The Revolution will not be Televised

Just a little Zizek-inspired thought before bed.

I remember in high school being elated at the wisdom of two lyrics from musicians I had breif and intense obessions with:

One: "The revolution will not be televised, brother!" Which was Gill Scott-Heron's exclamation in his poem of the same name. Scott-Heron is a kind of radical black slam poet and soul musician.

Two: "Sister had a birthday, won't be televised. [...] Smash the magnavox!" Which was the Blue Meanies - a noise-ska band.

I only made the connection that this sort of thinking was misdirected, misleading, inaccurate, self-defeating, etc once I read Antonio Negri's Empire. Zizek reminded me of it a moment ago.

Of course the revolution will be televised - not only will it be televised, but it will face its greatest threat by being televised. This is an easy and effective way for the dominant ideology to keep radical thought in check. Theres an over-saturation of representation of 'you and I' on television - we're on all the time, the revolution makes it to every episode of 20/20 and 60 Minutes. The only way to oppose the dominant ideology is to turn its own methods to progressive use. Echoing Scott-Heron and the Blue meanies (we're being repressed, we aren't allowed to fit in!) just reinforces the culture of otherness that has been built around this pervasive saturation of the everyman...

Okay, enough for now. Just thought it was funny that I was directing my indignation in a totally naive way for years (not to say I see the light now, but at least that's one veil lifted)...

Gallery Bound

Dan Harvey's exhibition opened a half hour ago in the Mudd Gallery. No free wine (some nice breads and cheeses instead) and no familiar faces (except Joe). His idea was really nice, but it failed for the most part - all because of the Mudd.

Dan greeted us by reading from his artist's statement: a vague manifesto for the dozen paintings hung, which he finished by reading a modified honor code and nailing it to the wall. Already this performance had begun to derail, I think. We get the picture immediately that he's hanging his ideas to the white gallery walls, placing them under the gallery microscope. Fine. I can sometimes tolerate the deathly pseudo-objectivity of gallery space, but here it was uncomfortable and disappointing to see it measureably weaken a charming collection of images and a charming performance (more on that in a bit). Really, 'charming' seems like the best word to describe Dan - barefoot and grinning in dusty, slightly torn clothes (nothing that would be out of place hanging on the frame of an ORC or Co-Op resident).

The problem was the space - white walls and a painfully standardized curatorial practice: Dan was a little absurd (which was nice) but mostly awkward (which was too bad) standing there among his paintings. The paintings themselves weren't all that interesting, but I enjoyed looking at them anyway in the way that I might casually inspect a new chair or basket or some such thing when visiting a friend. One of the canvases had a few stiched-up tears in it - "Pre #2" I think - my favorite.

Anyway, the best part of the whole deal, and what made me most of all carry out a mix of frustrated and warm thoughts, was Dan's banjo improvisations. After he nailed his statement to the wall, he sat down in the chair in the corner, and made up lovely songs about what had just happened, what was currently happening, the way his feet felt, and so on. Of course, immediately everyone pretended to ignore him and went about the usual museum shuffle from painting to painting. I did too - which was when it struck me how awkward and inappropriate the whole thing was.

Forgetting for a moment that I'm a shy guy, and don't enjoy the feeling of being watched - forgetting for a moment that it seemed like most of the attendees felt the same way - forgetting for a moment the somewhat interesting conceit of an artist telling a story about his audience as they pluck stories from his paintings - forgetting all that, Dan's banjo music simply belonged out of the gallery. It was too alive, too affecting, too good really for the gallery. What he needed was a real sit-down with some strangers, for cider and banjo music, in his home, or any other personal space - any space at all but the naked gallery.

