ghost cities of cyberspace

 

Tell me now, I beg you, where
Flora is, that fair Roman;
Archippa, and Thaïs rare,
Who the fairer of the twain?
Echo too, whose voice each plain,
River, lake and valley bore;
Lovely these as springtime lane,
But where are they, the snows of yore?¹

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis(1461)¹

My uncle died two years ago now, but his Instagram account is still there. How many dead people live on in their abandoned social media accounts? The future never seems to arrive, never really exists, but history never ends. For over a quarter of a century, social media has mirrored and shaped lives, always evolving, but leaving behind its detritus just like every other phase of civilisation. Where are the people we were sociable with on the forgotten single-community (bands, hobbies, comedy, whatever) forums and message boards of the 90s and 2000s², or the friends we made on MySpace in 2005? Some live on, ageing at an only slightly faster rate than their profile pictures (Dorian Gray would now age privately at home, his picture migrating untouched from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok etc), others lost, vanished, dead? But still partially living on, like those sunlit American families in the home movies of the 50s and 60s.

Club Kids 1992 – Keda, Kabuki Starshine, and Sacred Boy, Copyright Michael Fazakerley

Twenty-five years is a long, generation-spanning time, but, just as abstract expressionism essentially still lives on, in almost unaltered forms but no longer radical, long past the lifetimes of Rothko, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so the (just) pre-internet countercultural modernity of the late 80s and early 90s, the shock-monster-gender-fluid-glam of Michael Alig and the Club Kids, still prevalent back in the Myspace era³, (captured brilliantly in the 1998 ‘shockumentary’ Party Monster and less brilliantly in the somewhat unsatisfactory 2003 movie Party Monster) lives on and still feels current on Instagram and Tiktok and reality TV and in whatever is left of the top 40. Bulimic pop culture eats reconstituted chunks of itself and just as the 60s haunted the early 90s, bringing genuine creativity (Andrew Weatherall, to pick a name at random) and feeble dayglo pastiche (Candy Flip, to deliberately target a heinous offender), a weird (if you were there) amalgam of the 1980s and 90s haunts the 2020s, informing both the shallow dreck that proliferates everywhere and some of the genuine creativity of today.

‘I’m ready now,’ Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. ‘Touch the spread with your left hand.’ Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

entering cyberspace in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Grafton Books, p.105.

Alta Vista, 1999

Cyberspace, like any landscape which people have inhabited, has its lost cultures and ruins, becoming ever more remote and unknowable with the passing of years, but, like Macchu Picchu or the Broch of Gurness, retaining a sense that it all meant something significant once. The not-quite barren wastelands of Geocities and Xanga, the ruined palace of MySpace, a Rosetta stone partly effaced with dead links and half forgotten languages; photobucket, imageshack, tripod, what do these mean if you’re 15? Would the old, useable interface of MySpace seem as charmingly quaint and remote now as the penpal columns in the pages of ’80s music magazines do?

Looking for friends all over the world, Metal Forces magazine, 1987

But there was a time when Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves were peers of Google, and Bebo rivalled Facebook and Twitter, both now seemingly in senile phases of their development. Until very recently Facebook (Meta) and Twitter were brands that were seemingly unassailable, but empires do fall, albeit more slowly than bubbles burst.And meanwhile, the users of social networks age and die and give way to generations who remember them, just as the Incas and the Iron Age Orcadians are remembered by their monuments, if nothing else. Depressing, when you think about it; probably won’t write about history next time.

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.  JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye, Penguin, 1958, p.220

 

 

Geocities; this is what the future used to look like

¹ translated by Lewis Wharton in The Poems of François Villon, JM Dent & Sons, 1935, p54. Not reading French – I seem to go on about that a lot – this is my favourite translation I’ve come across, although apparently it’s a pretty free one, judging by the literal – but still quite nice – one here

² the continuing success of Reddit suggests that people never really grew discontented with the interface of the Kiss online fanclub c. 2005 (etc etc)

³It’s weird to note that the Club Kids would be considered – even without the murder etc – just as outrageous today as in the late 80s, even though their aesthetic was itself put together from a mix of Bowie, gore movies, Japanese pop culture etc etc. But then as I think I recently noted, there are people who still find the word fuck outrageous, after something like a millennium.

