Tag: Technology

Posted on

Hip-Hop Theory Talk

I’ve been working on a new book called Hip-Hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture about how Hip-hop culture preconfigures many of the forms and norms of the now. I gave the following talk to my class at The University of Texas at Austin, which shows me fumbling through some of the major concepts from the book [runtime: 37:01]:

Here’s a brief overview of the book:

The many innovations of Hip-hop now undergird our Western culture. From appropriating technology and reinventing language to street art and advertising, as well as the intertextual nature of our evermore connected mass media and communication. The DJ’s innovative use of the turntable preconfigured sampling technology and made the sample a viable currency of music making and sampling itself the battleground of creative work and copyright law. To wit, technologically enabled cutting and pasting are now preeminent practices not only for musicians but also filmmakers, designers, storytellers—culture creators of all kinds. Graffiti artists’ repainting of the urban scenery with images and letters prefigured the ubiquity of street-styled advertising. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of Hip-hop appropriation – allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and self-reference – inform the new millennium, how an understanding of Hip-hop culture is also an understanding of 21st century culture.

Thank you (and my classes) for indulging me. I’ll post more on this project as it develops.

 

Posted on

Go Publish Yourself: Lessons Learned

I have a real hatred of false headlines, titles of articles that lie about their contents. The latest one to catch my ire was James Altucher’s “Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card.” Mainly because, well, it isn’t. As much as we may try with apps and QR-codes, as well as traditional things like stickers and postcards, there still isn’t a token of identity that works like a business card. I don’t wholly disagree with Altucher’s article, just the parts where he claims his headline. The article is actually about why you should self-publish as opposed to seeking a publisher, and, as a publisher of my own first book, I can safely say that it isn’t my new business card, but that I do support the practice.

I listen to the vapid resignation coming from capital-P publishing and to the stories of corporate awfulness my friends endure, and I think if we landed half the punches we’re pulling now out of misplaced deference and outdated political instincts, we would bury them. — Erin Kissane via Twitter, October 10, 2011

I published my first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), five years ago, and I learned the process as I went through it. The tools for doing so have gotten much better, faster, and easier to use. I did Follow for Now largely “the hard way” at the time because I wanted control over every aspect of the book. I didn’t want it to look self-published. Due to advancements in the available technology, those concerns have lessened quite a lot, and I probably wouldn’t do things the same way now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the process, in the hopes that you can avoid some of the same issues now.

Design: As I said, I didn’t want my book to look self-published, so I hired a designer. I am also fortunate to have designer friends, some of whom have book design in their repertoires. I tapped Patrick David Barber and his partner Holly McGuire to do mine. I was originally going to hire Patrick to do the cover, but they took on the whole project, and I am very, very thankful that they did. It’s difficult to put a price on great design, and I didn’t pay them near what the job was worth, but I can confidently say — thanks to Patrick and Holly — that Follow for Now looks at home with any book on the shelves at the various bookstores, libraries, and homes that carry it.

Editing: Follow for Now consists of the best interviews from my old website frontwheeldrive.com. I spent a year and a half choosing, categorizing, and arranging the interviews into a form suitable for publication as a book. Once I got it pretty close to what I thought the final version would look like, I’d read those interviews so many times that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the final copyediting. I was simply too close to the content. I hired another old friend, Adem Tepedelen, to help me get the words all together. This was a step I didn’t anticipate when I started this journey, but again, I’m glad I did it. Adem found so many inconsistencies, misspellings, awkward sentences, and other holes that I’d never seen — even in all the years some of this stuff had been online. Get a skilled third party to help you get your copy tight.

Indexing: I cannot express how frustrating it is as a researcher to pick up a book, flip to the back to look up something that you know is in it, and find that there’s no index to help you locate it. Since Follow for Now contains so many people, ideas, books, records, and so on inside, I thought it was imperative that one be able to find the information in as many ways as possible. I was advised not to do the indexing myself (and I felt the same way I felt about the copyediting), so I hired Steve Connell (from the awesome Verse Chorus Press) to do mine. It was well worth it. There are rare cases when an index might be superfluous, but most nonfiction books should have one. Don’t skimp on the index. Your readers will thank you.

Distribution: I ordered a thousand copies of Follow for Now. They arrived on my doorstep in Seattle on a wooden palette. A thousand books is over forty boxes of twenty-four books each. It’s about half a standard palette. As a physical presence, it’s no joke. I’ve moved three times since then. Maintaining one’s own inventory at this point is absolutely ludicrous. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you happen to have your own warehouse and aren’t planning on moving anytime soon. The print-on-demand services have gotten much better, and if I were doing a book myself right now, I’d certainly be looking hard in their direction.

