Somewhere in a dark corner of rock and roll’s junkyard, there’s a carnival going on. An old white blues man is noisily trying to shake off his demons. His once-shiny suit is dusty from the melee, and the twisted metal of his soul is on display. As a crowd gathers in the night, the carnie growls in delight. That ol’ devil’s got ‘im in fevers and fits, howling his gospel to any and all who’ll listen. Continue reading “Tom Waits: By Demons Be Driven”
Music for Magazines: This is Not a Record Review
I wouldn’t even bother writing about Coldplay’s latest record, but as the water of the music industry recedes, Viva la Vida has landed as a big fish in a little pond. Dave Allen exerted quite a bit of effort vilifying the record over at Pampelmoose, and while I don’t disagree with all of his points, I think his keyboard’s venom is at least partially misplaced. This is not a record review. Continue reading “Music for Magazines: This is Not a Record Review”
Summer Reading List, 2008
It’s that time again, time for the Summer Reading List, and this year’s is the biggest yet. As always, I asked several of my friends and colleagues for their recommendations. Many thanks to all who participated, including newcomers Daniel Pinchbeck, Steve Aylett, Ian MacKaye, Mike Daily, Paul Saffo, Gareth Branwyn, Rodger Bridges, and Peter Lunenfeld, as well as return contributors Erik Davis, Richard Metzger, Dave Allen, Mark Pesce, Alex Burns, Paul Miller, Brian Tunney, Patrick Barber, Steven Shaviro, Ashley Crawford, Cynthia Connolly, and Gary Baddeley. Continue reading “Summer Reading List, 2008”
The Maker’s Notebook from O’Reilly
The staff over at O’Reilly Media‘s magazines, Make and Craft, asked around to see what features The Ultimate Notebook would include. The result is their newly published Maker’s Notebook. “Clearly, lots of DIYers dream of designing their own project notebooks. We incorporated as many ideas from this Notebook Braintrust as possible,” explains Gareth Branwyn, friend and contributing editor to Make. Well, being the journaling, notebook geek that I am, I got my hands on a copy as soon as I could. Continue reading “The Maker’s Notebook from O’Reilly”
Mind Wide Shut: Recent Books on Mind and Metaphor
Scientists have used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Aristotle used many anthropomorphic ideas to describe natural occurrences, but the technology of the time, needing constant human intervention, offered little in the way of metaphors for the mind. Since then, theorists have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer, all of increasing complexity. Continue reading “Mind Wide Shut: Recent Books on Mind and Metaphor”
Camera Obscura: Cloverfield and the Myth of Transparency
The scariest moment of Bowling for Columbine (2002) was watching the security camera footage of the shootings. Something about seeing that black and white representation of Eric Harris’ and Dylan Klebold’s grainy forms stalking the cafeteria that morning was just plain eerie. Continue reading “Camera Obscura: Cloverfield and the Myth of Transparency”
The Interface and the Algorithm: Four Recent Books
The much-discussed, much-explored interface between humans and machines is seemingly our final frontier. Comparing the interface to the Victorian novel and the 1950s television show (both of which shaped society’s understanding at the time), Steven Johnson wrote, “There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.” The graphical user interface has come to represent all of the many processes going on inside the computer — and the way we interact with each other through them.
The machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine. — Aviv Bergman
With Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments (MIT Press), editors Victor Kaptelinin and Mary Czerwinski have compiled essays finding the limits of the current widespread user interface and imagining a post-desktop interface. Studies have found that our current virtual desktop doesn’t afford supporting services for the growing areas of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), the ever-expanding diversity of technologies, or the multiple roles or tasks we find ourselves filling. Beyond the Desktop Metaphor is a compendium that reaches just that — beyond the desktop.
Looking back to look ahead, Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald compiled HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (MIT Press). Erickson and McDonald asked fifty-one designers to reflect on one work — something at least ten-years old — that influenced their approach to human-computer interface design. The result is fifty-one brief essays covering artifacts spanning everything from books like Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (The Free Press) and Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, early innovations like Douglas Engelbart’s mouse and Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad, and influential people like Edward Tufte and Jane Jacobs. In a field where the research and results are cutting-edge and exciting, but where the literature is often bogged down in minutia and, well, boring, HCI Remixed exhibits a novel approach and is actually fun to read.
