Writers Write

I'm reviving this blog with a thought that passed through my head as I tried to fall asleep - a few thoughts actually:

1. I might enjoy writing words for a living more then I enjoy writing code for a living.
2. I need to practice writing badly. I now compose in twitter-size structures; my conversations and writing are a series of unfunny one-liners. I wrote an honest-to-god letter last month and it was a disgrace.
3. Even if I don't write to feed myself and my work with sound, it would be nice to speak and write like an adult again - I'm not quite sure where that skill began to dissolve, but I was certainly better at it at 17 than I am right now.
4. I now have a hypothesis for my general disinterest with fiction in the face of a brooding love for language: if language is the art of abstracting thought, I suppose that means I'm more interested in the thoughts of my fellow human beings that fence directly with this shared experience we call life rather then those diversions that dick around with some cockamamie fantasy of abstraction and escape. It's strange that I think representation in literature dances much closer to the line of direct experience then abstraction in literature, while I feel the opposite about sound - more or less anyway.

I guess I'll have to write about it.

Packing

I'm packing for my move to Brooklyn, and batting at the cat as I go.  I have to say if there was a camera on me today, it would look like this:

Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan

Just a quick note to acknowledge Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan's excellent duo record, which has been caressing the hours of my workday for a week or so now. You can purchase the record here, and for drone fans, I strongly encourage you to do so!

Triphasic Sleep: The Week in Review

Last week I embarked on a little experiment I've been meaning to try for a few years. I was first introduced to the idea of polyphasic sleep sometime during college - I forget the context, but suffice it to say I probably came across it during an exam period. The idea is fairly simple: break your sleep schedule into smaller more frequent chunks, and you will gain more time overall as a result of having to sleep less.

For the exceptionally hardcore, there is the polyphasic method championed by such night-owls as Buckminster Fuller. This involves various and sundry sleeping patterns of say 20 minutes every 4 hours or 30 minutes of sleep every 6 hours, etc. Various polyphasic approaches are detailed on this wiki.

I've always had trouble falling asleep and waking up - and I've certainly never been able to pull off a successful nap. Without fail I'm either twice as groggy afterward as when I went to sleep, or I sleep way too long for it to qualify as a nap. Polyphasic sleep per se was kind of out of the question for me.

Instead, I went with a triphasic model - which is just a fancy way of saying I sleep three times a day - and broke my sleep periods into chunks that mirrored a full and natural REM cycle of 90 minutes.

I started my first waking day last Sunday at 10am after waking from a full eight hours of sleep. My first sleep period actually began on Monday, in order to deprive myself enough that I'd be able to fall asleep right away. That was important since I needed to be able to set my alarm to go off roughly 90 minutes after I actually fell asleep in order to wake again at the end of a natural sleep cycle. So the sooner I was able to fall asleep after setting it, the better.

I won't detail every day journal-style, as I've seen others do, but here's a run-down of my daily schedule and a rough overview of my experience.

Each day I slept three times. Once in the early morning from 5:30am until 7:00am. Again in the afternoon from 1:30pm until 3:00pm. And finally in the evening from 8:30pm until 10:00pm. This seemed like a good and even distribution. I was only out for 90 minutes of the work day, and I wouldn't need to miss any evening events like shows etc. I should mention in case you don't know me, I freelance for a living, and I'm lucky enough my schedule can be flexible enough to accommodate a little modification like this. I did quickly find out however, that while the extra awake hours gave my productivity a serious boost - I missed a sleep cycle at least once because my hours aren't always as flexible as all that.

The first few days were both tougher and easier than I expected them to be. On the one hand, I've never been so regular in my sleep patterns before in my life. As long as I can remember I've taken at least an hour and sometimes two to fall asleep at night, and I tend to be a snooze-button guy, where the wake-up process can last just as long. Since high school I've learned to set my alarm at least an hour and a half earlier than I actually want to get up if it's very important that I get up on time. Sleeping in 90 minute periods seems to be an amazing solution for this. Waking up at the end of a full REM cycle was way easier than I'm used to, and I found that I was consistently tired enough in the half hour or so before my cycles to be able to fall asleep right away. I also began meditating again in the minutes leading up to my cycles, which I think helped me fall asleep easier.