4Online and mainstream culture, even after this quarter century, remain mysteriously separate. Online news unfolds as it happens, but meanwhile in the daytime world, mainstream culture hangs on to husks even older than Geocities; publicly owned TV news shows don’t look to what’s happening now, but pore over the front pages of newspapers – yesterday’s news… today! – simultaneously being redundant and ensuring that newspaper owners’ views get publicity beyond their dwindling readership and therefore giving them an artificial sense of relevance. Which is really just about money, just as Google and Facebook are; the crumbling aristocracy of print media, its tendrils still entwined with the establishment, versus the new money, steadily buying its way in.

 

 

Play For Today – Current Playlist 8th February 2017

 

The world is not making me very happy at present (my thoughts on all that are covered to an extent here, so I won’t go on about it) – but I am still enjoying music at least, so here’s a selection of things that are currently sounding good to me:

Diamanda Galás and John Paul Jones – The Sporting Life (Mute, 1994) – I always find it surprising that a vocalist as completely extreme and melodramatic as Diamanda Galás can be as straightforwardly moving as she (sometimes) is – pretty pop by her standards, but a great album, with John Paul Jones creating perfect settings for that amazing voice.

Apokrifna Realnos
Apokrifna Realnos

Apokrifna Realnost – Na Rekah Vavilonskih (AnnapurnA Productions, coming March 2017) –  I would never have expected to love an album of archaic ritualistic/devotional music clandestinely recorded in Macedonia in the late 80s; but there you have it. It’s unsettling & deeply beautiful.

Teksti-TV 666 – 1, 2, 3 (Svart Records, 2016) The Finnish guitar-overlords are credited with playing a weird amalgam of punk, rock, shoegaze, krautrock etc; and I suppose they do, but the songs on this album are, underneath the noise and strangeness, pretty catchy indie rock that I wouldn’t expect to like but really do – it’s a great album.

Sauron – The Baltic Fog (Wheelwright Productions, reissue 2017) I wrote at length about this great Polish black metal release for Echoes and Dust, so won’t say much here. But it has all the atmosphere you’d expect from mid-90s black metal and some good tunes.

Heavy Tiger – Glitter (Wild Kingdom Records, 2017) – Very easy to like Swedish rock that is (lazy comparison) like The Ramones meets The Donnas with added glam attitude (plus good songs)

Heavy Tiger by Niclas Brunzell
Heavy Tiger by Niclas Brunzell

Blake Babies – Innocence & Experience (Mammoth Records, 1993) – On the whole I prefer Juliana Hatfield solo, but this compilation of the Blake Babies is pretty great.

David Bowie – Station to Station (RCA, 1975) – One of my favourite albums, this just seems to get better and better. Even if it just consisted of the supremely creepy title track & Word on a Wing it would be one of the best things Bowie ever recorded.

Makaya McCraven – In The Moment Deluxe Edition (International Anthem, 2016) – There’s so much amazing music in the 28 tracks here, plus literally some of the best drumming I’ve ever heard; superlative, brilliant jazz.

Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night (Asylum, 1974) – Unsettling times sometimes call for comforting music, and this warm, funny, poetic and melancholy album is one of my favourites.

If I Could Kill Myself – Ballads of the Broken (self-release, 2017) – If you are unconvinced by (or just despise) depressive black metal this will probably not change your mind. Lo-fi, raw and revelling in the miserable characteristics of the genre, it’s not (and I assume isn’t meant to be) subtle, but has atmosphere and good tunes aplenty.

 

kills

You Were In My Dreams – Kristin Hersh at Summerhall, November 17, 2016

 

street

It was a beautifully clear, cold autumn-heading-into-winter evening in Edinburgh. As the eight o’clock concert approached, the streets of Newington were calm and mostly empty. After a few moments of worry about finding the venue I realised I knew where it was, which was handy.

Although a seated solo show with readings from the author’s works, prefixed ‘An Evening With…’ seems about as grown-up and civilised as a rock concert can be, there’s (for me at least) a slightly surreal edge of teenage flashback about the whole thing, not least because of Summerhall itself. Once a veterinary school, the artwork and noticeboards on the walls, the sets of double doors, the echoing stairways and empty rooms along the weakly lit corridors conjure exactly that atmosphere of being at school after hours, all the more powerful for being unexperienced for 25 years or so.

stage

The sinisterly-named but actually very pleasant ‘Dissection Room’ itself initially strengthens the familiar atmosphere, despite the high, somewhat church-like ceiling. The rows of plastic seats in front of the low stage have, if it wasn’t for the side room with a bar, an irresistible feeling of the end of term school concert. And what better person to see here than Kristin Hersh? Like many people of my generation, my first encounter with the singer/songwriter/guitarist was in 1991 when Throwing Muses’ ‘Counting Backwards’ became an indie hit, followed shortly by the release of their Top 40 hit album The Real Ramona. I loved it; I still love it, and while the music press at the time were pushing the band’s other singer/guitarist, Tanya Donelly, as no. 1 indie pinup (or possibly co-no.1 with Curve’s Toni Halliday) for me, Throwing Muses were all about Kristin Hersh. I liked her voice better, I liked her songs better (I had a bigger crush on her) and while Donelly’s post-Throwing Muses band Belly was definitely to my liking, they didn’t grip me in the same way Throwing Muses, or Kristin Hersh’s solo work did. Never saw her live though.

