Bataille in New York with Total Control, Raspberry Bulbs, Crazy Spirit and Survival

285 Kent Brooklyn May 23 2013

I’ve pulled out some old tour journals a couple times over the past year to write about some of the books I was reading on the road.

This column originally appeared in edited form in the Zagreb Book Review.

On the eve of the UV Race / Total Control US tour, my friend Douglas asked me to write a piece for a fashion magazine about Georges Bataille. To prepare, I re-read Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation, a dangerous book that I first encountered around the time Total Control recorded Hengebeat. I ended up taking the Bataille / Land writing project on the road with me as some kind of talisman. When I was feeling the accumulated hangovers and sleep deprivation, or if I just needed space, I would hold the book and stare a hole through it.

Nobody wants to converse with a man holding a book with a title like that.

It has been twenty years since the publication of Nick Land’s The Thirst For Annihilation, the first English language engagement with notorious French philosopher / eroticist Georges Bataille. In 1992, Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy. Despite these academic credentials, he eschewed traditional institutional engagement in favour of a deranged, deeply personal communion with Bataille, pulsating with hysteric ambition. Subtitled Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, the two central questions posed by the book adorn the cover: why should we read Bataille? Have we the courage to pursue his work’s real consequences?

The consequences of Bataille’s work extend beyond the most evident example of philosophical engagement as literature of obsession and disease. What if we were to ask these same questions of Land’s book? Why should we read it? Have we the courage to pursue his work’s real consequences?

Hysteria is infectious! What a rant. My stomach turns at such overwrought drama. Look. I always regret lines like “have we the courage to…”, particular with regards to reading a book. I would contend that reading can be about risk and danger but it’s a contention that carries a certain stench, a certain perfume of desperation and self importance.

I would always attempt to read outside my comfort zone, to read difficult and brutal texts, but I developed a sense of composure over the years and save these kinds of lines for a verbal conversation with someone I trust. Writing like this about the danger of reading is insipid… in short, it doesn’t inspire courage. In lines like these I can sense an affection for amphetamines which was a sound physiological state to imbue Land’s demonic vitriol.

This was the nature of my obsessions at the time of this tour, obsessions which had a strong influence on the album we writing at the time: Typical System.

Land attempts to find examples of the kind of study he’s attempting when he draws on Bataille’s own engagement with Nietzsche, a series of essays and journal entries which reveal a painful sense of intimacy between the philosopher of the future and his isolated French disciple. Land bemoans the history of Nietzschean reception as “the gibbering of a lobotomy ward”, and exemplifies Klossowski, Deleuze and Cioran as exceptions against the academic corpus justified by Heidegger’s “ponderously irrelevant” study.

This show happened at the midpoint of a UV Race US tour. We started in LA and made our way to NY and met Mikey, James and Zephyr from Total Control. This was the first Total Control show of the tour, with my favourite band in the world at the time, Crazy Spirit.

I first met the members of Crazy Spirit when Straightjacket Nation played in New York in 2010 with Invasion. We played at ABC No Rio (you can read my account of the first time I tried to go to ABC No Rio on September 11, 2001 here.) Sam was wearing a home made Deep Wound shirt and we got to talking and traded addresses. He sent me the Crazy Spirit demo and whenever I came through New York I would insist that Crazy Spirit play.

Fortunately whenever we played NY Ian Dickson would invariably put the show - this was Hardcore Gig Vol #211 - and the man was accomodating and generous so I got to see Crazy Spirit play a few times. Hardcore is at its best when played beyond the point of endurance, and I never saw them play a lazy set. I would always try and get a spot near Henry as his drumming is mesmerising and the physicality of it so impressive. How is he still alive.

If your friends and family aren’t concerned about the consequences of physical and mental destruction from playing this style of music, your band is fake. You are an extra.

The violent tremors one feels reading such hypnotic excoriations of philosophy as institutional practice! Land’s greatest triumph may lay in his corruptive influence on any naïve students of Bataille who stumble across his book expecting critical insight. Imagine entire philosophy classes empty of students, who have fled to private study halls, laying naked and supine on velvet rugs trading lines from The Story Of The Eye in defeated tones as they wait for their failed grades and dismissal notices…

Poster by Alexander Heir (Death Traitors, played in Survival)

The show was in a big warehouse in Brooklyn. The room was packed. There was a guy walking around who looked like he was in a gang from The Warriors, and Al (TC) was obsessed with him. He had a Rudimentary Peni leather jacket and a mohawk and an air of spontaneous violence. He was friends with Survival and was hanging out with that crew.

Some gear issues on the night had Survival setting up late and playing a short set. When the soundguy cut the band off a fight broke out. I’m not saying anyone hit anyone but when I went outside for a cigarette I saw security escort the Warriors punk outside and he delivered them a barrage about how all the other bands are lame anyway and stormed off into the night.

Then Crazy Spirit kicked my head in.

Land establishes an anti-academic tradition within philosophy that is rarely acknowledged, among rapid shifts of subject manner, from thermodynamics to prose depicting the murder of God to an exploration of Henry Miller’s erotic abandon. Land’s contention is that philosophy is generally tolerated much like a senile relative of psychiatry, neuro-science, linguistics, literature, cultural studies and theology, lacking connections to power and industry, dwindling in standing as an evidently fruitless and unproductive labour.