I moved just a few months for a new job after that palette of books arrived, so I missed out on shopping the book to a lot of independent distributors. If you go this route, look into distribution before your inventory comes knocking.

Digital: Given the current battles over digital distribution, I am loathe to mention Amazon, but there’s no denying their power. If you have an ISBN (and you shouldn’t have a book out without one), then you can get your book listed on their site. I make no money from Amazon sales of my print book, but having it on their site has raised its profile. If you choose to use one of their services for digital and print-on-demand publishing, you get their distribution platform automatically. This is powerful stuff, but be sure check out all of the terms of service in full: You can certainly use their strength without signing over your soul. I hired Josh Tallent at eBook Architects to convert my book’s raw files to Kindle-readable ones. Google Books and other digital distributors have their own sets of legalese to sift through. Don’t sell yourself short.

Local: Check with all of your extant local independent bookstores. Most have consignment deals and many will buy books from you outright. See what they have as far as local events as well. A reading or talk from your book can sell a few copies and raise your profile in your own area, which, if done well, can lead to more exposure online as people post and Tweet about you and your new book.

Web: I am fortunate enough to  have a background in web design, so can build my own websites. If I didn’t, I know several people who could help in that area. Again, in the five years since Follow for Now, the technology has advanced enough that free sites can do the trick. Having a website to highlight elements from the book and press about it is invaluable, but at least a landing page with all the pertinent details about your book is imperative.

—————

There are many other things you can do to get your book out and raise awareness about it, but these are the basics. “Self-publishing” is a misnomer if there ever was one. It still takes a team of people to do it successfully. You should be prepared to do most of the work yourself, but chances are you have friends who can help where you fall short. I have told many classes that if you have a book written, you can have it out tomorrow. Just make sure you’re ready for the challenge: Be prepared for years of work. Having a completed volume in hand is only about half the job; it’s the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I’m still learning as I go.

 

Posted on

Digging in the Gates: The Digital Socratic Shift

If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability of our memories as we moved from an oral to a written culture, and his concerns have been echoed in the move to digital archives. The pedigree of this technological Socratic shift is deep. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll on December 6, 1877, he externalized and disembodied a piece of humanity. Jonathan Sterne writes that “media are forever setting free little parts of the human body, mind, and soul” (p. 289). By the time Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, the public was familiar and comfortable with the idea of preserved foods. As a cultural practice, “canned music” in John Philip Sousa’s phrase, was ripe for mass consumption. Envisioning a world without such “canned” media is difficult to do now. We preserve everything. The problem is not so much the authenticity of our entertainment and information, but how to parse the sheer expanse of it. Andreas Huyssen (2003) mused, “Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such an overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?” (p. 17).

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
— Juanita Marquez in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Alongside library science and other information archiving skills, forensics is a contemporary growth field. If we are to use our media as a sort of technological “Funes the Memorious,” what do we do when technological change outpaces its retrieval compatibility? You likely have (or have had) mass storage containers (e.g., cassettes, VHS tapes, floppy discs, etc.) that lack a device capable of reading them, ghosts of information past trapped in a black box forever. We’re all archivists whether we notice or admit it, but the gates to our archives have expiration dates. A recent trip to UT’s Harry Ransom Center revealed stacks of media unreadable by any technology on-site. William Gibson‘s electronic work Agrippa: Book of the Dead plays on this very trope of archival decay. The piece, set for a one-time reading, consists of a 300-line poem on a 3.5″ disc encased in a box made to look like a hard drive, is set to scroll once through and erase itself forever, a textual spectre set free from the archive after its single haunting episode. The pages of the included book version were treated with photosensitive chemicals which fade with exposure to light.

According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press, 2008; now available in paperback), There was one public performance of Agrippa. On December 9, 1992, at the Americas Society in uptown New York City, Penn Jillette read the poem aloud, which was projected on a big screen, exacerbating its scroll into oblivion. The event is fraught with rumor and lie, as the full text of the intentionally ephemeral Agrippa was posted online the next morning. The conditions of its hacking are detailed in full in Kirschenbaum’s book, and a collection of documents surrounding the work is available online. Another interesting artifact sprung from this event: Re:Agrippa, a choppy remix of videotaped footage from the single Agrippa public event, test patterns, and haunting voiceovers kludged together by the NYU students who “hacked” Agrippa‘s text for online consumption [runtime: 5:44]:

J9s3HIsWZyc

Our archive fever needs feeding. With its flickering signifiers and configurable nature, we consider the things on the screen temporary. But, as Kirschenbaum notes, in lieu of hard drives and other external devices (the main concern of his book), the visual display of the computer was originally considered a storage device. Now, crashed drives and outmoded media hide their secrets from everyone except those closest to the machine. Forensic scientists, not unlike those seen on that other screen, are more important than ever to our unstable memories. They can condense fact from the vapor of hidden nuance and open the gates to the archival entrails of dead media.