Country and City

I'm reading Raymond Williams' Country and City in my library office, and I realized that all my life I've thought of myself as a resident of the country. Corn fields, one-room schoolhouses, open land, and other farmer/cowboy identifications are suprisingly natural for me - someone who has lived their entrie life in the city.
I visited the country a few times as a kid and I remember mostly hating it, even though I loved to read about it - out in the country sometimes too. From what I've read of Williams so far, sounds like the English were the same way: writing about a rural England from their London apartments. What is this, corn stalk envy? A sort of agrarian psychic residue for city-boys? I can imagine some urban Londonite scribbling away while the Ghost of Feudalism Past prods him with a handful of chains - or a corn stalk maybe.

Capital Neighbors

Ben and I have fired up a little discussion of capitalism and art on the ICELU web forum. Here are few thoughts from that discussion:

I'm very fond of Ben's sober attitude regarding art-as-commodity, or art-as-action maybe. He's not interested in formalist beauty, in abstraction-for-purification, or expression in the romantic, emotional sense. "So mentally I try to strip the music of this beauty to reveal it as what it is: a product, a CD, a gift (this is what I try to create), a political agitator, a ritual. That's how I listen."

On the forum, I paired this approach with something that I took from reading Hardt & Negri's Empire - which is that the only way for the people (by which I mean "hackers" in the information-producers sense of the term that McKenzie Wark uses in his book The Hacker Manifesto) to avoid a kind of slavery in the grip of capitalist powers is to understand, embrace, and soberly wield the methods of capitalism: that is, all the lovely postmodern trappings of the information age. Rather than reject the methods of capitalism (commodification, informationalisation, etc) simply because they are used to cripple and marginalize - it should be the artist's goal to command these techniques and use them to dissolve the fantasy of a fascist super-community that one either belongs to or is rejected from outright (refuse to participate in the discourse of populist media? - you're now irrelevant, marginal, and dangerous). I put it like this on the forum:

Aesthetic homogeny is a tool (and really a fantasy) for the power behind the commodification of art - the myth of a "universal appeal" I think both grabs the wheel of art in capitalism to steer things away from the individual, and also dissolves the idea of community in favor of a kind of fascist super-community that you're either a part of, or nothing. So aesthetic naval-gazing is just the sort of spice to sprinkle onto the rhizomatic/postmodern community prototype - one that embraces the structures of power we have today, but turns them like a knife to cut apart that fantasy super-community.

It's the idea of the rhizomatic, postmodern, decentralized community prototype that gets me the most excited. I can see it everywhere, bubbling under the surface, and more often forcing change, dismantling the super-community brick by brick.

As Ben sees the rhizome:

I think when I talk about "industrialism" I think I try to listen with industrial ears - what complete listening is to me is hearing everything that made a particular piece of music possible. A very incomplete list for say a Sunday afternoon band concert would be: the construction worker who worked on the hall, the Fedex truck that delivered the music (and the factory workers who built the Fedex truck), the legislation in the House of Commons that lead to the formation of the colonialist military organization that originally commissioned a march for the recent acquisition of Bangladesh to the British empire - subsequent from which the composer of the second piece stole the second horn part for his trio section, the man who worked in a motorcycle who eventually begot the tuba player's grandpa, ETC. ETC. ETC.

Broken

I just found a very nice review of my record on the Grooves Mag site:

These songs are all about the comfort of smothering: The thickly layered sounds echo the familiarity of warm blankets, impenetrable snowfall, a mother's embrace. The whole affair seems like a gushy proposition, but Schoster approaches the challenge with consistency and style, backing up melodic content with chops in beat programming and signal processing. The sheer variety of sound sources used in the album's nine cryptically named tracks add up to a sonic scrapbook of sorts, cataloging conversations with friends, eerie voicemail messages, and interviews with fellow composers, adding necessary inhabitants to an otherwise depopulated landscape of pure tones and micro-beats. - John H. Degroot [read the rest]

Notes and Lines

I'm becoming interested in note based music again - really since Marcos played some Sciarrino for me the other day. Of course, the more I think about notes, and interact with notes, the old problems seep back to irk me.

