Xei the Ghost & Supa Ape

micro hip hop

The pneumacosm: a softer, warmer machine

ke: These days there are a lot of amazing r&b productions. I watch a lot of mtv and there are all these r&b artists like Ginuwine, Missy Elliot, tlc and Timbaland Productions. You listen to them and they are all processed, a bit fast, a bit android, The rhythms are very stop-start, they judder, they falter. The register is very trebly... When I was writing my book this had not started yet, so if I'd be writing it now I'd include a huge section on r&b. I'm currently preparing a long piece about Androids in r&b. It's all about the new-style r&b, which has totally changed itself and moved over the border to the posthuman. It's not posthuman in the Underground Resistance/techno sense. It's not militant. It's inside love, it's a softer, warmer machine.

dvw In their video clips they depict themselves as successful citizens, defined by their surrounding objects and architecture. They are defined by the space; architectural surroundings designed especially for the clip.



ke: That's Hype Williams, the director of video clips for Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson, TLC and Missy Elliot, who also gave them their animatronic cyborg look. He's always using this fisheye lens, so everything always has this anamorphic look, and the aspect I like is that this relates muscular tension to the environment. So when they dance in the video, the whole space dances with them, or when Missy Elliot blows off a kiss the whole image kisses you as well. Everything they do, their whole world does with them. So he has managed to make this total intimate relationship between muscular effect and world. I relate it to this sixties architectural concept of the pneumocosm. Groups like Coop Himmelblau designed all these pneumatic structures, like the inflatable buildings in Woody Allen's Sleeper. In the Pneumatic Cosmos, each gesture you made, no matter how small, would instantly be transmitted throughout the entire environment you are in. Like the sixties dream where your room would be a heartbeat, where your heartbeat would be instantly transmitted into the room you're in, so that your room would have the sensitivity of your heart. A complete collapse of interior and exterior space. When I look at Hype Williams I see that thing as well; the tiniest movement Missy Elliot makes is transmitted throughout the entire space. The closeness and softness of it; the kind of intimate technology you'll also find in William Gibson's work. When I watch r&b I can clearly see the same tendency towards touch, towards liquidity and new forms of computer love. Zapp, Roger Trautman, a big producer from la who just died, is very important in my book because of his tracks More Bounce to the Ounce and Computer Love. These are like r&b before r&b in the early eighties, but they promote this idea of soft love. It's like going back to Burroughs' Soft Machine, but taking the terror away from it and re-interpreting it as this intimate love. That's why I got obsessed with human-robot sex. r&b seems to be preparing us for this. This aspect of r&b fascinates me because it shows a kind of cyborg aspiration that isn't overtly avant-gardist. It's not terrorising or traumatising at all. It's intimate and it's clinging.

dvw: The weird thing is that it's supposed to do something about alienation. It's singing about getting closer, but in doing so it radicalises a lot of alienating principles, which are also liberating.

ke: Steve Beard and I went to a showing of Crash and the novelist Ian Sinclair, who had just written an introduction to Crash, was quoting Ballard. Ballard, who was such a key figure for us, was saying that you always have to access inconceivable alienations - alienations that previous eras didn't even think of - and that you have to go through them. This made a big impression on us all over again. So then we saw Crash, the movie, and it was completely reduced to these extreme sexual encounters in crashes. But after we watched it we couldn't remember anything about it. Crash has this aggressive amnesia quality, this positive quality of forgetting that we were really amazed by. We would relate it to Nietzsche's concept of this active forgetting, where it is useful to forget whole stretches of history in order to move forward. But R&B, too, has this a lot. Sometimes an r&b clip is really memorable and really forgetful at the same time. You think, Oh my God, this is really incredible! and then it falls out of your head. This also has something to do with the fact that it doesn't really access all the familiar points of the classic avant-garde life. They don't have any interest in this whole way of talking.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/5703/en

I don't talk to my boyfriends. That's why people think I am weird back home. One of the reasons, at least. They want me to talk to them more than I want to talk to them. The girls are supposed to want emotions, but not me. I want romance and all that, but I don't like when they are so needy! They want to possess me then, when I let them be needy. They give me needy face. Like a little boy who wants a toy and it is not sexy. Then I can't feel anything for them anymore.

So I meet nice Western guys. Australian, French, English. They think that China is just a big pile of sex and money for them. Not much different from their grandparents. They say they come for English jobs, but they really come to get paid and laid. Sleep with so many girls. But we are happy because they are something different. Not as traditional, not as controlling. Gives us something to look forward to besides the same thing every day.

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Since my cell phone bill came I have thought about telemarketing again. Mom yells at me every night 'I am paying your college bills so you pay your phone bill!' but it is shit right now in jobs. Nobody can get them. And when you do, serve chicken to people all night, get covered in oil and grease, and make 40 quid a week. When there's guys in the neighborhood making ten times that by selling pills to white kids.

My cousin works a nice job across the river but he looks like a punk wearing his suit every day. Not to mention that he has no friends anymore. He gets on the train at 8 every morning and comes back at 7 or so, and when there's snow it's later, and his boss makes him stay later a lot because he has to 'make his mark.' He says it will all be worth it but he don't even believe himself.

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I meet a guy from the US. I say in my head 'I would do him.' He is a nice guy, but not right away. I'm more curious about him than anything else.

I told him about how scared I am of the black people around here. He is from US so I think he might know something. Why are they always looking at me like that? When white guy sees me, I don't think he thinks bad things, but I know that black guys does. I am sitting in a large lecture and the black guy keeps looking at me. I know they are violent and I don't want to walk by myself, even during the day! The American guy says I am paranoid, that I should act like I am not scared. But then black guy might see that as an invitation, like I am slut. I am more vulnerable.

But I am not afraid of being raped. I know there is nothing I can do then. I told him that I am ready to be raped and it is not a problem. He says that's crazy and he doesn't believe me. But really there are worse things, like back home, that I won't tell him about.

deep, baroque, requires multiple listenings

Fred Moten on Kant

Truth is a woman?

the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nor anything of woman. Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not.

- Jacques Derrida

"college instruction is a brand of popular culture; the universities are poorly run mass media." - Sontag, Sept. 1956