Saturday, February 18, 2006

hanatarash/adorno



so here's what i'm thinkin'. we're supposed to bring an "example" to class next week, some kind of aethestic work that we can use to read w/ (or maybe against) adorno's _Aesthetic Theory_. I said I was going to bring some form of music and BW said, um, well, maybe you shouldn't do some kind of "throbbing gristle" thing, but i said, oh but i am! then i decided not to bring TG even tho i lurv them so much... instead i'm going to use the japanese noise band/performance group Hanatarash (the two guys went on to form the more famous noise band, The Boredoms). i'm going to borrow this amazing video from my friend mike of one of their infamous early shows (@ 1984). It features the main dude, yamatsuka eye, geared up in tight tshirt and pants with elbow and knee pads, in this enormous factory space, throwing around something like a mace while also jumping into and picking up huge green metal barrels. he then proceeds to take various sized plates of glass and crashes them all around, stacks of sapporo beer cases follow and, like, a thousand beer bottles get tossed into the mix. it is fucking amazing, especially since Eye is about 5 feet tall and around 130 pounds. all the while the other dude who plays drums, i forget his name, is making an infernal racket. the best part is the end where they show the floor littered with billions of shards of glass and some guys trying to clean it up with an inadequate little broom and one dustpan.

i'm going to turn this into a sophisticated analysis of adorno's critique of art after auschwitz (in this case art after hiroshima) and the negation of pleasure as a form of pleasure. what, you think i can't?

This is a pic of Yamatsuka Eye in Hanatarash (or Hanatarashi, as they're also sometimes called -- it means "Snot-nose(d))

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