—————

It should be noted that my conception of the archive and the haunting thereof owes a large debt to the teachings of Josh Gunn. Oh, there’s some unacknowledged Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Dick Hebdige, Bruce Sterling, and Kate Hayles in there as well.

References:

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Funes the Memorious. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1993). Snow Crash. New York: Spectra.

Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Posted on

Mark Dery: Nothing’s Shocking

I read a review of a Weird Al Yankovich record several years ago (i.e., eons past Al’s 1980s prime) that pointed out that his schtick had become commonplace. When irony and parody become the norm, the edges move toward the middle. When culture jamming becomes culture, there’s nothing left to jam. When the news is just another reality show… After many binges on the fringes, learning the edge, culture jamming, and cyberpunking during the 1990s, chronicled in his books Culture Jamming (Open Media, 1993), Flame Wars (Duke University Press, 1994), Escape Velocity (Grove Press, 1996), and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999), Mark Dery is back with a collection of essays from the meantime: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). It’s been twelve years since our last virtual sit-down, so I thought it was time to check in again.

@futuryst “Singing from the same hymn sheet” is a crap metaphor. “Examining the same entrails” is way better (Tweeted March 9, 2012).

I cracked open Dery’s first book in over a decade, and landed on the story about blogging, which, with an adept analysis of all-over-the-map, curiosity-collecting blogs like bOING bOING, explains further the plight of cultural criticism as Dery does it. Realizing I was getting ahead of myself, I backed up to Bruce Sterling‘s foreword, which coincidentally references the one piece I’d read. “This is prescience in conditions of historical inevitability,” Sterling writes about Dery’s blog piece (“World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging”). “I learn useful things like this by paying close attention to Mark Dery–not just to his writings, mind you, but to his career” (p. xii). Dery describes the situation himself, writing in 2003,

Years of tabloid media, reality TV, attacking heads, and, more recently, nightly news nightmares of doomed workers leaping from the World Trade Center, hand in hand, or journalists beheaded in your living room by jihadi or the slapstick torture at Abu Ghraib–home movies from hell that employed the visual grammar of porn–have cauterized our cultural nerve endings. Little wonder, then, that ever greater subcultural voltages are needed to shock us (p. 161).

The same laser-focused interrogation and machete-sharp wit that made Dery’s earlier books critical touchstones are here in rapid-fire form. Where his earlier work honed in on one subject or one genre of subjects, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is all over the place, a sniper-perch on the cultural sprawl where no one and nothing is safe. There are too many stand-out, entrails-examining moments to name, but his outing of HAL 9000 (“Straight, Gay, or Binary: HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet”) is likely to become one of the most talked-about essays. No matter the topic, no one puts together a sentence like Mark Dery.

Appropriately, I believe, Dery’s next project is a biography of gothic artist and writer Edward Gorey for Little, Brown, but I’ll let him tell you about that.

Roy Christopher: Not to be impertinent from the beginning, but where have you been?

Mark Dery: Impertinence will get you everywhere. In 1999, I published The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a portrait of fin-de-millennium America—paranoid, violent, economically stratified, ideologically polarized, demographically balkanized—as reflected in cultural phenomena that hyperbolized the zeitgeist: Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Heaven’s Gate cult, dug-in survivalists, fear-sick suburbanites circling the wagons in gated communities, jittery celebrities installing secret “safe rooms” in their mansions, Disney’s experiment in privatized governance and white-picket nostalgia (Celebration, Florida), apparitions of the evil clown in our media dream life, and the branding of everything, ourselves included. Like Escape Velocity before it, it was generally well-received, critically, although it suffered some critical brickbats, most notably from Pre-Cambrian feminist and professional bean-counter Elaine Showalter, who tallied up my references to women’s issues (whatever those are) and found the book wanting, and Michiko Kakutani at the Times, who had a fit of the vapors over my tendency to name-check Donna Haraway, which upsets the mental digestion of the paper’s readers.

