The Same 1955 - 2009 (Richard Kovitch)

K-Punk is also correct that "being negative" and the need for submerging ourselves in deep listening experiences is becoming far more important in an era of Choice Fatigue and attention deficit disorders, symptoms of the technological age. I recently attended a Focus Group about TV viewing habits, and the majority of participants all agreed they found it impossible to settle on a single program or channel for longer than a few minutes. This pattern of channel hopping increasingly defines the average evening. Just as the iPod and the Web 2.0 facilitates an increasingly elliptical, scatter gun exchange with culture, so increased autonomy over what we ingest shatters our ability to truly choose and allow our imaginations to engage.

Yet perhaps the great trick being played on the cultural critics is the illusory nature of reality as viewed through the prism of the Internet - one that has caused some to identify the current era as one of 'accelerationism'. But life itself hasn't actually 'speeded up'. How could it when mankind's basic, primal needs remain so fundamental and unchanged? Life is actually longer, with people living for almost twice as long at the end of the 20th century than at its beginning. The current economic crisis will not end any quicker simply because of 24 Hours new media and increased chatter on-line. Indeed, if you consider the economic crisis that ushered in Negative Equity in the early 1990's, economists contend the slump actually began in 1989 and did not fully recover until 2003 - 14 years later, far longer than memory would suggest.

No doubt, Web 2.0 has nurtured a generation acclimatised to accessing an increasingly global culture immediately and obtaining it for free. But this has simply fragmented the profit streams of Culture's commodifiers (causing the music industry, ironically, to turn back to the 'communal experience' of live music to revive its revenue streams). What is sad about the perceived negativity towards the current era is that the sheer breadth of cultural choice in 2009 is an exceptional thing surely worth celebrating. At no point in history has the wealth of human learning and experience been so readily accessible to such a vast body of people. Yet rather like a diner who attempts to digest everything on the menu, this excessive choice has simply lead to a feeling of sickness and dissatisfaction, not increased nourishment.

Furthermore, the dangers of using Popular Culture, and in particular Popular Music, as some sort of barometer for the age is that it may trick us in to looking in the wrong places for signs of cultural evolution. Perhaps if the former Mods, Punks and Ravers really are eager to locate the same youthful spirit in modern times that characterised their own era , they could do far worse than consider the terrain of Video Games such as Grand Theft Auto. It's not unreasonable to contend that games such as this have enabled an entire generation to venerate the same anti-social urges and youthful catharsis that those early Sex Pistols gigs or Warehouse raves facilitated previously? If technology really is the great facilitator, then where technology is breaking most ground will surely be where to look - in short, the vast terrain of the digital landscape, which in 2009 is still very much in its infancy.

AUTHENTICITY IS INVALUABLE

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” - Jim Jarmusch