2009 – Page 3 – Roy Christopher

August 4, 2009

The Clutter of Pop

In the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest is out today and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

July 17, 2009

A New Level

The old Level Magazine was one of those titles that put the Life in “lifestyle” magazine — and it’s back online starting today! Editor/publisher/leader Chris Noble invited me to contribute, so I’ll be posting bits over there on a regular.

Here’s the history of the magazine direct from Chris:

In 1999, the magazine Level was born. Brothers Mark and Chris Noble, publishers of a BMX magazine and a core MTB magazine, got bored of going into their local newsagent and seeing nothing on the lifestyle shelves for them or their like. The US had produced Grand Royal, a happy-go-lucky hobby, more or less, of The Beastie Boys, and Mark and Chris felt that there was a gap in the UK market for something along those lines.

How hard could it be?

After several months of masterminding, almost-disastrous back-and-forth wrangling with the bureaucracy of WH Smith (the main wholesaler/retailers in the UK), designing and redesigning and getting editor Chris Quigley on board, Level quietly appeared on magazine shelves across the UK and beyond.

With the contributions of various luminaries—some of whom grace these web pages—and a remit of “All Things Good”, Level went down well. Unhindered by strict genres or target niches, it really did fill a gap. The talk was underground but very complimentary. Issue 01 picked up the UK’s inaugural Magazine Design Awards’ “Best Designed Consumer Magazine” prize.

From then on, the only way was, well, neither up nor down. The high-budget, low-moral advertising vultures of the London-based competition had a stranglehold on the ad spends of the rich and famous brands. Despite an increase in promotional spend and advertising sales strategy, Level, without a desire to sell its soul, found its pages to be a hard sell. Only the most discerning of brands supported the magazine, and it just wasn’t enough. The brakes came on in November 2000, after only eleven issues.

But it’s always been there. Gnawing away in the back of our minds, especially that of publisher/designer Chris Noble. The brothers parted ways with the publishing company at the end of 2006, but Chris saw to it that he took Level with him.

Since then, Chris has had more time to think about bringing the magazine back in one way or another, and during the first half of 2009, he dove head-first into the world of web code which he had so far largely managed to avoid.

And the rest is browser history.

Many thanks to Chris Noble. I am damn proud to be a part of the new era of Level.

Check it out.

July 15, 2009

Blanks for the Memories

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

Tom Waits by iri5

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.

“Home taping is killing music.” It sounds funny now, but the British Phonographic Industry — sister of the RIAA — was incensed. Their attitude was that every blank tape sold was a record stolen. “BPI says that home taping costs the industry £228 billion a year in lost revenue,” McLaren said in 1979, “so they’re not happy that Bow Wow Wow have already reached No. 25 on the singles chart… ” The home-taping controversy was handcrafted for McLaren. He was managing Bow Wow Wow who had a hit with a song celebrating home-taping called “C-30! C-60! C-90! Go!” “In fact,” adds McLaren, “it’s the classic story of the 80s. It’s about a girl who finds it cheaper and easier to tape her favorite discs off the radio… which is why the record companies are so petrified.”

“The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable,” elaborates Steven Levy in a recent Gizmodo piece celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Walkman.

You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

Tape The magnetic tape was as much a part of the journey as the road. The portability and recordability of cassettes, which all sounds so very labor intensive now, were the precursor to today’s MP3s and iPods. Just as the book individualized the exchange of stories and information, the cassette tape and its attendant technologies individualized music listening.

Seeing the iconic cassette tapes on the shirts of the teens these days, like some technological Che Guevera, confirms Heraclitus’s conjecture that generations cycle on thirty-year intervals. You’re not likely to see the same thing come of the compact disc (it’s more of a RuPaul than a Che), so here’s to the cassette tape, the 3.5″ disc of the stereo.

[Tom Waits cassette art by iri5]

July 15, 2009

You Will

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

You Will

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. In 1982, when I first got a computer, one of my main intentions was to get a modem and connect to databases. My eleven-year-old self wasn’t as hungry for information — I could’ve gotten the same stuff from the “database” down the street known as “the library.” I was hungry for the idea of connectivity. The idea that I could connect my computer to other computers and exchange information. The idea was exhilarating.

Doesn’t that feeling, one that I shared with plenty of people by then, make the internet inevitable?

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, Marshall McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

Supposedly birds evolved the same way. Dinosaurs became bipedal via their large, counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same concept morphed wings.

Karl Popper (1968) called it “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that now we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. McLuhan continues, writing, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli.

The argument that technology is organic begs the question of what to do about it: How do we maintain control over our contrivances?

The argument that technology is organic answers the question as well: We maintain control over our contrivances in the same way that we maintain control over our lawns. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.

References:

Brand, S. (1988). The media lab: Inventing the future at MIT. New York: Penguin.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

——–

And here they are, the AT&T “You Will” commercials from 1993:

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July 14, 2009

New Follow for Now Website

I’ve been redesigning the Follow for Now site because I don’t have enough to do and because the old one wasn’t yellow enough.

Check it out and let me know if you see any glitches or have any suggestions. I’m just trying to make it work for both people who have the book and people who’ve never heard of it.

Also, I’d like to unload the rest of the inventory before the world goes “all-digital.”