It is all just an algorithm with enough unknowns to make a game of it. — McKenzie Wark
Nowhere has HCI been more “remixed” than in computer gaming. A simmering subculture for decades, supposedly the gaming industry has overtaken Hollywood in size, money, and attention. Making sense of this rapid growth and its influence on our culture has spawned confusion, reckless theorizing, and a whole new field of study. Fortunately for us, people like Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark have taken up the task of keeping things in perspective. Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press) draws from over fifty video games — from PONG and Space Invaders to Half-Life and Halo — (as well as his keen critical eye and l33t gamer skills) to deliver a holistic and seasoned approach to gaming studies.
Wark’s Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press), which was originally published in-progress online as “G4M3R 7H30RY,” is written in the aphoristic style of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (not unlike Wark’s previous book, A Hacker Manifesto). While its being published online has gotten more attention than the book itself, this should not be the case. Like Wark’s previous work, this is an important text for anyone interested in progressive thought on media and technology — and our relationships with it. Gamer Theory is less about the avatars, images, and interface, and more about the philosophy that drives them. It’s the algorithm as allegory, the formula as form, the rules as rubrics, and what all of it might mean to the culture they’re shaping.
Depending on what end of the human-computer spectrum you’re interested in — from haptics and CSCW to gaming and philosophy — these four books tap the pulse of the melding of humans and machines.
Haxploitation: Three Recent Books
Networks and network protocols are often seen as sites of control, but extreme connectivity eludes control. Diseases, worms, viruses, these all spread beyond our control because of connectivity — networks — that are beyond our control.
When networks cause problems is it because they work too well, not because they are broken. Continue reading “Haxploitation: Three Recent Books”
Southland Tales: Not with a Whimper, but with a Bang
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales finally hit DVD this week, and I’ve been soaking it up ever since. It’s a lot to take in and a lot to decipher (as Salon put it, “It’s filled with so many references and so much self-conscious irony that it’s nearly impossible to make sense of it all.”), but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s worth it. I agree with Steven Shaviro that it’s “not only a brilliant film, but an extraordinarily important one.”
Like Donnie Darko, this is another absurdist eschatological fairy tale, albeit on a much grander scale, with a Pynchon-esque sprawl and a large focus on politics. Where Donnie Darko shows remarkable restraint whenever the plot threatens to spiral out of control, Southland Tales just pushes that much further, reveling in its own chaos and spectacle. It’s a carnival, a war, an end to humanity, a social comment, a political satire, a science fiction romp, and a laugh-out-loud comedy — it bends and blends genres so much as to be “as radical as reality itself” (to borrow a phrase from several sources). Not that it doesn’t have a plot or a focus, it does, but a single viewing will not provide one with all the clues to its many secrets.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a whimper, but with a bang.
The full story spills over from the film into three prequel graphic novels and borrows liberally from The Book of Revelation, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Jane’s Addiction’s “Three Days,” T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Man” (quoted in its adapted form above), Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man, the writings of Karl Marx, and many other places. The full scope of the story is ridiculously vast. As Richard Kelly explains, “I spent the last four years of my life devoted to this insane tapestry of Armageddon,” adding that this was about “getting the apocalypse out of my system once and for all.”
The centerpiece of this “insane tapestry of Armageddon” is a drug-induced music video sequence featuring Iraq veteran Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) recontextualizing “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers (embedded above; runtime: 2:56). Like the rest of the movie, it’s over-the-top delirious, but its delirium eventually disintegrates into head-hanging melancholy and the beginning of Part VI, “Wave of Mutilation,” the final act, ridden by the motif of “friendly fire” and self-destruction. This movie must have the highest incidence of characters putting guns to their own heads in the history of film-making. It also must have the highest incidence of cameras: They’re everywhere. This movie is nothing if not panoptic.
Southland Tales is rich with metaphors and self-reference, and it breaks harshly with conventional story-telling and film-making. I think it is the latter that resulted in its wholesale dismissal by critics and abysmal box office performance. Southland Tales bucks the traditional narrative paradigm that audiences are used to, and in doing so, leaves viewers lost in its hallucinatory haze. This is not to say that I got it the first time through, because that certainly isn’t the case: I’ve watched it three times in as many days, and I’m just scratching the surface. I just think that the film is not only a bit too ambitious but also breaks with form to its financial detriment. Its layers of reality (e.g., a reality TV show, a prophetic screenplay, time-traveling doubles, the musical piece — all constantly surveilled and recorded) — often reminiscent of those in Scream 3 — only add to its surreal ontology and unorthodox narrative presentation.
