C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.
We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.
I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.
I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.
Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.
Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.
I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.
A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.
I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.
In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.
In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.
In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?
I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?
The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.
Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.
This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.
One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]
In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.
“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”
Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.
In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.
“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]
“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.
I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.
Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.
Those were the days when computers looked like this:
They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.
Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.
“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]
We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.
“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.
“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.
“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].
“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]
The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.
By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.
A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)
In the Meantime
While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.
The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.
Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.
When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!
Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:
I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.
A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.
Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.
They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.
In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.
After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.
Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.
The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.
Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.
Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.
It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.
I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.
The End of Privacy
Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.
Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.
Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.
Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)
So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.
I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.
To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.
The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.
So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.
I had a dream in which I was on a tractor, lurching along, pulling a wagon that was piled with large backpacks. Along for the ride were some rather well-known German DJs, one of whom was named Luke Vibert. (Luke is a real guy, and is not German — I had been listening to a Warp Records compilation earlier in the day, so maybe that’s how he got into my dream…)
Then there was a kind of intercut scene, away from the slow tractor travel, of these DJs in a club, behind their decks and laptops on the DJ platform. Some had guitars slung around their necks (but were not playing them), shouting into a special DJ mike with their German accents, “Ve are African men!, Ve are African men!” The crowd was dancing wildly.
Cut back to the tractor, still lurching along, and the DJs begin some other shout outs — “Space Is Da Place!”...”Space is All That!”...and...”Space is Deep!”
At the time (in my semi-sleep state), I thought these phrases were wildly inventive.
Biked up the west side to Terminal 5, a venue that has put on a lot of shows recently, but that I hadn’t been to since its days as a kind of sleazy disco, when I saw Fischerspooner some years ago. The physical aspect of the place hasn’t changed much — it still feels like a massive, cold, corporate club — but tonight’s show was a parcel of acts on the innovative Warp label, with Battles headlining, so it promised something new.
I liked much of their first record, and the video of the band playing in a mirrored room is incredible, so I was curious. I heard they’d be playing new stuff, so I wondered where they would take whatever it is that they do.
It was pretty amazing — fairly constant driving beats over which guitars, keyboards and loops, fed through all kinds of effects, were layered. The vocals, if you can call them that, were also looped and treated so that they emerged as incomprehensible textures, articulating vaguely melodic riffs. All this leapt from one section to another in ways that made it hard to discern the underlying form or structure of each piece — though the sounds were generally and consistently engaging and involving. They could have been making it all up on the go, but I sensed there was a lot — a LOT — of pre-planning that went into the set. (This was confirmed by some friends who know them and said, yeah, they practice all the time and it’s all very worked out.)
Their poor drummer sometimes looked shagged out, his shirt soaked as he slumped over his kit catching his breath during the few moments when he wasn’t playing — though he never tired or flagged. When the time came he started up again, like a machine recharged. Some of the loops and abrupt changes were hilarious — I laughed out loud — as they sounded like they wouldn’t work, like they were all wrong, but then somehow the insane part would find a context and surprisingly plop into place and it all seemed right. There were pedals all over the stage; even the drumming was going through pedals and loops. The guitarists had their instruments slung way up high, and I realized that was because they were constantly leaning over to hit pedals on a table or tweak the software on their laptops, and if the guitars had longer straps they would have been swinging around smashing all the gear to pieces. It made for a semi-geeky look, but they’re obviously geeks with a mission and purpose, no nonsense.
The “songs” had plenty of dynamic structure within them — ups and downs, and quiet bits and explosive bits — but there were no crescendos and the set as a whole had no typical dynamic build, unless we were all supposed to recognize the last two songs, which from an audience point of view would have signaled “here’s the single.” The dynamics within each “song” were also fairly abrupt — the changes from one section to the next were sudden, like edits. The band is often grouped under the “math rock” genre — which I guess refers to the “cold,” abrupt lack of transitions and inscrutable structure. Parts started, went on for bit, and then ended, just as suddenly as they had begun. No easing into sections, no chorus and verse, no emotional builds and transitions — those seemed to be verboten. There’s a dogma at work here — rules that guide, restrict and limit the music — but I’m only guessing regarding some of the clauses in this invisible manifesto. It was pretty amazing, but not for everyone.