For instance, the other day we saw the LU Symphony play a Dutilleux violin sonata - I don't remember what it was called, but it was great. Maybe great then especially because it followed the heavy and gross lines of the William Tell Overture (or "the Lone Ranger" as Paul overheard an older gentleman describe it) - so Dutilleux's traditionalism didn't bug me, all I heard were the quiet spectral moments when cymbol rushes blended darkly into a mass of velvet cello.

Anyway, afterward, Jen was telling us about one of her favorite parts, and referred to the "high E" to orient us to the spot she was describing. She was just using the language that was most comfortable for her - a practical language that comes from working daily with scores. Nevermind that none of us (Bryan, Paul, or I) had actually seen the score for the piece, had perfect pitch, or in Paul's case (since he knew the piece) had sat down to transcribe it -- nevermind all that. What irked me at that moment was the way that note name was being used - it was being used exactly, to decribe a sound, to stand in for a sound. Words don't stand for sounds - or, what I mean is, words don't stand for sounds in any exact way. In fact, I'd say the only attraction in using words to stand for sounds is that they'll always be imperfect stand-ins. It's that loss in translation that's fun, where the magic happens. So I was irked, coming from a performance of a piece that seemed to me to shine for its skill at stepping away from the shackles of notes (into the world of sounds, spectrum, color, fluidity, etc) only to be described with this audiovisual term that conjures a dead black spot on a stark white page. Ugh.

It reminded me of the danger in scores - for them to devour the sounds they should be enabling. And it reminded me why on Friday I found Sam Adler's music to be as dead as those dots on the page - except for his piano piece, and I'm convinced it had something to with the fact that he was forced to use non-standard notation to realize the inside-piano bits.

All that aside, I'm excited to use a score, and an acoustic ensemble - it doesn't seem like a waste of time anymore, I see a glimmer of hope again. Thanks Marcos!

Alphabet Tones

I got Nathan Michel's new record "The Beast" yesterday, and it's really lovely. I want to be like him when I grow up. To live on a stipend from Princeton which pays him to make records for Tigerbeat6 and Sonig - that's a nice dream.

In the realm of dreams, I also got more LaMonte Young yesterday. One day, I'd like to visit the Dream House. For now, mornings in my drone-soaked room with a hot cup of tea are suiting me well.

Spectral Folk

iTunes needs a del.icio.us-style tagging system.

I just recovered my external harddrive from the EMC studio, where it has sat since my computer was sent in for repair a few weeks ago. It was nice to have a very small collection of music for a while - I found myself going deeper with a given record than I may have otherwise, simply because it was the only one of its kind I had to choose from. For instance, I've been craving the drone for a solid week or more. I got my satisfaction from Stars of the Lid (and an actual physical Kranky comp) until a few days ago. Now I'm chewing through LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, COIL, and Stockhausen's Stimmung again. Kaija Saariaho has gotten some heavy play as well - along with some other academic acoustic music, mostly of the IRCAM orbit. So what?

So, I realized that I suck in my music in loose associative categorical waves. I could say that I'm now into my Minimal-Drone collection, and my Academic DSP collection, or my Academic collection, or my Academic Folk, or Laptop DSP, or Spectral Folk collection, etc, etc. That's where iTunes is failing me. I want to sift through my collection for the sort of loose and rhizomatic categories that del.icio.us gives me for bookmarks. I'm tagging away with the custom genre box, but it's just not the same. Where is my statistical feedback, broken into clouds of popular tags and the like?

I guess I'll put on some Roger Reynolds and cross my fingers that a miracle will occur in Cupertino.

Snow Drone

I'm not sure when it started, but I just looked out my window and it is snowing. I feel a little bit like I conjured the snow - I'm in the middle of a suite of perfect snowy-day activites: Reading Middlemarch, sipping a mug of hot green tea, and listening to the drones of LaMonte Young (Dreamhouse 78'17).

Speaking of drones, I was met with a happy sound when I surfed over to the polyfusia site this morning: a track from the new Clifford/Kealoha collab.