What was tough was I thought at first a simple matter of adjusting to the new pattern and amount of sleep I was getting. I'm not used to getting 4.5 hours a night, so I figured it would take some adjusting. I was a little groggy between cycles during the first two days - but that actually went away surprisingly quickly. The toughest thing for me was losing the psychological sense of a day beginning and ending.

I ended my week of experimentation with a full 8 hours of sleep during the night, and the thing that surprised me the most the following day was that I recalled the events of the entire previous week the same way I would recall the events of one day. Everything ran together like one massive undulating day. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to keep that up any longer than I did.

I really enjoyed the extra time this schedule gave me though, and so I'm trying a new variation this coming week. I'll be sleeping for three hours (a multiple of 90 minutes) each evening - from 4:00am to 7:00am, with a 90 minute nap at some point throughout the day depending on when my schedule allows. I think this will make my sleep schedule not conflict with my work/life schedule as much (that came up twice last week) and I'm hoping to solve the strange never-ending day phenomenon by going to sleep when it is dark and waking up when it is light for my longest cycle. Last night was my first 4-7 period, and so far so good. I don't feel any more tired than I did last week so far - and definitely no more tired than I would on 8 or more hours of sleep.

More next week!

Let's Keep Writing

Thanks to Myer I've been reading Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror on a regular basis recently. For a web designer turned developer it's a godsend - especially for someone like me who dry-humps the very idea of 'best practices' in every systematic thing I do.

Today I came across a post in which Jeff outlines an extremely simple best practice of sorts for being a blogger: Choose a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. It's moronically simple, which is why it's also utterly useful advice. So, I decided to take it, and use this blog and Lovely Media as my experiments.

When I started this 'dreamlife of letters blog' it was specifically with the intent that nobody would read it. I had just started working on my book (which will be the subject of many future posts, and is the driving motivation to get off my ass and write again) and was looking for an easy and accessible place to catalog my ideas. This was before the days of google documents.

Somewhere along the line I started to occasionally write as though someone were actually reading. I went back and forth this way for a while until my current "somebody might be reading but it's probably just Myer" mentality. If you are reading, thanks Myer! But after reading Jeff's post I've become inspired to make this thing work both as a dumping-ground for research and ideas related to my book and other detritus as well as something a person who does not know me may actually enjoy reading occasionally.

The whole point of Lovely Media on the other hand was to make the common link-email-exchange that happened amongst my friends a community activity. I thought we were all sharing some pretty neat things with each other, and it made sense to also share these neat things with anyone who might be interested.

So I'm going to alternate between the two blogs - three posts a week for each, after Jeff's six post goal. I think it's a good one - gives me a day off, and by splitting time between blogs I have some variety personally. The actual problem of when to post is one I haven't worked out yet. I'm writing this at nearly 1am in the morning, which is probably when most posts will happen, but I'll need to feel out when I'm in the most bloggy mood as I go I suppose. I'm on a new triphasic sleep schedule (more on that soon) and so I have a lot more hours in the day to choose from to designate as blogging / writing time.

No matter who is reading, if anyone, I can already tell it's going to feel good to write again.

I Was So Wrong

Maybe it's just that my blog reading habits have taken another upswing recently, or that I've found more interesting things to read, but Google Reader has become part of my daily routine (most days) and I was so wrong about it. Netvibes may look pretty, but I'm reading more with Google Reader. You win this time, Myer! ;-)

google reader versus netvibes

I recently switched my browser homepage and overall RSS reader solution from netvibes to google's reader. For the most part, I'm happy with the switch, even with netvibes' recent rollout of their 'ginger' version and the social networking capabilities that come with it.