I hadn’t heard of Raspberry Bulbs before this show but the Bone Awl Not For Our Feet tape was a favourite and I was looking forward to seeing them play. I ate too much of the psilocybin laced chocolate and smelled some the drug… I was in a great state to watch them… but I blew it. I stood in the worst possible spot.. alone, away from everyone… I was defenceless, riding out the trip and trying to mentally prepare for playing a set… vulnerable to all kinds of conversationalist types who yelled in my ear over the din about the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes and the Napoleonic conquests… if only I’d had the sense to get my talisman from the van and hold it in front of my face… Thirst for Annihilation…

Whenever I listen to Bone Awl or Raspberry Bulbs, I seek judgement and no mercy. Residual anxiety for my failures and self indulgences pierces through the music. Condemned.

Were anyone to acknowledge books like The Thirst For Annihilation and the chain of anti-institutional philosophers it identifies, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Bataille, one would have to acknowledge the terrible, majestic thought that philosophy could exist in spite of the academy! That philosophy could be wild, an aggrieved beast, roaming outside of science, art and literature, unchained from government finances and the leash of universities publication houses! This is one of Land’s more intolerable suggestions: that philosophy could spread its cruel poison on blogs, in pornography, in fashion magazines…

…and in live music.

I don’t have the capacity to remember most shows that I play because part of the appeal of playing music live is to agitate my mind to such a degree that I transcend the capacity to make impression. I attempt to get to a point of animal purity that does not create memories, and the idea is to hold myself in that state for the duration of the song. You give yourself over to the music and something happens. It’s a lot easier with the violence of Straightjacket Nation or the physical demands of drumming with The UV Race or G2g. More difficult but more rewarding when singing with Total Control or Station Model Violence.

It’s a feeling much like the calm you feel when you’ve run past the point of exhaustion and hit the next level. Your body moves and your mind is focused on the road ahead. It’s the feeling right after being hit in the face, before you know where the blow came from and what to do about it. It’s the feeling between when you know you’re falling and when you hit the ground. It’s the feeling when you’ve not slept for a couple of days and you need to lift something heavy and fragile. You can find it with psychedelics… sometimes drug accelerate the capacity to reach that state… though I would not recommend with playing live music unless you have some kind of stimulant to discourage the introspection.

All this is to say I remember nothing about the set.

I remember getting off stage and meeting Elias from Iceage for the first time. Later that night we ended up at the house of the Rudimentary Peni punk (name witheld to protect the innocent.) It was a cool apartment with about 20 people on multiple levels listening to Indigesti and the house rules were no shoes inside so there was a ziggurat of boots and sneakers next to the door. I sat smoking cigarettes and talking about Mishima with Elias while Crazy Spirit played dominoes in their socks. This was the start of a beautiful friendship, confiding in a stranger, my fraying mind blissed out and rolling with the punches… of all moments in the night the sight of people walking around a party listening to Italian hardcore in their socks has made a great impression on me and I celebrate where Bataille and NY intersected.

Since 1992, Nick Land has withdrawn from the academy and moved from England to China, having adopted a position his peers have portrayed as either accelerationist or “mad black Deleuzianism”. A collection of his essays over the last two decades called Fanged Noumena were published in 2011, his name discussed in reverential tones by reluctant adherents to the Speculative Realist movement as a progenitor. There have since been a number of more balanced and well-mannered studies of Bataille from the academy that indicate that Land’s work was far from groundbreaking or the shape of philosophical engagement to come, but an isolated blight, a malformed fetus born from a corrupt womb, best dropped in a sealed hazardous waste bag and incinerated out of sight. Despite the reverence acceded by the cult few who’ve been capable of enduring its excessive salivation, gnashing and howling, the book is generally viewed as an anomaly of audacious caprice, and few references to it exist within the hallowed halls of higher learning. Land wrote a book without an audience, and in twenty years, the earth has grown over it.

Final word:

Here’s a couple more excerpts from that tour journal.

I was asked by a friend to write about the repress of Studio Paradiso, launched in the premises of Paradiso in Amsterdam on 3 September 2013. Here are my notes:

A collection of Max Natkiel’s candid portrait photography of the patrons of legendary Amsterdam club Paradiso was first published in 1986.

The style of his subjects is beyond reproach, and covers a broad spectrum of the post-punk underground without the codified monotony that characterized its disintegration into pop culture. You’ll see effete punks and demure goths, each subject a brilliant character with their own bizarre style, hamming it up or staring the camera down, all probably ex-bass players of the best band you never heard of. The most striking aspect is that slightly unseemly approach to dress that is the distinct mark of the experimentation of the time: goth skinheads, new romantic motorheads, half naked or wearing pajamas safety pinned with garbage.

This September Voetnoot Publishers are to publish Studio Paradiso, featuring 600 of these memorable portraits that capture the style and energy of distinct and unique subculture.

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This is part of a series of reading while travelling written for the Zagreb Book Review.

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More from my Zagreb Book Review column in this spirit:

Houllebecq in Tokyo with Total Control

Nietzsche with Straightjacket Nation in Slovakia

Graham Greene in KX with Station Model Violence

Genet and Chris Kraus in Copenhagen with Iceage

Herman Hesse in Detroit with 9 Shocks Terror

Dostoevsky in New Caledonia

Hemingway in New Orleans with Total Control

Simenon in KX with Station Model Violence

Gracián on the Hume with Straightjacket Nation

Blood Meridian in Kings Cross

Werner Herzog in Kings Cross (Notes on Audiobooks)