Re: <nettime> New "thought rhythms'

[David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

I was pointing not simply to the fetish for the transgressive for its own sake but 
to the longing for moment of deeper rupture after decades of apparent continuity.

Punk.. various metals, electro turbo folk etc never struck me as actual rupture but rather an 
extension of Rock’s "thought rhythms" by other means. For decades I was puzzled that nothing 
would appear that I could just not "get”.. in the way my father had never been able to “get” 
beyond the rupture of that post war shift from the dominance of the American Jazz age. 

I was looking for something to come along that offered not so much the “shock of the new”
as the "shock of afective incomprehension". That genuine sense of total estrangement signaling  
that a shift in centre of our psychic gravity had at last arrived with all that entails. My point was 
I think (or rather hope) that this has happened. And so I celebrate (and perhaps overestimate) my 
bewilderment.   

Amis’s term “ new thought rhythms” seemed to capture something Mcluhanist (medium is the message)
in the generative (as well as generational) gulf which as a father I feel as at last I am being confronted 
(day and night) by angry grime rhythms with repetitive profanity (both sexual and racial) that my kids are 
listening to (and patiently playing and trying to explain to me). Its both disturbing alienating AND exactly what I 
was waiting for! 

But I am quick to reassure them..“don’t worry girls there will be no "Dad dancing” to Hip Hop and Track 
rhythms in this kitchen.
  
> 
> One’s father, it seems, is better ignored than killed. 
>>> 
>>> Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say.

PS Talking of embarrasing older fathers (a club to whch I have now become a member ) I once met Townsend 
as a kid (of 17) on my visit first visit to Amsterdam. It was excruciating.. I was staying in a hotel with my father. 
We had come over for the wedding of a friend of his.

Townsend + entourage were staying in the same hotel. My father tried drunkenly to flirt with Townsend’s wife at the bar. 
He then got off his bar stool and walked into a glass door. Of embarrasing parent moments I think you’ll agree this takes 
some beating. Townsend was very kind and came over to spare my blushes and 
chat to me. I was frozen to the spot and tongue tied to be so kindly accosted by someone who at the time was a hero. 
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