As Myer has heard me admit over and over, my guilty secret is that I often choose design aesthetics over functionality. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and I'm sure if you talk to any interface design specialist they'll talk your ear off about the beauty of a well designed functional interface. That said, I'll still sacrifice features for beauty in most cases. I'm guilty! For example, I develop websites in Firefox because it is far and away the best suited for the job: an extension called firebug is most of the reason why this is true, but the whole extension architecture available to firefox just makes it the most functionally robust browser out there. I'm typing this blog in Safari however, and I do most of my browsing here. It just looks so nice, and even though it lacks the huge feature set of Firefox, the interface design is amazingly clean and simple.

So I'm going against my instinct a bit by adopting google reader. I did find a skin for it that makes it look pretty - using it under safari is very nice. Ironically it was made by the guy who designed the logo for Firefox. I miss a few things about Netvibes functionally and interface-wise however:

1. In netvibes, each feed has its own space on the page, so I can see at a glance what has been updated, and I like browsing by source like that. Google reader mashes everything together on one page and provides two options for viewing: the full post, which means you can see at most two or three posts at once; or a squished list with the first few words of the post visible, like gmail. I'm opting for the second view so I can see more of what's new at once, but that brings me to the second thing I miss:


2. In netvibes, I could mouse over the title of a collapsed blog post on the front page and up would pop a lovely little AJAX floating summary near my mouse. All I had to do to quickly skim the first few paragraphs of all the new entries on my page was mouse over new posts. I could quickly get a sense of the things I wanted to read and click in from there to read longer posts. With google reader it's a bit more cumbersome - I do get to see the first few words of a post, but that rarely gives me a good sense of what I'm about to click into. In a perfect world, writers would write functional titles and opening sentences to give me a great idea of what I'm getting into. Course, that's not the case!

I'm sure this all sounds incredibly picky - but having a good interface to work with can be the difference between getting use out of a tool, and throwing the tool to the wayside. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with google - if only for the really fun 'share' feature. Also they pretty much own my life these days, so you know.

be kind, rewind

Tonight I saw Michel Gondry's new film 'Be Kind, Rewind.' Going in to the film I was expecting a certain level of artfulness and humor that had been hinted at in the trailers and from what I knew of his previous work. What I didn't expect - what I was happy to find - was a social film with activism and community at its core; a vitality and humanity I've only seen in films close (in both history and ideology) to the events of May 1968, in particular Truffaut's 'Stolen Kisses.'

Stolen Kisses is a special product of a time just after student uprisings in France and all over the world had in some cases come close to toppling whole governments. You can feel a sense of an excited "what's next?" being collectively whispered throughout the film, and particularly represented in the young Antoine Doinel. It's an incredibly optimistic film, just on the edge of an emerging era and culture.

Be Kind Rewind gave me this same impression - but rather than simply attempting to recycle a forced agenda of revolution and optimism, the film seems as though it simply has no choice. It articulates itself essentially in the language and grammar of now: the trailing edge of globalized culture, which is no longer an impending and dreaded model trickling its way through our lives, but a critical and essential matter of the way we live. What is really interesting to me is that the way the film (and I would argue, culture on the whole) reclaims the conditions of globalized culture for the people is by the acute territorialization of culture. It's very important that we're witnessing the interactions of a specific small town in New Jersey, that we're seeing a microculture interacting with itself, but also and I think very critically, that we see it interacting with global culture.

Throughout the film we are constantly aware of a shared media reality - this small community acts it out by staging 'ghostbusters' or 'driving miss daisey' etc. This community takes ownership of the culture that has been disseminated from Empire, and which in this film is represented by the empire state: New York. Gondry does a wonderful and effective job in telling what is a recent story, and what stands to characterize this emerging century: the decentralization of cultural power and ideology. It sounds terribly cliche to speak of the 'youtube generation' for example, but it's worth pointing out that we're at a unique point in cultural history that is putting notions of authorship and authority that are really fairly young into question.

I had a short conversation with someone at the SPARK festival recently about how their students apparently had no qualms about drawing from a 'democratized pool' of sound bits and software tools, with absolutely no regard to authorship. He was lamenting the fact that he'd hear the breakbeat from 'funky drummer' in his student's music, and that they had no knowledge of its origin. My response was that I find this kind of loss of authorship extremely exciting, and I think it's representative of a potential for the creative act to re-emerge as a fundamentally community activity. Rather than looking at art and artwork as a product of individual genius, we are learning to understand it as a cultural communication. Be kind rewind understands this, and I was incredibly happy to see it articulated in such an ecstatic way. The film says "do" - and that's what we're doing.