Raunch Feminism

Really nice entry on "raunch feminism" in Momus' blog today:

Raunch as choreography emerges from working class strip bars, cheap Western porn tapes, sexist rap videos. It confuses sex with the sex industry, and sexiness with pimping and whoring. It also confuses all sex with dick sex: its main move is the thrust, and its main facial expression the rock-guitar-solo "gurn". [...] My main objection (apart from the visceral aesthetic objection) to raunch feminism is this. Feminism as a project has two sides: the dismantling of patriarchy, and the empowerment of women. Raunch feminism proposes that women can be "empowered" without dismantling patriarchy... in fact, by embracing "the male gaze" entirely.

link

very little

I said I'd write more on aesthetics and ideas, but I really only had one more thought to make. I still weigh aesthetics into the "practical" - the other day I told Myer that I had given up the functionality of FireFox for the beauty of Safari. I've since gone back to FireFox (and ahead to Flock now and again) but the theme remains. Beauty - as problematic my relationship may be to that word, we're learning to get along for better or worse - often works as my divining rod for culture, theory, technology, etc. I gravitate towards beautiful things. I'm happy to report though that as my world of beauty sprawls into places I never thought I'd go, it has lead me also to thoughts I never expected to have. I guess I'm on the sound poetry square of the monopoly board right now - still dodging hotels.

the prettiness of good thoughts

Here's a little personal history. I remember when I first realized that erotic appeal of counterculture screw-your-homework-read-nietzsche transgression married to radical visual and audio culture. I'm a composer, and so maybe that's why it was first with a book called "Jamming the Media." It was probably junior year of high school - when I was still publishing a zine - and I think I bought Oval's Ovalcommers that same month. To me, Autechre was shiny and new, and I had a feverish need to absorb anything I thought would take me deeper into a world of skipping CDs and homemade literature. Reading Jamming was a simultaneous experience: I could absorb a history of radical media activism, while learning and marveling at what was for me at least a completely radical and beautiful presentation. The design made the book easy to fetishize. I remember it being thrilling to first read about the book, and then to own my own copy and feel the exhilaration of reading an essay about mail art couched under a fractured typeface. Even the type of paper was new to me - the visual experience was striking, I had never seen a book like this. But it wasn't just the beautiful design - I was as tantilized by the aesthetics of the design as I was by the aesthetics of the content of the book. The revolutionary immediacy of directly subverting a real power - the media - was entangled with punk rock and avant garde art and all those other cool things I knew enough about to know that I wanted to slip into their culture somehow.

More later...

ps, if anyone is listening, dial the knob to this: [mp3]
tobais on the air - ignore the annoying host if you can.

Lost

Rather than sleep, I watched a film about sleepless navel-gazers: Lost in Translation. Watching it again made me remember Momus' essay about the film:

It's the 'lesbian until graduation' syndrome, and Sofia is definitely interested in graduating. The world she's graduating from -- Japan, visual culture, youth culture -- is my world. That's why I feel betrayed too.

Essay

Flock

I'm blogging from Flock. This is a test.

the cult of tech

I had a little conversation with Bryan at lunch today, and we speculated how tech-saavy one of the visiting professors in the composition faculty actually is. The evidence: he can talk the talk, but makes some telling flubs (like referring to objects in max/msp in a strange and ambiguous way, or conceptualizing certain problems in a subtly un-techy fashion). He works in max/msp, has pointed us to analysis/resynthesis software by programmer friends, and can ramble on about esoteric IRCAM technologies with the best of them. I swear I saw him double-click on the back button in Internet Explorer though - also: Internet Explorer!? Unthinkable.

I remembered an article I saw on Myer's del.icio.us page - from usa today, but we'll forgive that for a minute - that spoke of the de-territorialization of tech-saavy people. It makes sense - technology is becoming networked in every capacity, and where there are networks, communities can form regardless of geography. The interesting thing to me is this phenomenon of a kind of naturalization of techyness. You are or you aren't. You get it or you don't. The initiates are constantly scanning for telltale signs of outsider status, and there's an emerging tech class system at work I think.