There are so many jarring non sequiturs throughout the film that when Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) dropped his signature line from the film (“I’m a pimp, and pimps don’t commit suicide.”), I was surprised that I was surprised. Absurdity is the rule here, not the exception. In one scene, Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) makes Martin Kefauver (Lou Taylor Pucci) put on his seatbelt, just after stopping him from blowing his own head off! Some of the lines that seem to come from out of nowhere are a part of Southland Tales‘ “self-conscious irony,” as after “officer” Bart Bookman guns down two performance artists he utters, “Flow my tears.” On the side of his police car is the Latin phrase “oderint dum metuant”: “Let them hate, so long as they fear,” which was a favorite saying of the Roman Emperor Caligula. These are only a few examples of the film’s many references and absurdities.
With that said, I also think this movie is worth the investment it takes to unravel. Maybe, like Donnie Darko, Southland Tales will find its cult audience. Here’s hoping Richard Kelly is on his way to becoming the next Kubrick and not the next Gilliam, because with only two movies, he’s proven that he has the chops to share their company.
How We Became Post-Rock
There seems to be very little consensus on exactly where Rock crossed the line and became Post-Rock (a term popularized by Simon Reynolds), but most people agree that the two bands that galvanized the movement in the last two decades are Tortoise and Mogwai. The roots of the genre run deep and in many directions (e.g., Prog, Brian Eno, Jazz, CAN, PiL, Industrial, Jim O’Rourke, et al.), but for our purposes, we’ll start roughly with those two.
![Mogwai live [photo by Leif Valin]](http://roychristopher.com/images/mogwai-live-big.jpg)
Mogwai is consistently one of my most-listened-to artists. This is partly because they make great sleepy-time music, but also because their blend of mellow prog, raging guitars, and soundtracky drama has held my attention for years. Where Tortoise tends toward a shuffle and strum, Mogwai has a propensity for rumble and roar. Structurally, if the former were a lattice partition, the latter would be a brick wall. Simply put, there’s just a lot more tension and release with Mogwai.
With that said, the brand of Post-Rock that I am drawn to owes more to Mogwai than Tortoise (Explosions in the Sky and Kinski, for example), but this is not to paint Tortoise (and their brethren, June of 44, Rodan, et al.) out of the picture. Each of the new crop of these bands owes a great debt to the mathematics of Tortoise and Slint, the guitar textures of My Bloody Valentine and The Cure, the orchestrations of Radiohead, and the experiments of electronica. But they’re each taking this loose foundation in new directions. Hood, 65daysofstatic, The Notwist, and 13 & God all slouch toward electronica; Isis, Cult of Luna, The Ocean, and Jesu all lean on the metal; dälek blast Hip-hop through their wall-of-sound; Explosions in the Sky, God is an Astronaut, Caspian, Saxon Shore, and This Will Destroy You all play the middle ground, holding the core of instrumental post-rock together with fervor.
Thanks to a series of tips from longtime music friend Wayne Wambles, these last few bands are among my recent most-listened-to artists. I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Explosions in the Sky over the past year or so. Wayne caught wind of this and recommended several bands to me, all of whom toil similar musical soil to Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai.
These four bands are the logical heirs to the Post-Rock torch. Their compositions wax and wane in a similar emotive fashion to their forebears, building tension and releasing it in flurries of guitar noise. There’s not much more to say by way of description, but here are brief synopses of each.
Caspian often starts off with near silence but builds into a wailing wave of guitar. They’re the most organic of this new crop, careening off the rails and staying at the edge of control at all times.
With vocals sometimes employed, but used as not much more than another instrument, God is an Astronaut flies somewhere between Sigor Ros and Mogwai. With four great records out, they’ve been around seemingly forever (see one of their videos below).
On the flip-side, Texas’s own This Will Destroy You has had a brief but successful history, having only been a band since 2005 and having blown up right out of the box. The youngest of all of these bands, they’ve already proven themselves worthy of the post-rock mantle with 2006’s Young Mountain EP (Magic Bullet) and their recent self-titled full-length.
Saxon Shore remind me more of Mogwai in that they seem to rely on electronics more, and, like Mogwai, they’ve worked with David Fridmann (who is best known for his pioneering work with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev). Fridmann produced their last record, The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore (Burnt Toast Vinyl, 2005), and his influence is heard in its epic drive and many climaxes (They’re currently working on new material).
Here’s the video for “The End of the Beginning” by God is an Astronaut from the record of the same name (runtime: 3:43):