Drone Again

I'm so back onto drones. Was I ever off drones? I'm feeling that wave of "why would I ever listen to or make any other kind of music" again. Here's a short list of great drones:

1. ghosting - their current myspace song.


2. the dream syndicate (lamonte young, tony conrad, et al) - 2 iv 64


3. lamonte young - dreamhouse 78'17


4. lamonte young - the melodic version (1984) of the second dream of the high-tension line stepdown transformer from the four dreams of china (1962)


5. tony conrad - pythagoras, refusing to cross the bean field at his back, is dispatched...

I also got a copy of Sun Circle, which is pretty much a cover album of Lamonte Young's rare Black Album by Greg Davis and Zach Wallace. I was SO excited about it when I ordered it. I need to listen to it again, but I wasn't super impressed on the first listen. There's a glacial-speed development that happens in lamonte young's best stuff, it almost becomes vertical - time stands on one end and begins to move straight upward. Sun Circle on first listen does a great job of apeing the aesthetic of the Dreamhouse stuff, but it just felt flat to me. I was in a terrible mood when I put it on though, so that might be it.

jog he can

I came across this poem dedicated to John Cage today. I guess i'm not in the mood for fluxus poetry today, but it was nice to see I'm not the first to anagram Mr. Cage.

I was in the mood to play the trombone today, which was the first time I sat down and practiced in months and months. I'm incredibly rusty, but working my chops back up to a passable quality was a lot of fun. I'm sure it annoyed the neighbors though.

What's annoying me right now is whether it's okay for me to sing a song about Jesus at my show on Saturday. I'm not religious, but tasteful devotional songs have recently been very comforting to me. I can't decide if my song would be insulting to a hypothetical Christian audience, despite the respect I intend in performing it. I may chicken out and just sing a love song instead... Those are always offensive to someone regardless.

Production and the Culture of Play

For me, and I think for Cage, Hardt, Negri, and Derrida at least - and probably others but definitely not everyone - what's at stake in all this sweating over theory and resistance is the preservation or maybe emancipation, or even deployment of play (depending on what stage we think we're at with play in our lives, if arriving at a diagnosis like that is even useful...). The problem with saying something like that is that resting on something like play obviously begs an outline of that thing: what exactly is play? Or maybe better - and a little more slippery - free play?

I think, like Chomsky says (I might be misinterpreting him, but this is what I hope he means) we need to be brave enough to act with incompletes - that is, we need to leap into control as far as we are able of the production of justice, even though we haven't arrived at Justice - and, of course we may argue that the entire idea of arriving at a coalesced thing Justice is both impossible and dangerous, etc etc: have your poststructrual field day here. So: I don't know what Play is any more than I know what Justice is, but in the spirit of theory complementing action, here's some grasping at a distinction that seems to me like an entry point for action.

Play, I think, is in danger of being confused with consumption - and I think that danger is largely due to influences of capitalist ideology. (Surprise! ;-) ) Play, I think, is a critically active and productive mode or pursuit or whatever. When I think of play, it's Cage developing strategies for sound, or it's my bud kev crafting a prototype for the compilation we're putting together, or it's Zizek watching Casablanca and cooking up his bit about Bogart and Bergman's sex and not-sex. The last example is where I think the danger slips in. The ideology of capitalism is such that value lies totally in the act of consumption - or at least, that "something more" that products promise is contained directly in the act of consumption. Consumption isn't the spark of a process, or a step along the way, it's a necessarily self-contained bubble of value: it not only doesn't require any response, I'd argue it encourages unresponsiveness - a kind of reverence for its doing a good job of providing the experience of consumption.

So, here maybe is a good place of distinction for what I think are the most exciting activist trends right now: institutions, loose collectives, products, and other mostly capitalist ephemera that not only leaves open a door to active production, but pretty much demands it. That's what I think the mark of play is: production. The production of an object, a community, or a discourse, whatever - but an active and critical production.