Photo by Dina Douglass

So, on this very crisp November night, sitting among the politely expectant audience, already loving Kristin’s new album/book (which I pointlessly gripped in my sweaty hand through the show, I was quietly excited. The stage was set with a chair, two guitars, a couple of pedals (which I had a look at later; for fact fans, they were an acoustic simulator and a chromatic tuner) and a small table/case of some kind with a small pile of books on top. Based on the sound of the album I had expected an acoustic guitar, but in fact she plays (what I think is) a Fender Classic Series ’72 Telecaster thinline, with which which she manages to – but wait, here she comes.

 Stepping slightly self-consciously onto the stage, Kristin smiles at the crowd, warns us that she can’t see without her glasses, so to scream for attention if required, and takes her seat. A small, neat blonde figure informally dressed in a long skirt and pink t-shirt, Hersh is both pixie-like and indomitable, her piercing eyes noticeable even from my seat in the 6th or 7th row. She is also, as I knew from her records but somehow hadn’t really considered until now, an exceptional guitarist. So, after a brief and funny apology in advance for playing new songs, she launches into Wyatt at the Coyote Palace’s enigmatic opening track, ‘Bright’. The sound is very close to the album, the rich, reverberating tone of the guitar filling the lofty space of the hall and more than making up for the lack of the very detailed layers of the recordings.

pedals

The relaxed and good-humoured show was weighted towards solo material, with a few Throwing Muses songs and readings from her books punctuating the set. With the sound pared down to one woman and a guitar, the differences between the more punky band material and her solo work (even the folk songs of Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight) are minimised. This isn’t to say that it’s an evening of hushed softness; in fact the presentation brings out the feral power lurking in songs like Crooked’s melodious ‘Mississippi Kite’ as well as – and I mention it because it was the high point of the show for me personally – starkly bringing out the desolation at the heart of ‘Sno cat’; not that it was very different from the album version particularly, but it was one of those instances where the context of the spoken introduction (an anecdote rather than a reading) filled the gaps in the allusive, oblique lyric and gave it a huge emotional impact.

Probably the most rapturous reaction from the audience came fairly early in the set with the performance of the forlorn 1994 classic ‘Your Ghost’ which was as (sorry) haunting as ever and, gave me one of those indescribable flaneur-ish ‘alone in a crowd’ moments that are extremely powerful while being neither happy or sad exactly. There were many other highlights; the aforementioned ‘Sno cat’  several from Wyatt… the ‘Hooker Gazpacho’ reading, ‘Between Piety and Desire’ and ‘Guadalupe’. A reading from her memoir of the late Vic Chesnutt (Don’t Suck, Don’t Die) was followed by a beautiful version of ‘Bakersfield’ from his classic 1990 debut Little.

In the live setting, the relationship between the readings from her books and the songs they are connected with (I went on about it too much in my album review so won’t go on about why it’s good again here) is even more evident and the pacing of the set is perfectly judged and at about two hours, was over far too soon. There was a three-song encore, including a great version of the brilliant (and in the context of Kristin’s introductory anecdote very funny) Throwing Muses classic ‘Cottonmouth’, which was one of the first songs that introduced me to her music, twenty-five years ago; a strange, sad, happy kind of magical feeling. And shortly thereafter Kristin left the stage.

Apparently I regressed to my teenage state during those two hours; I was too ‘spellbound’ I suppose, to take any pictures while the show was on, and then, despite ten years or so of writing about music and interviewing bands, I lurked around for a bit, chatted to the sound guy, clutched the book I had intended to get signed, faded into the background and eventually wandered out into the wintry (though not quite frosty) city night, feeling a mixture of things that added up to ‘satisfied’ in a way that was absolutely definitive of the adolescent version of me that fell in love with Kristin Hersh and her music in the first place. It was a good show. I wish she’d done ‘American Copper’, but you can’t have everything.

kristen