Here is a tube station poster for this installation:
I spent the day talking to the British press and demonstrating the workings of the Playing the Building installation, which opened here tonight in a building called the Roundhouse, a former Victorian industrial train repair facility in north London (near Camden Town, and sort of near Kings Cross station). Because the building is round, steam engines could be rotated over troughs radiating from the centre, positioning them in the proper direction for repair.
In the ’60s it was the site of (UFO) psychedelic rock shows, some promoted by my friend Joe Boyd — Ten Years After, Pink Floyd, etc. It also hosted The Living Theatre and other scandalous naked performers. I played my first UK gig here — Talking Heads opened for the Ramones and the Stranglers in ’76. We had a single out at the time, no album yet. The place was pretty grotty, and here we had our first experience of gobbing — the quaint UK custom of audiences spitting on bands as a sign of appreciation. Yes, it’s for real, and it was disgusting. One could see, like little shooting stars in the stage lights, the white gobs of phlegm flying your way. I didn’t get hit that much, but the Ramones really got pelted. They REALLY didn’t like it. Luckily their leather jackets served to protect them and, in this case, went beyond just presenting a unified look. Beers in plastic cups were also thrown — one landed right on my hairline and tipped its half-consumed contents over my head. Funny how England, the country fairly well known in centuries past for fulfilling its self-proclaimed duty to export “civilization” to the unwashed and the heathen of the world, has a flip side on a par with any unsavory sport or bizarre cultural practice anywhere else. Well, we all do I suppose, but gobbing is a pretty weird way to show your love by any measure.
The venue fell into further disrepair, though being an industrial landmark it was never torn down, and its unique shape made it recognizable. Occasionally it was used for performances that took advantage of its funky rawness, but that also limited its use. A few years ago it went under extensive renovations, and a new structural shell was built that, miraculously, is almost invisible — the Victorian era scrollwork, and cast iron pillars and girders still appear to hold the building up, and are what my installation “plays” — and the new supporting structure is now largely hidden from view, sandwiched between the exterior roof and the massive, original wood beams of the inner roof.
Here is a view showing where new and old interact:
The new roof can support 20 tonnes of weight if needed, more than ample for flying PA systems, lights, stage gear and sets. None of that was possible before, so now this is poised to become a much more viable and active venue in town — though the round shape still makes it unique, and inappropriate for shows requiring a conventional proscenium.
I am in an African village, staying with a local family. It is a Sunday (or similar day off) and family, relatives and friends have all assembled for a backyard get together. There is a large table with food, and people are in attractive local dress (instead of the Western stuff worn during the regular week).
After some festivities, I notice a high, mournful voice singing – not too far away. I follow the source of the singing, and just beyond the gathering I come upon a young African man, maybe 20 years old, at a keyboard singing Neil Young songs. He’s got the high, whiney voice down perfectly, and for a moment I am simply stunned. He sings one song, then goes on to the next one in the Neil Young songbook. I think to myself, “Some Peace Corps person must have left a Neil Young cassette behind, and this kid has taken it upon himself to learn all the songs.”
My hosts and some others appear and ask me if I am impressed with the young man’s talent. “Is he not great?” I tell them yes, I am impressed, he’s amazing, but I politely omit the fact that his talent is, to me, completely useless. My hosts press on, “Since you recognize this man’s talent and skills, don’t you think he could surely be a success in your country?” I am flummoxed, and try to explain nicely that his talent is astounding and surprising — if you close your eyes it really could be Neil Young — but to me, it is of no interest past the moment of initial shock. My hosts aren’t having it. They KNOW this man is talented — and they’re right — and are therefore absolutely certain that he could be huge outside of their village and surrounds. I again try to explain that in my country, a Neil Young already exists, and an African copy, however faithful, is simply unnecessary.
The discussion peters out in mutual misunderstanding and incomprehension.
