31 March 2009: "People who go to Dan Deacon concerts seem like real bros"

This post is about mimesis. Drawing liberally from both Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom, Carles notes that "I guess in a way, every1 wants to ‘look like their favourite musician.’" Balanced ever-so-precariously between the anxiety of influence and the cult of personality, budding artists today must navigate choppy waters on route to establishing their authority. Wisely, Carles discusses their plight as though they were merely audience members, to highlight the contradictions inherent in the "society of the spectacle" -- can we create, perform, and watch ourselves creating simultaneously? Are we our own audience, stifling the erstwhile spontaneous flow of seminal artistic forces with our autocritiques, our anticipatory calculations. Have we lost all sight of an audience besides ourselves -- which leads to our seeing nothing but our own reflection in the crowd, as the musician in question in this post does?

Often, in commercial contexts, these questions about the role of imitation in art and its paradoxical effects of authenticity are simply side-stepped by an adoption of a libidinal/atavistic construct. Never one to neglected the libidinal economy, Carles posits a sex-inflected solution to the artistic problem here -- "Think he is ‘trying to be artsy’ or something, but he probs needs to ’sell out’ and hire a female singer or something who is ‘hella sexy’" -- only to reject it for a more frankly impossible quantum-mechanics approach to the deeper problems of mimesis: "Do yall like Dan Deacon, or do you think you would have naively been more into him if u could travel back in time to the year 2002?" As always the question regarding influence is whether we are content to emulate masters or do we always seek to supplant them. Lurking in our appreciation and our imitation of an artist is a desire to destroy that which we emulate. Nevertheless, in this will to power, Carles intimates, is ultimately a transcendence of the more primordial and savage urges of reproduction, the perpetuation of genes with the most youthful and viable partners. What mimetic strategies allow for, with their Neo-Platonic transmutation of lust into emulation, is a "sausagefest without any twinks."

But Carles hesitates to commit to this analysis: "not sure if that’s ‘really my scene,’" he admits. Instead we're suspended between gestalts, not sure if Carles endorses a passive mode of appreciation to avoid the conundrums of creativity (his dismissal of this musician's album is telling -- "he has a new album out, but I think it probably sounds like his old albums, and that means it is ‘pretty whatever’"), or if he is preparing a more far-reaching critique of mimesis. We hope that we have not become overweeningly optimistic in anticipating the latter.