July 11, 2009

“Disconnecting the Dots” on Reality Sandwich

For my latest piece for Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan’s web publication, Reality Sandwich, I poached and updated a few things I’d written about here. Here’s an excerpt:

Technology curates culture. As such, the alienation we feel from our technologically mediated “all-at-once-ness” (as McLuhan called it) comes from a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s “help” in easing our workload.

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life,” Alice Kahn once quipped, “please press three.” I’m not anti-technology, but I have been trying to grasp what our devices are doing to us, as well as the relationship between technology, culture, and people. Our devices are often divisive.

Read the full article here.

July 7, 2009

Follow for Now on the Kindle

As if you’re not sick of hearing about it yet, Follow for Now is now available on the Kindle. Now you can get all forty three interviews, all the pictures, all the goodness, in Amazon’s digital format. So, if you’ve made the jump from atoms to bits with your books, you can now add Follow for Now to your collection.

For those who don’t know, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds.

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more (click here for the full Table of Contents).

Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

And now you can get it on the Kindle.

June 30, 2009

Razorcake hates Follow for Now

Before you start thinking that everyone loves my book, Follow for Now (they don’t), check out Keith Rosson’s review on Razorcake. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s just not much interesting material being covered, even in the music and literature sections, which I feel a lot more comfortable with than, say, the science section. Like when Christopher interviews Milemarker—and time has still not proven to me that they were anything but a pretty boring band made up of some decent writers—and in lieu of trying to make Al Burian squirm a bit or trying to bring a bit of life to a band that’s always been celebrated for its coldness, he asks them “whom they read and respect.” Honestly, man—I couldn’t give a flying shit how some space-rock band has been using their library cards.

In contrast — and though he means it pejoratively — he nails it when he says, “Follow for Now unfortunately seems more interested in the ideas being presented regarding technology, media, literature, etc. than the interviews themselves.” Well, yeah!

Anyway, Rosson may have missed the point of the book, but I appreciate the attention as always.

June 28, 2009

Decisions, decisions…

In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine‘s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer’s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

June 28, 2009

The Eternal Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is not a band. It is an institution. Where other bands who manage to stay together for over a quarter of a century (or much less) become legacy bands (i.e., bands that are only known and revered for a part of their careers long past), Sonic Youth continue to push themselves and their fans into new and exciting territory with every passing year together. Lately there’s plenty of proof. In addition to a new record and a recent movie (both discussed below), there’s also David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century (Da Capo, 2008), Matthew Stearns’ 33 1/3 book on Daydream Nation (Continuum, 2007), and a forthcoming tour (I’ll be seeing them [again] on July 12th at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama).

Sonic Youth: The Eternal Their latest dozen songs, The Eternal (Matador, 2009) — their first for Matador after a long stint with Geffen — is no exception to the experimentation and consistent limit-pushing. Their sound has always been thick, but the official addition of Marc Ibold (ex-Pavement, Free Kitten), who’s toured with them for the past few years, adds yet another layer, and legendary producer John Agnello (Jawbox, Fugazi, et al.) assisted them in the studio this time. It’s not all walls though. “Antenna” is alternately mellow and melodic, sparse and jagged, driving and droney. “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn” indulges Thurston’s punk fetishes before devolving into his signature screech. His and Kim’s disembodied vocals on “Anti-Orgasm” also hearken back to earlier, less tuneful times. Other songs, “Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)” and “Calming the Snake” for instance, recall “Candle” and “Kissability,” respectively, from Daydream Nation (Blast First, 1988). The Eternal (named after the Joy Division song?) is not the full-on energetic onslaught of that record or 2006’s Rather Ripped, but it does prove that Sonic Youth is still ripe with noisily good ideas.

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake

Named after a line from the Sonic Youth song “Tom Violence” from EVOL (Blast First, 1986), Sleeping Nights Awake is a documentary/concert film crowdsourced to a group of Reno high school students through the non-profit Project Moonshine. Ali Alonso, Noah Conrath, Danielle Hauser, Charlie Hayes, Ben Kolton, Allana Noyes, and Nathan Lower were given three digital video cameras (Panasonic AG-DVC30s), training, and told to film the event. They ended up with ten songs from the July 4th, 2006 show in Reno and plenty of backstage, pre- and post-show banter from the band.

The students shot fifteen hours of black-and-white footage, and Project Moonshine founder Michael Albright edited it into the 86-minute Sleeping Nights Awake. I caught it at The Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, Texas, and the results are stunning, if a bit unevenly paced. The ten songs captured are separated by backstage chatter, stalling the film’s momentum each time it really gets rolling. Chunking the songs and the candid bits more might have solved this minor flaw. Otherwise, the film is raw like a Sonic Youth film should be and beautiful like much of the noise they make. It also humanizes the members in a way that’s never been done. Even the New Kid Marc Ibold, and drummer Steve Shelley, who’s on camera backstage for a grand total of about five seconds, come across as personable members of the Sonic Youth family. None of that is to say that the members of Sonic Youth ever seemed inhuman, aforementioned “disembodied vocals” notwithstanding. It is to say that Sleeping Nights Awake does a damn good job of showing their many dimensions.

So, Sonic Youth might be ironically monikered these days, but their age doesn’t show in the youthful energy of their music and experimentation — shown in spades on The Eternal and Sleeping Nights Awake.

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Here’s the trailer for Sleeping Nights Awake [runtime: 3:50]:

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