[CLICK TO VIEW]

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” President Jimmy Carter, 1977.

The Voyager programme is NASA’s unmanned space operation that was launched in 1977 to escape the solar system and explore the far reaches of galaxy. The Golden Record was included on both of the Voyager crafts by one Carl Sagan, the records are meant to provide a document of human culture for any extra terrestrial life that might encounter them. In 2008 the Voyager spacecraft left our solar system and with them they took the history of our culture. At NASA’s most recent reckoning the crafts are 10 billion miles from our Sun.

The Golden Record itself contains a series of 115 photographic images and documentation, a selection of natural sounds, greetings in 50 languages and a selection of music from around the globe. The photos provide a visual documentation of the culture of the earth up until 1977, featuring photographs of nature, birds, whales, dolphins, humans etc as well as man’s achievements over nature, The Taj Mahal, The Train, Motorway, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Aeroplane. Finally there are photographs of human culture, Asian street scenes, The UN building, men fishing and Chinese people eating dinner.

Some of the photos from Voyager’s Golden Record;

The sounds included on the record can be found here.

[CLICK TO WATCH]

No Pain In Pop presents..

Friday 30th October 2009
Goldsmiths Student Union, New Cross
2000 - 0300 hrs

LIVE

the Bug ft Flowdan - http://www.myspace.com/thebuguk
Claustrophic bass from London’s most visionary producer, complete with rumbling rhetoric from Roll Deep’s Flowdan.

Teengirl Fantasy - http://www.myspace.com/teengirlfantasy
Equal part weird cut & paste ambient compositions and high-energy dance anthems.

Gold Panda - http://www.myspace.com/goldpanda
Pitchfork endorsed organic frequencies and stomping sub-bass.

Deep Sht - http://www.myspace.com/deepshtsht
Crestfallen slowgaze from heartfelt romantic Tom Watson and co.

DJs

Cooly G - http://www.myspace.com/coolyg
The first lady of funky, Hyperdub’s deep house superstar and - for what it’s worth - number 45 in the NME Future 50 list.

Joy Orbison - http://www.myspace.com/joyorbison
Rolling, soulful and very danceful, Croydon based producer Joy Orbison’s first few tracks are all set to be the high water mark of the decade in whichever genre you choose to place them.

+

No Pain In Pop :: Transparent
Jah Pat :: Split Tapes
Off Modern :: Doldrums

£5 NUS / £7

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No Pain In Pop’s Halloween Party has consistently been the best halloween party around for a few years now, this year isn’t likely to be any different, you’d be totally silly to miss it.

Any inquiries please contact felix@offmodern.com

Thanks to James Kirkup for poster design.

Photos from our first event back at Corsica Studios can be found on the Vice Magazine photo blog here.

Photos by Krystal Rodriguez

These posters are on display around various locations in New Cross as part of No Pain In Pop’s ‘Nail The Cross’ festival. Thanks to longtime collaborators Charlie Gibson for her Spaceman Collage and Patrick Barrett for his image of electricity lines at Bletchley Park.

Get Me are some great West London kids, they are alway putting on loads of fun nights that you should be going to, Lixo has dj’ed at a few of our events in the past and we are returning the favour for the second REELY AND TRULY. In the early ’80s renowned photographer Mark Lebon launched ‘Reely’, a long-running and influential London film night and club. This year GETME! and DoBeDo resurrect the night as ‘Reely and Truly’. Each month ‘Reely and Truly’ opens with an hour of short films curated by DoBeDo – featuring the work of both young filmmakers and some of the original ‘Reely’ contributors. Alongside this, two photographers are invited each month to shoot and premier an exclusive slide show that will play as the visual accompaniment to GETME! DJs and monthly special guests. And they are also putting on the fantastic Tempz on October 9th at Westrbourne Studios. All pretty amazing right? Be sure to come down.

Claire Baily is one of our favourite young artists, she exhibited this movable, changeable and adaptable sculpture at our exhibition, FRONTIERS, back in May. Here are some nice pictures of it. If you want to follow what she is up to, she has just set up a blog, which is still looking a bit sparse, but keep an eye on it, good things are bound to follow.

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This weekend sees the return of No Pain In Pop’s fantastic New Cross all dayer ‘Nail The Cross’ across four floors and two venues. Take Courage and Off Modern are curating upstairs at the Amersham Arms. Arch M, Hounds of Hate and Hype Williams all playing live, plus there’ll be an art exhibition and other performances.

FULL LINE-UP:

KODE9 + SPACEAPE - JOKER - IKONIKA - DARKSTAR (LIVE!) - HUDSON MOHAWKE - 20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS DJS - A GRAVE WITH NO NAME - ARCH M - BANJO OR FREAKOUT - BOK BOK (NIGHT SLUGS) - CASPER C (AITBF/BLOGGER’S DELIGHT) - DEEP SHT - DIGNAN PORCH - FEEDING TIME DJS - FOREST SWORDS - GENTLE FRIENDLY - HOUNDS OF HATE - HYPE WILLIAMS - JOY ORBISON (HOTFLUSH/DOLDRUMS) - KINDNESS - MALE BONDING - NO PAIN IN POP DJS - SBTRKT - SEXBEAT DJS -STOPMAKINGME (FABRIC/KILL EM ALL) -THIS IS MUSIC DJS -TRAILER TRASH TRACYS -VERONICA FALLS

tickets can be bought here; http://www.gigantic.com/gigantic/event_gce_13670a.html

We thought we should bring your attention to a new design/photography/art/interesting things blog run by Peckham based graphic designer and future tree surgeon Nicholas McQueen.