I read about a system that won an award at Ars Electronica which I think is a nice disruption of consumption - it makes a kind of injection of play into normal consumption. It's a website where you can enter the barcode of any product, and it will identify undisclosed ingredients, and provide access to a critical discussion about that product or its components. The idea is to eventually have support for cell phones, so you could go to the store, use your camera-phone to scan a barcode and read about some mysterious chemical listed on the side of your cereal, or whatever. This is an active kind of culture - it makes a space for play.

Now - already I think capitalist ideology and methodology is trying to swallow up what I'll go out on a limb and say is an explosion or at least the initial tremors of a culture of play. There's a television station that sells advertising by the year to companies like Sony, who don't then provide advertisements for their products - the station runs ads that it asks its viewers to make. I'm worried about things like that, the danger here is claiming play in the name of consumption, and remaking play so that it works for consumption. That TV station seems great - but I really doubt you'd see a spot about Sony that takes a critical position towards the company the way you might on youtube for example. What there will be is an ad that is at commercial quality, in the language of consumption, that uses the power of play to validate itself: "someone just like you made this themselves! it's part of who you are!"

I think one of the most important things to do right now at a time where the internet is in danger of losing its freedoms is to actively claim a culture of play, and deploy it in the face of consumption.

digitalization and slum-living

No time for commentary, off to work (in the wake of international worker's day!) but Zizek has made this point elsewhere, and I think it's fascinating - I hope not in any fetishistic way, but who knows. In a talk that you can download here he sets up the potential for new ways of living at the intersection of digitalization (and Gibson's cyberpunk novels come up here) and poverty/slum-living. I couldn't find a better quote, but he touches on the idea here:

While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, it is extremely surprising how many of their features fit the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary class. Even more than the classic proletariat, they are “free” in the double meaning of the word—“freed” from all substantial ties and dwelling in a free space outside state and police regulations. They are large collectives, forcibly thrown into a situation where they must invent some mode of being-together, while simultaneously deprived of any inherited ethnic and religious traditions.
[...]
We should be watching the slum collectives for signs of new forms of social awareness: They will be the seeds of the future.

The article is here, and the mp3 is here (search the 2004 mp3 page for Zizek, he's buried a bit near the bottom of the page).

Temporary Services

There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will. [...] If we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution, though it would be absurd, of course, to try to sketch out in detail the goal that we are hoping to reach, still we should know something about where we think we are going, and such a theory may tell it to us. [...] It is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark. - Noam Chomsky in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1971

I think critical theory can learn something from this position, and from experimental science (as far as I understand it anyway). In physics, it seems to me, that the best theoretical physicists and the best experimental physicists would make Foucualt happy - they never allow themselves to feel too confident about the axioms they deal with, and test everything again at every chance. I think of Richard Feynman especially when I say that, but I'm sure if I knew more about other good scientists (lauded and invisible both) it would apply to them as well. So the best physicist is in a sense, a wonderful post-structrualist: self-reflexive, metacritical, ready to deconstruct in the face of ritual and common sense. What Chomsky opines to Foucault, though, and what I think is often the missing frosting on the cake of deconstruction, is this kind of boldness to say "okay, we have a pretty good idea what we're after, lets take a step forward and be ready to shift directions along the way." Chomsky is talking about constructing theories - but what he's after is an out-of-the-laboratory wielding of shaky theoretical terms like justice for example. As ready-to-break as the concept may be, we have to be bold enough to push it beyond its limits into practice and action - always looking to the laboratory for the new ready-to-break model.

I'd like to try to tie together a few ideas that seem to me to resonate well together. To start, here's a list:

• Cageian free play. Cage's zen aesthetic of no-aesthetic or maybe, all-aesthetic, was futuristic - he was invested in the idea (that is becoming material) that technology would bring society into a position where its primary activity could be peaceful and spontaneous free play, rather than a struggle for survival. I wouldn't call it so very different from Derridian free play, though Derrida might be utopian in a different sense - the practical impractical utopian.
• Empire and the network of the multitude. Negri and Hardt set the stage for free play - or, at least, the potential for it. Empire is built on an infrastructure that could support free play, but while a push towards the repurposing of Empire is imminent it is probably in its infancy.

