The steering wheel

A familiar claim: our convenience culture ruins the spontaneity that our lives used to have. Before, you were forced to experience something new and deal with it, while today you can pretty easily avoid many new things. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. How about we flip this on its head and say, "media convenience allows us to adventure on our own terms"? Make it a new one if that's what you want, but feel free to stay in your shell.

Why is cultural stagnation always the technology's fault, and not the user's? Now instead of what's always on the radio (or the Christian talk station) or a small collection of albums, you could theoretically guarantee a new set of sounds every time you drove your car. If you end up choosing that same album over and over again, isn't that your choice? Having less CDs doesn't make new listening more likely.

We're caught up with this idea that technology frees us and holds us back. In reality, it doesn't quite do either of those things. It only gives a tool to become more the person you want to be. Do you want to be in constant communication with others? Done. Do you want to go off on your own, but make sure that you're reachable in an emergency? Also done. Do you want to listen to the same song everywhere you go, all the time? Can do. Do you never want to hear the same song twice? You got it. The point is, we choose our own paths, and it's a cop-out to blame the fact that you're becoming predictable on the gadgets that enable it. True, humans tend to adapt to the environment (app culture being one example), but the devices we're talking about do much more freeing than demanding.

The question that this really gets at is: what do we want? It's a simple question, but the answer to it is very difficult. Inevitably, it seems, the question leads to another one: do we even know what we want? Do we want our lives to be simple, challenging, or somewhere in the middle? If we're talking about something like music, most people would probably say that they don't want to be challenged too much, but also don't want to seem stuffy. But there are comforts and pleasures to in the already-known and self-approved choices. Every decision about what to do is one more thing to think about, and at some point the mind just gets tired of having to decide. It's possible that having 2,000 albums on an iPod makes this fatigue point come more quickly, but perhaps it has merely shifted the decision from "should I buy a new album or listen to one I already have" to "should I listen to something new or something I recognize".

There's also an age/time factor. It comes as no surprise to me that these types of posts are written by people with some decades under their belts. It's not because older folks don't "get" technology or are overly nostalgic for the olde days, but rather that people tend to get busier as they move into adulthood. Priorities take over, and business takes precedence over pleasure. This is one of the reasons why people tend to think that the best kind of music is the kind that dominated their young adulthood: the idle/party time spent finding new things dwindles as workdays increase. That's okay, but it's a phenomenon that often gets mistaken for a change somewhere else. It's not me, music just isn't as good any more. It's not me, this device just makes it too easy to listen to my favorite album. It's always possible to find more stuff that you like (case in point, the Mumford & Sons in the article); discovery just needs to be prioritized. Time is a commodity, and how we choose to spend it has a drastic effect on how we see the world.

In short: don't let the things in your life dictate what you do. Make that decision for yourself, and let those things take you there.

Hellhound on My Trail

"Did Robert Johnson really sell his soul to the Devil?" is a great subject for an article. This one takes up that offer and turns it into a brief history of the Blues and the Devil, followed by some academic argument on the likelihood of actual soul-selling. It's pretty interesting, but suffers from a major problem: I think this guy is serious. In the discussion, blues scholars are divided into two camps: those who believe Johnson sold his soul and those who believe he made it up. There are accusations of attempts to sanitize the history and a brief critical analysis linking Johnson's death with a song he recorded a "mere" 92 days beforehand. Son House's story about Johnson jumping from a rank amateur to a master in no time flat is interesting, but, like the rest of the histories, impossible to verify. We'll never really know what happened, but it seems unproductive to argue about the mythology. Most likely, the truth falls somewhere between the two extremes: maybe Johnson thought he sold his soul, maybe it just made good material and then caught on, maybe he later took credit for somebody else's rumors. Cultural mythologies are fascinating, and worth understanding. But the way to go about that is to trace their histories to put them in historical context. Whether or not they are true is beside the point; it's the how and the why that matter. Say Johnson never sold his soul: does that part of the story no longer matter? The sections of the article that discuss societal and contextual threads are great, so it was disappointing to see it resolve into an expert debate on the technicalities.

Genre tetris

I have here three albums described as electrohaze psych-dub, dark ambient italo, and psych-drone ragas, respectively. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I can easily imagine what each of those sounds like.

One thing that I like, though, is how genre words are building blocks but are not all cut from the same cloth. It's theoretically possible to combine any two kinds of music, but not all genre words fit together. Psych and ragas go together, especially if there's some drone involved, but an italo raga probably wouldn't work. Pop can be appended to most anything (pop rock, pop country, psych pop, etc.), but pop hip hop just doesn't work, nor does ambient pop (at least the way I'm thinking of it). Electro bluegrass sounds impossible. And jazz still lives in a world all by itself. I'd like to hear those gap-filling stuff attempted, though.

Sentences

This is our culture:

Primary Colors for the social media era, the wildly profane, viral phenomenon that resulted from a fake Twitter account deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel is the first significant Twitter epic in today’s digital age.

I guess "Twitter epic" is a thing now, then. If we're going to make that a genre, I suppose it's only right that there is a significant work in it.

Aleatoric

When your work or hobby causes you to deal with certain approaches or modes of analysis, it's easy for that to bleed over into other areas of life. So it's not much of a surprise to see NYTimes music critic Anthony Tommasini writing about a baseball game as a concert:

For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher’s mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.

For a musical mind, these sorts of diversions are common. In a city, constant noise coalesces into a pattern of mechanical and human sounds. On a country evening, trees and insects rise and fall. And so on.

For those who usually don't notice those things, this column is a great introduction to that world. It's also a good example of the importance of medium and attitude to outreach programs. In 1952, John Cage composed 4'33" with a similar goal: to show how music can happen in places other than the stage. He had visited a sound-proof chamber at Harvard, where he discovered that the human body constantly produces at least two sounds at all times. He wanted to bring this idea of perpetual sound to others. To do this, he used a piece of music that generated spontaneously from the audience rather than the instruments.

Unfortunately, he had a few things working against him. First, because he was working with a concert environment, he had to overcome the expectations of the audience that they would be played to, rather than that they would be played. He increased this expectation by putting a piano and a pianist on the stage. So, to this day, people think the piece is about "not playing" rather than "other types of playing". Second, because Cage was/is seen as avant-garde and spoke academically, his idea is lumped in with other things that people consider kooky and weird. Tommasini, though, takes the more populist approach of a newspaper article about the all-American sport of baseball, creating a Trojan horse of music criticism that may have more success getting into the minds and ears of the public.

(via kottke.org)

Borderlands

Surprising nobody, Borders is closing its remaining stores and dissolving. It seems like people are taking this news to be a "big deal", either as a referendum on the way we purchase and reads books today (or don't) or a comment on the state of the publishing industry. Over on NPR, Linda Holmes does a good job of getting at both of those points by discussing the ripple waves of a large businesses failure and the communal nature of a bookstore.

On the first point, it's easy enough to see the loss of jobs, the loss of secondary jobs, and the debts that may never be paid. On the second point:

That said, the aspect of Borders' implosion that troubles me is that there will be 399 fewer places to take part in the communal act of book buying, which is a completely separate activity from reading . . .

Bookstores are very special places, even the behemoths. They provide a space for cultural dilettantism. You can get lost in them for hours, perusing covers and picking up obscure titles. They are dedicated to discovery and are curated by some of the most dedicated retail employees around (even to get hired at a large corporate chain, one is still required to exhibit a sharp passion for reading).

The assumption that people are making is that these stores are simply going to leave behind book-less voids inhabited only by zombies with the occasional Kindle. But presumably consumers who are buying books will continue buying books. If the big-box model wasn't working, that means that a smaller, more nimble local store (which Holmes hopes for at the end of the post) is ideally situated to fill that void. And unlike a Walmart situation where the bigger store undercuts the smaller, prices at new-book bookstores has always seemed to me to be list price across the board.

Perhaps I'm lucky to have Kramerbooks (which has a full-size bar and restaurant) around the corner and Politics & Prose (which hosts many book events) up the street, but well-run independent stores look good right now. I am always surprised by the number of customers in those stores. In places where Borders was the only source, there is now the opportunity to start up a smaller store and be creative. It's even possible for it to take advantage of the e-book movement by setting up a digital store of its own. Like other struggling industries (music, newspapers, etc.), a little bit of work can go a long way. In short, Borders may be gone, but there's no reason to think that books and book readers are somehow going to lose out here. In fact, the opposite may be true.

The color of Internet

What is the color of the Internet? According to an aggregate of relevant Flickr photos, it's something like:

This is the perfect result. It has that "everything" flavor to it, but its most prominent feature is the Gesundheit scrawled across the top left. That's your Internet.

(via swissmiss)

Summer snows

From the Smithsonian's Flickr collection, these photos were taken in the late 1800s:

Wilson A. Bentley first became fascinated with snow during his childhood on a Vermont farm, and he experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines. In 1903 Bentley sent prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian, hoping they might be of interest to Secretary Samuel P. Langley.

If you're wondering, the first photograph (as we know it) was made in 1826.

Electronic evocations

Science and technology combine to make very cool music things:
I'm guessing this has something to do with Hz and frame rates and whatnot, like how old computer monitors used to flicker on video. This would make for a great music video.

(via kottke)

Brazenhead

The bad guy is not always who you think it is:

Secondhand bookshops have been banished from the city, there's no place for them.You know, and people say, "Barnes & Noble put you out?" No, no: real estate put me out.

I imagine that things may be harder for a firsthand bookstore competing with the big boxes and Amazon, but secondhand stores should be able to survive so long as they get the business side of things right. Also, this guy's bookstore looks amazing and like one of those uniquely New York-y things to do while in New York.

(via The Paris Review)