Life is like a broken record

More regular posts soon to cover the Störung Festival, once up on RA, and this weekend past have been in Gijon in the north of Spain for the L.E.V. Festival.

Meanwhile, the last word about Albert Camus for the time being (I just finished reading his notebooks). This time it is Jean-Paul Sartre speaking about Camus that is interesting. After Camus’s death in January 1960, Sartre wrote a tribute piece in English for The Reporter that has also been collected in several places. Sartre writes:

“Every life that is cut off-even the life of so young a man - is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is broken and a complete life. For all those who loved him, there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”

The metaphor is a strange one, almost seeming to imply that a complete disc of music is now broken and we must learn top play it despite the missing pieces. But one senses he might also mean a record that was never fully finished, leaving part of a symphony unfinished, unrecorded, with it. But is this a broken record? Clearly Sartre also never imagined a world populated by Marcus “Oval” Popp, Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone.