Shirin Kouladjie | Days of My Life : 2003.10.14
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Last Modified by Jim 2004.04.20 12.15
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04.04.20 12.15
Such a medley of films last Tuesday! One of the most salient traits among the selections was the juxtaposition of animated and live action footage.
This should come as little suprise, given that such juxtapositions are most evidently collage. Nevertheless, this perhaps inevitable outcome
proves instructive. For while a film like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? quite purposefully cuts up the cutting room floor,
making a point of revealing that cutting, new media applications allow for editing techniques that mask&mash; rather than mark—
the juxtaposition of fragments to acheive new combinations. Thus the question is raised: need a collocation of pieces reveal its fragmentary nature in order to be classified as
collage? Or, to take it a step further, need a collocation of pieces call attention to its fragmentary nature in order to be classified as collage?
In a sense, these are two more versions of the same question rephrased for the nth time— must the rips and tears be seen (and/or stressed)? That the question of
rips and tears continues to recur suggests its fundamental importance to our inquiry.
Majkin Klare suggests that we haven't been discriminating enough as far as
deciding what counts as collage and what doesn't. But as they sometimes say, even on the standardized tests, answers may vary.
It's really an exercise in line drawing— where do you draw the line? As Majkin points out, collage probably isn't ubiquitous. Maybe it's cultural impact has been diluted,
then? Does collage seem a bit less remarkable than it once might have, now that we are in a
time when homogeneity is, increasingly, on the outs? Does the fact of an increasingly heterogeneous world equal the
death of collage?
On one hand, one might argue that the collage aesthetic became such a fundamental part of cultural expression that it consigned itself into invisibility and thus oblivion.
Collage, that once rebellious art form, completely undercut the dominant style (which we might, in an over-simplistic way, refer to as
realism), became mainstreamed, in time became the dominant art form, and in the process lost its relevance and its vitality.
Such a trajectory has been the fate of many a rock band.
On the other hand, one might argue that while collage aesthetic as initially conceived has mutated with the passage of time (and the rise of new media),
the very fact of heterogeneity marks it as the most vital artistic approach of all. Collage is dead— long live collage!
Purists of impurity will object, and some may find the very notion of conceptual art to fall at the outer limits of collage. Yet to others, all collage may seem a form
of conceptual art, in the sense that the quality of the idea tends to be at least as important to a collage's success or failure as the actual execution of that idea.
Thus, Nikki S. Lee comes up with the ideas for her photographs, but she doesn't feel the need to take her own pictures. If the social juxtapositions she foregrounds
aren't immediately apparent after looking at a project or two, once you've seen her in drag queen,
hip hop, lesbian,
Ohio, punk,
skater, tourist and
yuppie mode
(to take a few examples), you start to realize that these stills aren't quite as seamless as they might at first seem. The rips and tears are there after all.
Collage, then?
In his remarks on happenings, Allan Kaprow wrote that "the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
Lee keeps that line fluid, and in her best work that line becomes indistinct: while we can't really call her a documentary photographer, we can't really call her an actress either.
Was she, in the instances where she assumed a given persona, any less a part of the subculture than any of her peers?
Any less a punk than any other? Any less a yuppie than any other? Is she just a punk, or a yuppie, or what have you, in form, but not in fact?
Well, yes and no. That is, no more nor less so than any other. Less practiced, perhaps, but no less capable of growing into the role.
Ultimately, in calling attention to the fundamentally performative quality of identity itself,
Lee demonstrates that life most resembles art when art most resembles life, and never more so when both art and life conceive
of themselves as forms of collage: well aware of the rips and tears that bring them into being.
G-Mail: is it a violation of internet privacy?
Is it a timely innovation or a spooky development?
I, among others, find myself feeling spooked.
It's raining.
Meanwhile, the Sundance Online Film Festival has gone missing-- apparently their proprietary structure isn't sufficient,
and they feel the need to build in a measure of artificial scarcity as well. This is a perfect example of new media aesthetics
hamstrung by old media economics. It's almost criminal of Robert Redford to dangle a certain type of prestige in front of directors which
functions as much to disappear their artistry as to advance their careers. But then, Sundance is the brainchild of the Sundance Kid.
The profit motive that drives the Sundance Online Film Festival seems especially galling when one comes to understand that many of its features are produced on a shoestring.
Take, for example, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, which premiered at this year's event, and cost a grand total of $218.32 to make— using iMovie!
I'd like to promote it as an exemplary moment of collage involving the intersection of an ephemeral archive and a new media application, but I haven't been able to see it. Tarnation indeed!
Then again, the Black Maria Film Festival doesn't have much in the way of online access either.
Fortunately, Black Maria came to Charlottesville, and although I didn't see much of it, I was there for long enough to witness a splendid cut-up of Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane. The screen was divided into quadrants, and then into sixteenths, which made for kind of a blocky collage aesthetic, but
the stop-and-go, play-rewind-play approach worked well enough— it had sort of a remix feel to it and almost felt like an instance of plunderfilmics,
if I might be permitted to coin a phrase.
But then... if we were confused about the line between plunderphonics and music, isn't the line between plunderfilmics and cinema equally unclear, for similar reasons? After all, a studio film provides a similar illusion of continuity to a studio album— both are likely
to have many more borders and layers to them than will seem apparent to the casual viewer/listener. Lest the collage aesthetic in film and video seem like a low-budget affair, consider the massive amount of work that went into creating the seemingly seamless canvases of the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies.
Such intricate editing procedures aren't just confined to science fiction movies either— for living proof of the role that new media applications play in all sorts of films, check out this interview with film editor Walter Murch, who used FinalCutPro and a bunch of G4s in
giving shape to Cold Mountain, and received an Academy Award nomination for his pains.
Nevertheless, there are some films that privilege (that is to say, foreground) the collage aesthetic more than others, in both conception and execution.
Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle is certainly dedicated to juxtaposition, and although he isn't accessing an archive in the process, his imagination is
so capacious and twisted that the result ends up feeling like a collage anyway. On the technique front, there's Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy, recently capped off by
2002's Naqoyqatsi, which has an online trailer available. As is so often the case, one collage aesthetic goes well with another, as the music for all three of these films was composed by
Philip Glass.
Finally, although The Song of the South has been the most-discussed Disney movie on grounds of late,
I aim to change that trend by giving due respect to The Three Caballeros, which, with the possible exception of Fantasia, is as collage as Disney gets.
Thanks to everyone who contributed, listened to and voted on music in an attempt to create the perfect MDST 322 Mix.
It was a thoroughly unscientific undertaking, but not, I think, a
miserable failure.
Did you click on that last link? Curious as to the results? Find out what gives.
Back to the subject at hand, here's a tally of everyone's votes thus far.
As more votes come in, if you feel that the mix should be altered, alter away.
After all, this is an open source environment. As such, does it threaten the democratic process?
At any rate, since this is my weblog, here's my ballot:
1. Negativland / What's Music
2. Boards of Canada / Roygbiv
3. Cut Chemist / Lesson 4: The Radio
4. John Oswald / O'Hell
5. Rob Swift / The Ablist
6. Venetian Snares / Dance Like You're Selling Nails
7. Jay-Z + Danger Mouse / What More Can I Say?
8. Photex / Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
9. Dmitiri From Paris / Une Very Stylish Fille
10. St. Germain / Sure Thing
11. Beck / Hollywood Freaks
12. DJ Logic / Miles Away
13. Le Tigre / Dyke March 2001
14. Herbie Hancock / Spank-A-Lee
15. Kid 606 / Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indiepunk Whiteboy Ass
16. John Cage / Williams Mix
17. Primitive Radio Gods / Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand
18. James Tenney / Collage # 1 ("Blue Suede")
19. Philip Glass / Rubric
20. People Like Us / Wide Open Spaces
Some remarks by way of explanation: all things being equal, I think that DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist may have one of the best tracks of all, with "Milk: The Basic, Part One," but it's simply
too long to justify bumping a number of other worthy candidates from inclusion. Also left off were Of Montreal and Modest Mouse... they're great bands, but do they make collages?
Again, I'm inclined to say that many musicians who employ a collage aesthetic also harbor (whether openly or subtly) a fairly radical political agenda, though this is by no means a simple matter.
In the current cultutal climate, the act of sampling is an act of subversion, if not of revolution, and the irreverence of this act is often part and parcel of subversive ideology (see the examples of John Cage, The Clash, and Public Enemy, to take
three wildly divergent examples). Yet, at the same time, the collage aesthetic seems to function equally well in the service of complacency (whether tongue-in-cheek or no), as per Dimitiri From Paris's "Une Very Stylish Fille" and Beck's "Get Real Paid."
On the sonic level, there does seem to be a fine line between mixing it up and messing it up. If there isn't enough experimentation, it isn't interesting enough, and
if there's too much experimentation, the resulting aesthetic may paint the listener into a corner of displeasure, or even disgust. I suspect that this latter outcome resulted, to some members of the seminar, when
Christian Marclay visited. But I'm willing to give him a second chance— for a more successful balancing of recombination and recognition check out Marclay's "Black Stucco," available for a limited time in Set Ten.
Perhaps the resistance to Marclay is partly grounded in the fact that he isn't as inclined to use recognizable samples as many other artists. Thus the question: when artists like Danger Mouse or John Oswald or People Like Us lay down a successful track,
how much of their success is their own, and how much of their success should be credited to their antecedents? This may depend on the type of mixing and messing going on— Chris Cutler comes up with five categories by way of classification: "There It Is"; "Partial Importations" "Total Importation"; "Sources Irrelevant"; "Sources Untraceable."
Of course, in any sonic collage a number of these categories may be working of the course of a single track. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to apply these classifications to a number of the songs that we've listened to. It seems to me that the best songs do a little bit of everything.
No matter what the dyanmic between artist and sources, the credit for any sonic collage (or collage in general, or work of art in general) is mixed. To take one of our favorite recurring examples, it's tough to deny that The Beatles and Jay-Z deserve some sort of original credit for The Grey Album, it's also tough to deny that Danger Mouse deserves the primary credit (unless you want to argue that the primary credit goes not to the
artist at all, but rather to the new media which made its success possible). At any rate, with the massive proliferation of Jay-Z "mash-ups," as Andrew Dalton puts it, there must be a reason why Danger Mouse came to the fore. As neat of an idea as Jay-Zeezer's
Black and Blue Album might be, it just doesn't seem as well-executed as The Grey Album. Or is that just me falling for the virtual "aura" of Danger Mouse and the Grey Tuesday movement?
As to Plunderphonics, the topic of this week's discussion, I find myself enthused by John Oswald's work and dismayed (through no fault of his own) at how difficult it remains to access it. I wonder, with regard to the destruction of his album Plunderphonics, if it was really a matter of the music, or if it was more a matter of the packaging.
After all, it was Michael Jackson who was the most intent on the album's eradication, which is little surprise when you get a glimpse of the album cover. And speaking of album covers, check out the instructive difference between the DIY and Corporate album covers for Oswald's Elektrax (which the Elektra label lamely retitled Rubáiyát).
There's also that amazing image on the cover of Oswald's Plexure, which many wil
recognize as a mutation of Bruce Springsteen's Born In The U.S.A. This leads to another important question: if a visual artist is relatively free to mash up a snipet of an image by way of collage, why should it be so much more difficult for a musician to mash up a snipet of sound by way of collage? Mashing is certainly what Oswald does on Plexure, but don't take my word for it— listen to a sample.
This is pretty amazing stuff. It's also amazing to note how listeners have tip-toed around recognizing Oswald as a pure original. Thus, Laurie Brown refers to Plunderphonics as "a completely original non-original album," and while Lloyd Dunn credits it as "among the most 'original' sounding work I've ever heard," he leaves the 'original' in inverted commas.
What makes Oswald's work any more or less original than any other form of music? And what makes it plunderphonics, and how is that distinguished from music? Here's what the man himself had to say on the matter in an interview with Norman Igma:
"A plunderphone is a recognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded.
Whistling a bar of "Density 21.5" is a traditional musical quote. Taking Madonna singing "Like a Virgin" and rerecording it backwards
or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognize the source. The plundering has to be blatant though. There's a lot
of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we're doing."
Yet, as Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, recently pointed out in an interview with Emily Wilczek:
"I don't like the term 'plunderphonic' because it's got the word 'plunder' in it, which implies stealing,
which has got negative connotations. I prefer to think that I use things; I'm a user of phonics— 'phonic-work.'
I don't think there is any kind of music that isn't plunderphonics; all music is taking from a previous source, and using previous inlfluences,
whether that be an audio influence, or the influence of a person in your life."
Is there a difference between plunderphonics and music in general? This is a debate we may work through in the next couple of weeks. Definitions and paradigms do seem frightfully elastic once you start thinking about them in the context of collage,
and I must admit that I find it tougher than ever after this last week to answer Negativland's question— what's music? (That was Negativland's question, right? I mean, they did sample someone else who was asking it in an entirely different context,
but that doesn't really matter, does it? Or does it?) Not sure. Much as I relish the ambiguity of such questions, there is, in me as in most of us, a small voice that often speaks up at such times, shouting: I hate lycra!
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04.03.23 15.25
Whoa. Did I really take three weeks off from my weblog? That seems like an inordinate amount of time. Blame it on the 2004 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
Looks like I have some catching up to do. Let's start with two talks I attended recently.
According to P. Adams Sitney, in his talk on "The Relics of Modernism," the power of collage comes via its ripples of connotation— whereas some artistic approached would prefer to bury or veil its antecedents, collage doesn't want you to lose your allusion.
Meanwhile, David Golumbia, in discussing "The Non-Standard Web," came to the conclusion that standardization entails the commodification of cultural objects. Perhaps collage is, fundamentally, a style of resistance to this sort of trend, being less interested in commodification and standardization than in modification and randomization.
This may be sufficient to qualify collage as an art form privileging not only resistance, but also revolution— both in its aesthetic pre-dispositions and in its political pre-dispositions.
Before I get too carried away with my theorizing, I'd like to draw your attention to one of the exceptions that may well prove this rule. In a fit of appropriation, inspiration and obfuscation, the Republican National Committee recently released a new web video titled "John Kerry: International Man of Mystery".
This particular news release has been running as their top story for nearly one week now. So... if John Kerry is Austin Powers, then who's Dr. Evil? Not clear... anyway, here's Number Two giving Dr. Evil the latest update on the upcoming election...
Speaking of elections, has anyone seen the latest method of surveilance via new media, the relatively low-tech website called Fundrace? You can use it to track the political donations of your friends and neighbors, not to mention the stars. It also provides a window into how polarized the country is becoming. Compare the results in Cincinnati with the results in San Francisco to see what I mean. At
first glance, this seems like a disturbing development... that is, until one learns of the software known as Caliper's Maptitude For Redistricting. Read all about it in this splendid New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin, from 2003 December 8, and see what the gerrymander set is getting up to now.
Also on the subject of political surveilance, one of my favorite examples from last week, which we didn't have time to cover in discussion, is a work called They Rule. It is collage, and it is new media. But is it art, and if so, is it animation? Or is it taking things too far to fit all examples of flash into the category of animation? At
this stage in the semester, it seems clear that a primary tendency of both collage and new media is to collapse borders and blur edges. Take "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," in both versions by Bad_CRC and by Tourist Guy.
Video games spill into photography spilling into animation, all of which contain a running narrative of sorts. Is it a hypermedia experience? Not quite-- it's not interactive enough. But what's clear is that in an age of collage and new media, genres are anything but clear.
As far as our syllabus goes, many of the examples we've looked at in one given week could have fit just as well in a number of other weeks. Just as the boundary between paper and digital collage is sometimes fuzzy, so too is the boundary between what should be considered ephemeral art, flash art, internet art, and/or video art. Often there are multiple
applications working together at once, and the digital divide between genres is often less visible than the analog divide. This issue will return in full force over the next couple of weeks, where we attempt to determine what, if anything, distinguishes the collage techniques of plunderphonics from the collage techniques of avant-garde music in general.
But not to get ahead of myself. I would like to address a couple of points relating to animation before signing off for the afternoon.
Larry Carlson's Virtual Om seemed most impressive to me for its integration of lo-res and high-res animation. Dwedit's "Miko Miko Nurse" seems like the latest in a long line of zany flash projects that a more traditional animation community might like to distance itself from.
The most enduring of these is, of course, YATTA!: but how to describe it further? Before it became something of an underground phenomenon as a fanimutation of a
flash movie, it was a popular variety skit in Japan. Both the original song and the more recent fanimutation have a curious political valence to them: the song is upbeat, but do the lyrics of the original skit and/or the images of the later fanimutation
complement or contradict the jauntiness of the tune? Is YATTA! a critique of free-market capitalist society, an endorsement of free-market capitalist society, or simply too silly to be anything other than a strange blip on the cultural radar? It seems
to me that the lyrics are, though ostensibly harmlessly banal, in fact revelatory of a much darker side to the recent Japanese recession. As for the fanimutation, my trusty SUV litmus test (pro-SUV equals support for free-market capitalism;
anti-SUV equals skepticism of free-market capitalism) suggests that the artist is more inclined toward critique than toward celebration or simple craziness.
Finally, a note of thanks to the members of the seminar for introducing me to homestarrunner.com. So much for doing anything else with my spare time between now and April!
That's it for today. Time to go listen to a little Modest Mouse. Yarimashita!
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04.03.02 13.33
Why doesn't Ben Cummings consider the Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia? Because it's biased? Free? Unreliable? Unstable? Virtual? His remark, made in last week's seminar discussion, has stuck with me all week long— not because I took it as an affront, but because I can't figure it out. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an "encyclopedia" as "a literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge, usually arranged in alphabetical order." I suppose, on the basis of this strict definition, that the Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia yet, since it's not yet extensive enough, or comprehensive enough, or because it doesn't yet contain an obvious alphabetical search function. But all of these objections are simply a case of yet. Within a decade or so, the Wikipedia's shortcomings will be far less glaring than they are today.
Not convinced? Check out this dusty but convincing article on non-proprietary reference works and the future of free encyclopedias by Larry Sanger, one of the Wikipedia's founders, along with Jimbo Wales. It seems clear that we're not the only ones arguing about definitions in the new media era— check out Sanger's attempt to answer the question that's more difficult than it might at first glance appear: what is an encyclopedia?
Now, as to the question of alphabetizing, while the Wikipedia can be so ordered, such an ordering has proven cumbersome, and, I would argue, irrelevant. The alphabetized encyclopedia was originally conceived to facilitate searching, which the wikipedia's search engine renders irrelevant. Let's face it: Israel has much more to do with Zionism than Israel has to do with isotopes— doesn't it?
In this respect, the Wikipedia simply makes it much easier to connect parcels of knowledge in ways above and beyond those of merely alphabetical, and often arbitrary, significance. One might argue nostalgiacally on behalf of serendipity, though one could link randomly if one wished. Better yet, one could indulge in an instantaneous, nostalgia-free form of serendipity by linking to the random page function.
Boy, I did carry on about that. I do recognize that the definition of 'encyclopedia' is unstable, but I also recognize the Wikipedia as something that will fit the definition no matter how it happens to shift. Does this mean that I'm becoming a Wikipedian?
Rick Prelinger's visit was fantastic, from my perspective— his archive provides insight not only into the America my parents grew up in, but also into the America I grew up in, and into the America we all live in now. I found "The House in the Middle" especially disconcerting, in large part because of the audience's reaction. Call me humorless, but I fail to understand what's so funny about the detonation of atomic bombs against the backdrop of a few makeshift bungalows and the Nevada desert. I'm not sure that this is just a function of time, either. It seems to me that on some level this film was just as absurd in 1954 as it is in 2004. But that doesn't make it funny. I wonder— would a 1954, 2004, or 2054 audience of Japanese in Hiroshima, Nagasaki (or indeed, anywhere in the country, or anywhere in the world) laugh at this film? Would an audience of the Fallon's Paiute-Shoshone Tribe laugh at this film, then, now, or at any time in the future?
It seemed clear to me, as I sat mournfully in my seat, that the flimsy "National Clean-Up Fix-Up Paint-Up Bureau" was but a paltry fake, a front of sorts for the nuclear agenda of the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Yet to one of the hands in the audience members, who wanted to know more about the special effects, it was the bureau that was real, and the bombs that seemed fake. As I shook my head, I reflected that we live in a world where bombs make more of an impact on people than fix-up bureaus do, though you'd never know it from watching the nightly news, which is really little more than a series of propaganda films itself.
After "The House in the Middle," every other film seemed to fit as another riff on America in the nuclear age. As Allison Ramsey notes, "Perversion for Profit" presented a strange combination of "ridiculous" and "legitimate" assumptions. To me this wasn't so much "unnatural" as it was unnerving, revealing just how relative and unstable or own moral ground remains. I also couldn't get over the fact that outstanding head of "outstanding news reporter" George Putnam was framed squarely by Minnesota, Ohio, and Kentucky throughout most of the film— it's as though this man were in fact the voice of the Midwest. It's also interesting to note that when Putnam explained that "OBSCENITY LEADS TO DEPRAVITY," he illustrated the notion of "DEPRAVITY" with an abstract image of fragmentation. Is there something inherently depraved about collage (an aesthetic of sublimated violence)?
The promotional films for Bell Telephone— "Once Upon a Honeymoon"— and Redbook— "In The Suburbs"— seemed like paradigmatic examples of what Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as the culture industry. Here's what Redbook looks like today. Don't confuse it with The Little Red Book.
I found "Age 13" tough to take, both as a strange, unsubtle instrument of class warfare and for some of the reasons noted by Roody Roodhouse. Yet I wonder— to what extent is Prelinger to be blamed for his selection? Does selection count as endorsement in this case? Is it possible to dismiss the principles of the films without dismissing the principles of the anthologist/archivist? I would say yes, in Prelinger's defense. Yet I understand Roody's pain, and I feel it— maybe it's just that I've been feeling it for a little longer, and so I'm more inclined to try and understand it instead of strictly recoiling from it. My hope is that the better we understand such social malaises, the better equipped we'll be to cope with them, and, ultimately, to start eradicating them.
Now, you can condemn the frame, or you can condemn the framer. In Prelinger's case, he isn't so much the framer of the frame as the keeper of the framer's frames. He does frame when he presents, but the archive simply preserves. May it remain.
Moving on to the goblins and ghouls of the American mass media, while their frames aren't going away anytime soon, the framers themselves are a little less above the fray than they used to be. One could even argue that the mass media's hold is starting to come undone in the era of new media. Once upon a time, billions of events were ordered by the fact that there were a discrete number of media outlets to address them. Most of these media outlets acted discreetly: thus, The New York Times motto, "all the news that's fit to print," can be construed as "with so much information out there, we must be selective in the interest of our readers," or, alternatively, as "with so much information out there, we must be selective in the interest of our owners." Is something "fit" because significant to the public interest, or because suitable to some private interests? Much as The New York Times may fancy itself the paper of record, what it finds fit to print grows less and less significant as print itself becomes less and less relevant.
Today, the ratio between the number of events— rising, with the rise in population— and the number of media outlets— rising even faster, with the ever-faster rise of technology— is a ratio that is shrinking fast. More than ever before, what's news depends on where you're looking. To a large extent, this is because the corporate filter has begun to wither away: no longer is it necessary for the publisher to raise funds from the advertiser, the customer, or the subscriber in order for an idea to break into print. Anyone has the potential to become his/her own publisher (the usual objections re: access notwithstanding) with a modicum of initiative and time, in the absence of significant overhead. Moreover, once posted, that publication becomes infinitely reproducible.
But how does information become priviliged in such a media rhizome? Although visibility still remains predicated on deep pockets, the very influence of deep pockets may also begin to wither as independent networks of communication facilitated by new media continue to coalesce. Now more than ever, and perhaps inevitably more and more, the circulation of an idea has as much to do with its intrinsic worth as with its publisher's net worth. In this respect, recent developments have started to undo the Adorno and Horkheimer thesis that "the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest." Or am I just being utopian?
Consolidation of media ownership as sanctioned by the FCC seems to me a futile attempt to counteract the new media revolution, which necessarily serves as a decentering force to the influence of mass media. Compared to the consumer of 1944, or 1964, or 1984, the consumer of 2004 is bound just as much, if not more so (in terms of mass media) but also less and less (in terms of new media) by what Gitlin describes as "a choice among the givens." Still, a pessimist/realist might argue that the rise of new media outlets merely facilitates the foementing of the fringe, and not much more. Meanwhile the mass of media consumers will simply continue to eat what they're fed and do as they're told, or, alternatively, to dissent as they're told. As Adorno and Horkheimer explain, "the need which might resist central control has already been supressed by the control of the individual consciousness."
People, I need to know if this is mid-twentieth century paranoia or an accurate assessment of the world we live in now. I'm up for resisting central control. Can I get a witness?
Merited though our suspicion might be, Gitlin and Hall are correct to draw distinctions between the mass media and the state— while not quite tools of the state, the mass media matrix often functions as what Althusser termed an ideological state appartus, or ISA. Now, if you saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, you might object, saying that the media is anything but an ISA. To this I would respond that the public media remains an apparatus of the Chavez state, while the private media functions as an appartus of what Chavez terms the neo-liberalism of the economic world order as promulgated by the G7, the IMF, the World Bank, et al.
What happens when two different ideologies clash? Here's one of the most current dispatches from Caracas. Curious about Chavez's worldview? Here's a recent speech, in his own words, or, at least, in the words of his translator. If you happened to miss the film, or if you're looking for more information on the situation in Venezuela, venezuelanalysis.com is the place to turn for the pro-Chavez perspective, and vcrisis.com is the place for the anti-Chavez perspective. Judge for yourselves.
As to judges, we have some fine ones in our midst. Allison Mui offers up an fascinating proposal to consider "improvisation as collage in real time." This will surely be of relevance when we come to discuss conceptual art, performance art and installation art in Week 13. Megan McVey's weblog is up and running, and there's a great archive to troll through there. She's a believer in the power of hypertext, and she offers some convincing reasons in support. Speaking of support, let's make a point of supporting Aaron Biscombe's Skilled In The Art Of Nothing initiative. He's looking to rally the collective enterprise around some creative collage-making, and I, for one, am planning to hop on board.
Finally, horray for Grey Tuesday. And horray for Andrew Dalton, who has some great thoughts on what makes The Grey Album so great. To his observations I would add that Jay-Z's "What More Can I Say," a rant about the artist's plight, is well-paired with the Beatles's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and that H.O.V.A.'s "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" complements the Fab Four's "Julia" perfectly. But which is complementing which? Is The Grey Album more of a drain on Jay-Z or the Beatles? I would say more of a drain on Jay-Z, since one loses more of The White Album than of The Black Album in the mix (although that opinion could be based on my relative ignorance of The Black Album, or on my tendency to privilege lyrics over music). Nevertheless, it's the representatives of the Beatles, not of the Jigga, who are are sweating DJ Danger Mouse. Why is that? Perhaps because Jay-Z made a career of appropriation (remember Hard Knock Life, Annie fans?) and respects the technique.
In fact, it almost seems as though the H-to-the-O was prepared for the collage onslaught to come. Check these lyrics from "What More Can I Say":
This one will get bit up
These fucks
Too lazy to make up shit
They crazy
They don't...paint pictures
They just trace me
You know what
Soon they forget who they plucked
They whole style from
And try to reverse the outcome
I'm like... [garbled]
Here Jay-Z disses all of his playa-hatin imitators. But what can he do about it? While the haters can't really reverse the outcome of his success, he can't really reverse the outcome of their appropriation either. That's why that last word is garbled. The situation is one that words fail to describe. There's still an utterance, though&mdash: to some it might sound like 'cluck,' accusing those who "trace" him of chickening out; to others it might sound like 'tough,' as in, 'tough play,' or 'too bad'; to others it might sound like 'puhh,' as in puhh-LEZE, as if y'all could step to the H-O-V; to others it might sound like 'uhh,' as in 'not impressed' or 'okay, what next.'
But don't think that a predicament like this could trip Jay-Z up for long. He continues:
I'm not a biter
I'm a writer
For myself and others
I say a big verse I'm only biggin up my brother
Biggin up my borough
I'm big enough to do it
I'm mad thorough
Plus I know my own flow is foolish
Suddenly, the terms of the game have changed. When Jay-Z appropriates, he's not a "biter," but a "writer." He can say a big verse (as in, a B.I.G. verse) and he's biggin up, he's not "too lazy to make up shit." Since his "flow is foolish," he can get away with the appropriation. As the old saw has it, he makes it new.
But Is H.O.V. somehow more entitled to sample B.I.G. since they share more than their lyrics? As B.I.G. styled it in "Juicy," "same number, same hood, and it's all good." But what about when Biggie turns "Hypnotize" into a huge hit with a refrain straigt out of Snoop Dogg's "Lodi Dodi"? Is this east-side hatin on west-side? And what about Snoop Dogg? Is he hatin on Charles Schulz? And what about Schulz? After all, Peanuts was originally titled Lil' Folks, which sounds like quite similar to Lil' Abner. Wasn't he just hatin on Al Capp?
I don't know, but I gots to roll.
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04.02.24 11.19
So, as usual, with the best will in the world, having intended to write a weblog entry much earlier in the week, I find myself with a few spare minutes to slap together a collage of thoughts. Here goes.
Sounds like Christian Marclay was the flop of the semester, judging by the weblogs. Roody Roodhouse gave some measured criticism, but Carrie Dann and Jake Hostetter and Morgan Whitaker were less willing to temper their opinions. Roody's very helpful entry does contextualize Marclay within the history of avant-garde music, and she's ultimately correct to suggest that in this context, Marclay's performance seemed more old guard than avant-garde.
I found it helpful to close my eyes. The visuals, as Jake suggests, were a distraction— though he is wrong to claim that he was trapped. When confronted with the old guard, it is a very avant-garde gesture to stand up and walk out. I thought about being avant-garde. Instead I decided to take a nap. But even in a semi-conscious world without images, I found one of the most interesting moments of the performance in a cell phone ringing in the row behind me.
That said, I didn't like the plate or the paper at all. I preferred the tiny record, which, as it turned, out, was a show stopper.
It's great to see people airing their opinions on these matters. That's how the conversation improves. Hopefully Rick Prelinger will make a better impression. If not, he'll know about it, since he's reading our weblogs! I got an e-mail from him just yesterday, in which he praised MDST 322 as an "excellent class" (having stumbled upon it, as he indicated, "quite by chance," upon "seeing referrers that led back to the 'Ephemera' page). He also mentioned a project he has in the works which seems of interest, so I figured I'd reproduce the details here. He writes:
After some time waiting for the commercial real estate market to
deteriorate to the point of
affordability, we now have space in downtown San Francisco and are about to
install shelves
for an appropriation-friendly library of books, periodicals, print
ephemera, and visual
materials. The idea is to share our rather massive collection of paper
materials with others
who might enjoy the freedom to browse freely among physical (as opposed to
digital or
microfilmed) materials. Scanners and digital cameras will be available,
and we hope that work
made with words or imagery from our collection will be available for
exhibit there in some way.
Should open this summer.
Sounds like an excellent project. I'm already planning a visit. But even if you can't make it out to San Francisco, this week's topic is living proof that in the age of new media, ephemera is no longer as elusive as it once was. At the same time, many things that were once less ephemeral— such as course syllabi or academic reflections like these— have become more ephemeral (less stable, less tangible). Do such shifts fundamentally change the notion of the ephemeral? Do I sense the aura creeping back in once again?
After all, it's one thing to paste a 1909 Ty Cobb baseball card up on a webpage, but it's another thing to have that same card in a vault. Will future generations think that's a weird distinction, or is materiality a safe bet over the long haul?
The weird thing about baseball cards is that at one time they were meant to be ephemera, and then at some later stage they became something more than ephemera. When did that happen? How did that happen? Why did that happen? What does that say about the society we live in? Would you like to trade your Alex Rodriguez rookie card for two of my Alfonso Soriano rookie cards?
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Check out the archives for Jim's weblog.
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