I am three pages into a book I was really looking forward to, HEROES: MASS MURDER AND SUICIDE by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Yes, possibly an odd title to be looking forward to, but this is me. Three pages in, Berardi quotes one Hito Steyerl on the subject of the video for David Bowie’s “Heroes” -

…the clip shows Bowie singing to himself from three simultaneous angles, with layering techniques tripling his image; not only has Bowie’s hero been cloned, he has above all become an image that can be reproduced, multiplied, copied, a riff that travels effortlessly through commercials for almost anything, a fetish that packages Bowie’s glamorous and unfazed post-gender look as product… This hero’s immortality no longer originates in the strength to survive all possible ideals, but from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated…

And commodity and desire and Trotsky and Lenin all get their mandated mentions and so on. I dimly remember the video footage they’re talking about. The thing is… there were three microphones recording Bowie’s vocal on that song, set at three different distances, with gates on them, set to activate at three different vocal volumes. There were three oscillators on the synthesiser, and the song is about a couple and Bowie observing: three. The video image was split into three as a visual representation of the sonic rules of three defining the song.

I have often said that my “intellect” is something of a blunt object, and I struggle against it, but, sometimes, a cigar really just is an industrial capitalist tobacco product. For me, cultural critique and philosophy too often bang right into the brick wall of basic facts of production and simple logic. And I end up putting the book down, because, for me, whatever the writer says next is laid on a dodgy foundation.

But, you know, I’m a comics writer.

READING: FUTURE DAYS: KRAUTROCK AND THE BUILDING OF MODERN GERMANY, David Stubbs (UK) (US)