Met Michael Rother last week
Neu!'s children are legion, still
(that last one has a bit of Hawkwind in there, and "Transmission")
How come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?
The paradox of modernism innit - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time, recreates the moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read), is somehow eternally new.
Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year - even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.
The context for meeting Rother was a Hamburg conference panel discussion in which we were both involved (along with Gudrun Gut, another German modernist albeit of a later vintage) and in which issues of lost futures etc were discussed.
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