Ok, so here I am. at a particular place at a particular time. situated. and we are talking about, exploring this idea of rewind. where to begin?... where I am now. Where to go?.. well, backwards.

Eg.: I remember the 1st time I heard about Capital Magazine: [still think it's the best afro i ever actually saw in person [wow, how's that for a provincial attitude..!?] ] Is that a rewind? A displacement? Where does memory fit into this? We must seek [how's that for bridging themes, eh?], scan, toggle, journey towards a deciphering of this concept... but it is confused. as with any large meme, there are evocations, multiplicities of meaning...

Is rewind to bring forth or go to a single point in time, with no attention paid to the travel time in between? We must not forget, rewinding is pursued with the entire journey in mind, not just the destination; it is entirely a linear mode of travel (though not entirely analog - you do not necessarily get tape wear or tracks anymore...)

Rewind is not memory, to be recalled at will. "It is not of a single image, nor even of many." We must be careful if we are confusing a call to rewind to a bygone era; 'retro'(-activity) is a broad span, not to be encapsulated within a single image or frame of time. Do we let the tape flow back to the beginning, or start again from a certain chapter (the 80's? pre-post-post-modernism? prior to 9/11?). What do we do then? What are we to do? Hope that the 60's youth will win this time? Rescue the internet for our own purposes? Not vote for Nader? Vocally support Napster? Pursue preemptive action against Osama? (ie. not give him weapons and train him against the Russians..) Will things be different? Can we affect divergent ruptures, like planned demolitions? If so, who are our explosive experts, and do we trust them with these weapons and schematics?

Again, we come to the question of culture, ... and its makers. Are we creating culture, or is it sold to us? This dialectic, this pull of forces... what happens to the linear line - the idea of rewind itself even - in the era of decentralized and ruptured narratives? Does not a directionality presuppose a chorus, a willful productivity? Do we believe we are all in this grand cultural enterprise together? Because that is the essential question here, the one we would be asking, if we thought REW was a valid cultural option, an aesthetic tool.

But, alas, it is not.