It'd be interesting to look at if there's a relationship between knowing tech and manufacturing ideas. If those who browse file systems as naturally as fishing a pencil from their pocket are better candidates for the sort of "hacker-proletariat" class that McKenzie Wark outlines in his Hacker Manifesto.

I don't have time to google it now, I need to get to class.

Arts and Letters and Truths

Look, now I'm convinced it's fashionable again to lay deep faith in Truth:

There's nothing less exhilarating than reducing everything to social constructs and to our piddly human points of view. The pleasure of thinking is in trying to get outside of ourselves—this is as true in the arts and the humanities as in math and the sciences. There's something heroic in the idea of objective knowledge; the farther away knowledge takes you from your own individual point of view, the more heroic it is. Maybe the new ideas that are going to revitalize the arts and humanities are going to be allied with the sciences. - REBECCA GOLDSTEIN

It's frustrating that Goldstein can't separate truth from beauty from herself. It's one thing - a great thing - to find great beauty in mathematics, "objective" truths and etc - but it's another thing altogether to close the book, so to speak, and place it back on the shelf. She makes statements like

[C.P. Snow's book] had a big impact on me, impressing me with the hollowness of bifurcating the intellect and the passions. The intellect is passionate.

and I'm hopeful - but she follows that passion out to the bitter end. It is possible to utilize reason and to find the beauty in it (I could say 'beauty' instead of 'reason' as well) without tricking yourself into thinking that reason is some gift of God, an absolutely True assessment of the natural world as it is. I don't think reason needs to be worshiped as Zeus in order for it to be useful, breathtaking, etc. Let's not kid ourselves... that kind of stubbornness breeds war and spite and etc...

It's interesting though that in this decade - if I can make a gross generalization based on the content of Arts and Letters Daily; why not, here goes - it seems that Truth is making a comeback, and it's a bitter, vengeful one. What's that, Mr. N?

There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.

mr cage

cott: "[...]the liberal establishment is killing us [...]"

cage: "though i am going to die, i'm on the side of life"

i haven't listened to this in a long while - cott is hilarious and cage is sublime:
download from archive.org

iPod/MSP

i wonder if systems music will ever burst into the marketplace. hipsters walking down busy districts, flipping through algorithms on their iPods - locked into that other green world, tethered to their headphones, but listening to the sounds around them: fractal-remixed. you know, microphones sampling the sounds around them and remixing everything into their headphones. i'd buy one, that'd be the best driving music - displaced, formant-shifted, folded and refolded engine noise. yaaaaa.

not so far off maybe - lets do work on getting max/msp running on one of those things, okay?

nagarjuna and derrida

how much is this dude like this dude?

Deconstruction and Nagarjunian dialectic walking hand in hand? K-i-s-s-i-n-g...

am i tip-toeing into a major anachronism? i think there's something here...

phonocentrism

Is drawing an analog between phonocentrism (placing speech and thought above or before writing: logos, cosmic reason) and the genius of the composer / genius of the realization-performance, interesting? performing/speaking, thinking/composing... interesting or obvious? or missing the point?

titles shouldn't come first... so i'll call these meme-scraps or something...

the logocentricty of notation: thoughts on derrida and post-digital sound
thinking without words and tearing down barlines
structures of listening / notational regimes
inside recording / outside repetition

logcentricity and music

derrida: plato's pharmacy. logocentricity & musical notation. does spectral thought escape or displace musical logocentrism? is the recorded sound like the written word? does recording break free from repetition or further obscure and enforce it? pharmacy. structure, sign, play.

saussure and the remix

saussure's courses on general linguistics - relationship to dj spooky's remix culture? spectralism? (making signs of sounds, from recording technology & computer analysis etc) psychoacoustics?

nietzsche and sunyata

is nietzsche's "thing in itself" at all like sunyata? look into metaphor, language, ties to spectralism, keith rowe and juxtaposition, sound as superstructure, artfulness of language