Activist culture, I'm happy to observe, when it isn't apathetic (that's an odd too-common phenomenon, apathetic activism...) is wonderfully and loosley pointed in the above direction. The network is the operative concept in art and culture it seems - and this network is exactly the infrastructure I mentioned that is giving up so much promise of an in-this-lifetime (maybe) free play. Check out the group Temporary Services for evidence.

I listened to an interview with Michael Hardt (Empire co-author) a night or two ago, and the interviewer asked him why he and Negri were so recklessly optimistic. He pointed to a long tradition of communist and activist optimism - of treating defeats as the seeds of victory. He brought up Marx's metaphor of the mole burrowing and burrowing with every action, positioned to break to the surface. I'm optimistic.

Radical Verses

I had a conversation with Melanie last night about activist methodology. For this project I'm working on, format and tone is important - I'm working on it for selfish reasons, but I'm also hoping to contribute to the already bubbling discourse on aesthetics and life - so I'd like to find a way to present my ideas that won't come off abrasively.

This morning, reading through the Dhammapada, I realized that it was a wonderful model of a radical activist work. Here's a bit from it:

Those who take the non-real for the real and the real for the non-real and thus fall victims to erroneous notions, never reach the essence of reality.

Having realized the essential as the essential and the nonessential as the nonessential, they by thus following correct thinking attain the essential.

So, for now, I'm working with the idea of writing an essay, and then boiling it down into verses, and repeating for every section of this project. I haven't been able to let go of that traditional essay format entirely - I'm a parenthetical statement, constant footnote kind of guy, I need to work with a rhizome of interconnecting statements - but the idea of pairing essays with clean (at least on the surface) verses seems like just the right thing. Douglas Hofstadter did it in his own radical activist work, Godel, Escher, Bach, with his pairing of essays and fantasy dialogs.

And Cole Swenson seems to be doing it in her poetry. Radical verses seem to have just the right amount of ambiguity and room for free play - though, I'm still a fan of the complementary essay. (Swenson scholars seem to be too ;) )

Structuring Aesthetics

I'm going back to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire now that I have the time to give it the attention it deserves. This is the first step into a project I hope to spend a few years on, and that will hopefully materialize at some point (or several points) as an essay or a book - or maybe a generative web-based installation, we'll see what the best format will be. The project is essentially driven by a question that has bothered me for years - since I began to look at what I do creatively in a critical light.

I'm interested in taking a que from Foucault, to examine the patterns and ripples surrounding the production of aesthetic objects. I'm using all those words in a really broad sense - by aesthetic object I mean a painting or a song as much as I mean a community or an event. I'm interested in the deep structure of functional aesthetics - that is, I want to look at how art and artful practice (ideally in the spirit of Derridian play, or Cageian play, but also the artful practice of propaganda, coercion, and other manifestations of power for example) are components of living, how they might produce meaning, or how they might be symptomatic of ideologies. It seems to me that the aesthetic and the functional can't be seperated, and that I'll need to look at one as a component of the other, and the other way around - Myer and I have had some nice discussions on this topic. It also seems like the conflict between the self and the multitude, or the self and the other will be a rich area to look into. I'm launching out from a Marxist base because it feels the most solid - we'll see where I might land.

Wherever it is, I want to arrive firmly in the arena of the real - that is, i'd like to develop a methodology by working through these theories. I'll say plainly that I'm working with an activist's mindset, and I want to come away from this with a toolset I can utilize in my creative work and elsewhere.

After I finish Empire right now I think i'll move onto A Hacker Manifesto - Wark's definition of a hacker as an information producer, and a special emerging class in the information age rubs me the right way.

(ps, i was lucky enough to find the same photo i used the last time i posted about negri, but with more of negri's office visible - hopefully that will be a nice complement to my understanding of his book this time around. i'd like to see a little more of his office ;-) )

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]