Love this city! Much of it is in remont (renovation), which calls to mind Berlin in the years right after the wall fell. In Berlin, and between West and East Germany, there was a huge financial surge meant to bring the East up to the functioning level of the shiny, capitalist West — so it all happened extremely quickly. Dumpy East Berlin apartments became squats became nice apartments became luxury goods stores within only a few years. Here the process is slower — there is less money — but there are squats that have transformed into funky lounges and cafés, little restaurants run by former actors and actresses, and crumbling buildings in the old Jewish and Roma (gypsy) ghettos that are fast being bought up. For now, everything is possible (sort of), and everything is in flux. Alternative arts spaces appear and disappear. Exhibitions and performances are held in former industrial spaces.
Thank You U2!
Mark E pointed out as we prepped for our show last night in Warsaw (at a not so big club/venue called Stodoła) that these undersized dates are in effect being subsidized by U2’s world tour. The promoter of these dates, and of much of the U2 stadium tour, is Live Nation, the global conglomerate. A venue like Stodoła could not possibly afford to pay for us, the catering, or even their local crew given the relatively small number of tickets to be sold here — and it’s not even an “exclusive” VIP-type venue. It’s not like they can charge $200 a seat and make up their losses that way — this is a standing room club… with a floor made of plywood. So in order to book our date, they must (we figure) be losing money now, then making it up with what they expect to earn on the upcoming U2 stadium dates.
Those stadium shows may possibly be the most extravagant and expensive (production-wise) ever: $40 million to build the stage and, having done the math, we estimate 200 semi trucks crisscrossing Europe for the duration. It could be professional envy speaking here, but it sure looks like, well, overkill, and just a wee bit out of balance given all the starving people in Africa and all. Or maybe it’s the fact that we were booted off our Letterman spot so U2 could keep their exclusive week-long run that’s making me less than charitable? Take your pick — but thanks, guys!
I loved many of the Jackson 5 tunes — Get It Together was an LP I listened to nonstop along with Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall record. Quincy Jones’s production on the latter LP was impeccably precise — it is as shiny a pop product as an aspiring superstar could wish for while still containing funky African-inspired grooves and textures. Significantly, though, the records that followed had fewer of these elements, but sold more copies. I didn’t like Thriller or Bad — they seemed to me like pure pandering to the mass (white) pop audience. But the coda of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” on Off The Wall is pure intersecting overlapping lilting Africa. (Later Michael would “quote” the great Manu Dibango song “Soul Makossa” and “forget” to give credit.) That same song’s reference to The Force was a corny “Hey I’ve got a great idea for a pop novelty song! Let’s reference Star Wars!” kind of idea that a 13-year-old boy might have — but the groove and Michael’s singing transcended much of that silliness.
At that point Jackson was still a young black man — he had yet to transform into the androgynous eccentric that he would become. He claimed his skin bleaching was the result of disease, but most of us who know about the lightening creams that sadly abound in black neighborhoods and throughout the Third World suspected differently.
The shock, to me, was that a young black man who was conquering the world of white pop (and video! He was the ONLY black man on MTV!) was simultaneously ashamed or very mixed up about his blackness. What kind of example does it set for black adolescents watching Michael get whiter and whiter every year? How’s a Brother supposed to get further with this shit going on?
The night that news of Mr. Jackson’s death came, Ingrid Deabreu, 49, a patient care and dialysis technician from Guyana who lives in Brooklyn, stayed up watching a marathon of his videos with her 7-year-old daughter Kimberly. When the video of Mr. Jackson’s “Black and White” came on, her daughter turned to Ms. Deabreu and asked: “Mommy, he said it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. So why’s he trying to make his skin white?”
A life in the pill bottle tied Michael to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and too many more. The surreal chemical universe these stars create for themselves is hard for me to fathom — when I have some success (at least recently), I’m very happy about it. Of course, my success is nowhere near what theirs was — I can live a normal life and buy toilet paper and OJ at the corner deli. In a way it seems a retreat to origins, to the womb of poor beginnings in Gary, Indiana or Tupelo, Mississippi — where, in a kind of weird link between distant galaxies, poor folks also pop painkillers like OxyContin if and when they can.