Ranging from Joseph W Kittinger’s worlds highest ever sky-dive to musings on the BBC shipping forecast, The Elastic Novice has plenty to keep you interested.

Hello Everyone,
We’re currently looking for people to contribute to our website, so if you’re interested in writing about music/art/literature/architecture/anything or would like to get something featured, please send an email to felix@offmodern.com and we’ll endevour to get back to you with a reply.
Look forward to hearing from you!

John Updike and The Modern American Aesthetic.

By James Maclaren.

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Martin Amis said of writing that it is not ever something you can choose to do or become, it is a compulsion, a need to make sense of the world – novels are vessels through which the world is furnished with meaning. Far more subtle and various than the everyday, they offer us a purpose – something innate in the human spirit, the need to make sense of our lives, to populate them with some notion of meaning or eloquence. Having a capacity for something so vital is part of a formation of an identity – in a rather high faluting kind of way many of the best writers feel that they were put here to write, and, as Dante’s Inferno tells us, one of the hottest sections of hell is reserved for those who have talent and do not use it. Updike as a young writer in his early twenty’s was trying to understand the changes that were happening in American culture – the post-war America of apple pie and Momma was being challenged by a new idea of what it meant to be young and American, something to do with being individual and choosing your own path rather then accepting the same choices and responsibilities as your parents. Updike wrote a short story in 1957 about a young grocery clerk in a sleepy suburb who is shocked out of the monotony of his work by a group of beautiful young women entering his shop in bathing suits, all buds and curves they peruse the shelves, and, all the other cashiers being busy come to his check out to buy their stuff. Breathless and stricken he serves them – they leave in a flurry of giggles, numb for a few minutes he tells his boss he quits and runs out of the shop in search of the girls. Of course they are gone and he is left with the desperate taste of something he could not quite touch. Updike was trying to get at the disparity between what this free liberated America promised and the reality of most young peoples lives – the same menial jobs as their parents but with the added resentment of having just missed out on something, something that was really first rate.

Updike, in early 1959 started writing Rabbit Run, in, as he called it, a “haze of cigarette smoke and dizziness”. His first full novel, started life as a novella; a small comment on sport as a type of hyperreality that elevates people to some sort of pinnacle before dropping them back into their second rate lives; grocery clerks, gas attendants, factory workers. It quickly became apparent that Updike had found his man, through the character of Harry Angestrom he could survey America in a big way – ventriloquising his own experience as a young man born into this new generation as well as looking beyond his own patch – he was married at the time of the novel’s creation, bound as we all are by decisions and restraints, he needed a narrator who would be there for him, another story to say what he needed to say. We meet Rabbit as a 26 year husband and father, demonstrating kitchen appliances in a store – in his school days he was a basketball star, by contrast his domestic life is full of demands and regrets. His small apartment is dotted with drained whiskeys glasses, bland food prepared without care or thought. There is a private moment of repulsion as he notices new lines in the corner of his wife’s eyes, rendering her plain rather then perky, as he knew her when he had courted her in the dime store they had both worked in. Updike’s gift is in saving this passage of prose from being gratuitous; he does not appeal toward anything base or misogynistic even though his protagonist is judging his wife in such a mean way. He is showing us a life drained of meaning; the idyllic picture of the American family is for Harry a prison where even the conciliations of lust and sex are being eroded by childbirth, familiarity, and the passage of years. These new lines are felt keenly because they are emblematic of living a second rate life, of having become irrevocably settled at twenty-six.

The novel’s title Rabbit Run can be seen then as an instruction to its hero, to get out and break away – the poverty of everyday life surrounds Harry, his parents live in a small dark house, his dad has given his life to the print factory in which he works and his mother gossips and resents Harry’s choice of wife; the small, spiritless Janice. His wife’s family run a car-lot, small minded people who never offered their daughter much love - her father pouring out his heart into his sales pitches, a cultivated artificial kindness. Even the towns reverend lives a beleaguered small existence, escapes to the golf course, his only respite from the web of his wife’s resentments and failed ambitions; at a time when Christianity and community were pillars in the functionalist family dogma, Updike shows it as failing, coming apart at the seems. Why not then should Harry want to break away, like the young cashier quitting his job and running out into the sunshine in search of girls. It may be a futile rebellion but it is a small attack on a American life that no longer works and maybe never did.

Another early novel then, about youth and freedom, tuning into the zeitgeist in anticipation of the 1960’s. No in fact Updike, even as a young man of 27 felt a distance from the reformists and freewheelers that were beginning to emerge out of the legacy of post-war consensus America ( this distance was not just imaginative but political, Updike was always patriotic- in contrast with the new wave of writers critical of American life, such as Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). He remembers a particular resentment toward Kerouac’s “On The Road” published in 1957, because although Updike was aware of the limitations in American family life he saw Kerouac’s celebration of individual freedom as dangerous because it did not stress enough what was left behind. Where we can understand Harry’s motivation for running, we also feel as readers that he’s mean and selfish, leaving a young girl only just out of her teens to look after his kid, as well as facing the twin humiliations of her parents intrusions and the towns gossiping cruelty. Updike does not think that this unbridled search for sensation is something writers should laud around – he looks at the disintegrating weave of late 1950’s America and sees it, at least in part as a loss.

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James Maclaren is an undergraduate student of English and Drama at Queen Mary’s University. He will be regularly contributing articles about literature for Off Modern.