Walked along the just opened, not quite finished High Line elevated park last night after taking my daughter and her pals to a birthday dinner. It's extraordinary... postmodern zen... the feeling of strolling on an elevated walkway is pretty special. Romantic but industrial. Slick but free.
Here are some black metal (and related genres) album covers.
I think they're beautiful. They've gone beyond the cartoon horror of traditional metal graphics, and have arrived at something sublime, something almost peaceful in their apocalyptic moodiness. I've heard only some of these bands, so I can't claim to be knowledgeable about all of the music these covers represent — but my imagination can fill in some of the blanks.
We’re three shows into this NA leg. By last night’s show in Montclair, NJ we felt like we had clawed our way back to the level of performance we reached at the end of the previous legs. We were fine at the first two shows, but some of us, not just me, had to think now and then about what we were doing — which didn’t really affect the show, but was a little bit of a reminder that there’s a lot going on.
Jon Pollak, our LD for this whole tour, has left for I don’t know where. We’ll miss him — his lighting was wonderful — but our new LD, David A, will be up to speed soon.
On the night bus ride from Canandaigua, NY (near Rochester) to Montclair the crew bus broke down — a radiator pipe problem, I was told. In the middle of the night (5 AM?) the band and dancer buses circled back around and picked up the survivors. Crew members groggily piled on and slept the rest of the night in the empty bunks and on lounge sofas as we continued on to NJ.
Amazingly, I slept though the whole thing, as did Mauro, Paul and some others. I woke up in a parking lot in Fairfield, NJ to find Victor (guitar tech) and Bruce (FOH mixer) sitting in our bus lounge, surrounded by luggage, drinking coffee.
The abandoned bus was repaired, and showed up in Montclair mid-afternoon with Arlene, the driver, behind the wheel.
Mauro and I decided to bike from the hotel in Fairfield to the Edison house and lab, a National Historic site in nearby West Orange (about 9 miles away). Rolling hills along the route, through Verona and some other hamlets, made for a bit more of a workout than we anticipated. We passed by pleasant wooded suburbs and some pretty big houses. No bike paths (no surprise there) and not even sidewalks in some areas. If you don’t have a car in NJ you really are a second-class citizen. When we got there — a gatehouse to a private community marked the entrance — we were told that it was open only on weekends, and the lab was under renovation. My fault for not double-checking opening hours.
I’d read in a new book about recorded sound (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner) that Edison arranged demonstrations of his “perfected” wax cylinder recorders at various theaters around the continent. He’d have a known singer sing along with their own recorded voice, and then at some point the singer would stop and the recording took over. Testimonials claimed that the audience gasped and couldn’t tell the difference between the live singer and the recording (like “Is it real or is it Memorex?” for those who remember those cassette tape ads).
This seems a little far-fetched, though it’s true that we do hear what we want to hear to a large extent, and the amount of hype Edison was capable of generating was considerable — and hype can affect what we see and hear. There was indeed some information that surfaced alleging that Edison had “trained” the singers to imitate the quality and sound of the recordings — slightly pinched and not very loud — to make the gag work. This seems likely, as any decent singer could sing far louder than the volume of those old machines.
Although this may make Edison out to be a bit of a three-card Monte showman (as, like that game, the demonstration was rigged), it also shows what a talent he had for marketing and promoting his inventions. Coming up with an amazing idea and even patenting it was only half the battle… at least as far as getting it out there goes.
The rigged demonstration also gives an early hint at how performance is influenced by technology. Technology feigns neutrality — to simply record and capture (photography, audio, digitizing) — but not only does each technology skew the copy in some direction, the copy soon becomes the gold standard against which performance is measured. Even if the copy is not 100% faithful, in a weird backwards turn it becomes the “real” thing. While this seems almost comic — early singers imitating wax recordings or photographers imitating Impressionist paintings — with multi-track and now digital recording the worlds of recorded (and manipulated) sound and live performance drift ever further apart.
Our show in NJ went great — the crowd was up on their feet for a good part of the evening.
I’ve been in contact with some of the Extra Action Marching Band crew about doing more songs together when we reconnect in Portland, Seattle and Berkeley. Emails have been exchanged about brass arrangements and stage attire.