But, contrary to popular belief, the rich pickings of the writing life fall somewhat short of a hedge-fund manager’s annual bonus, so I joined the professoriat, teaching courses in creative nonfiction (“The Popular Essay”) and media theory (“Reading the Media”) in the Department of Journalism at NYU. I toiled in the fields of corporate academe until 2009, when I returned to writing full-time. Teaching has its rewards, chief among them the privilege of rubbing brains with some of the brightest minds around and the unimaginably gratifying experience of hearing former students confess some small debt of gratitude for the writerly wisdom you’ve imparted. And it has its more dubious pleasures, notably: faculty meetings, committee meetings, the territorial threat displays of colleagues of very small brain, and the scenery-chewing hysterics of my department’s resident diva, an aspiring Sontag who dyed her hair an unconvincing magenta and who, in dead seriousness, once compared the department prohibition on holding her class in a communal study room to Nazi regulations in the Warsaw ghetto. Oh, and seeing yourself compared, on some RateYourProfessors-type site, to Snape. (Actually, that last was pure awesome, since Snape is my favorite character in the Potter movies—the only thing that makes them watchable, really. I’m always rooting for him.) In all seriousness, though, I couldn’t manage the trick of balancing the demands of classroom and writing desk. Some of my former colleagues were brilliant in the classroom and productive as writers; I respect them immensely. But teaching ate me up, leaving little time or energy for my writing. And, since my writing is at the heart of my sense of myself—it’s not just what I do, but who I am—there came a point when I had to choose between the financial security of an academic sinecure and the less tangible rewards of the writing life. Full disclosure demands that I say, too, that the politics of the institution conspired against me, but I’ll spare you the petty details of academic bloodletting. Anyway, I’m happy to be back where I belong, scribbling for a living.

RC: Since your books in the 1990s, the odd subjects you covered then have become the everyday. Where does that shift leave your current work? Are you headed further out into the cultural hinterlands?

MD: Well, it leaves The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium looking eerily prescient, I’m immodest enough to point out. I’ve been gratified by posts by apparently young readers, on GoodReads and Amazon, noting how contemporary that book feels. For example, the free-floating paranoia and anti-government conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant nativism of the ’90s militia movement is alive and well in the Tea Party and out on the survivalist fringe. As well, that late-’90s sense of American mass culture as a media-mad Tilt-a-Whirl spinning out of control, and of American society as a place where the center cannot hold and the worst are full of passionate intensity, is still with us, although it waxes and wanes, to be sure.

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts collects essays from the past decade or so, and in a plot twist I never would have imagined, some of the more recent pieces mark a turn toward a more personal style, by which I do not mean what back-of-the-magazine American essayists typically mean, which is soppy confessionalism, but rather the use of myself as a prism for refracting the cultural dynamics and historical events around me, as, say, Montaigne did in Essais or Didion did in The White Album or Luc Sante does in Kill Your Darlings or Richard Rodriguez does in nearly all of his books. So I’m lighting out for the territories within as a way of making deeper sense of American dread and American dreams, to quote the book’s subtitle.

RC: Unlike other books of its kind, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a strangely cohesive examination of America’s viscera over the past fifteen years or so. How much of it was written with the collection in mind?

MD: None of it. Each essay was what McLuhan would call a probe—a nomadic rover, wound up and let loose on the terrain of a media event, a cultural trend, an idea whose time has come, a historical premonition of our moment, the collective unconscious of America, whatever. But as its subtitle—“drive-by essays”—suggests, it’s an armchair version of the philosophical travelog, a tradition that stretches from de Tocqueville to Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare to Baudrillard’s America to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo.

RC: Tell me about the next book project. It seems a perfect pairing of subject and sensibility.

MD: It’s a biography of the writer, illustrator, and inimitable eccentric Edward Gorey. More than that I can’t say, since it’s still in the research stage. I haven’t put pen to paper, but must start soon, since I’ve got to deliver the manuscript sometime next year. Just saying that (“sometime next year”) inspires a thrill of terror so debilitating I may have to go lie down for a while, with a cold compress on my forehead.

RC: What else is coming up?

MD: I’ve just contributed a short essay to Hidden Treasure (Blast Books), an incomparably beautiful compendium “showcasing astonishing and rare” oddities and arcana from the National Library of Medicine: chromolithographs from the Atlas of Skin Diseases, magic lantern slides, Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children (1942), Health and Hygiene Puzzle Blocks from the Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory in 1960s “Red China,” an 1839 lithograph illustrating the postmortem examination of a man (?) with sexually ambiguous genitalia, a 1924 German tract extolling the virtues of nudism. It’s a simply breathtaking, a cabinet of wonders between two covers: 450 unforgettable images, accompanied by brief essays, ranging over the intimately alien landscapes of bodies rendered monstrous by injury, disease, or congenital deformity. Also, I’ve got a personal essay-cum-cultural critique of the Rorschach test in the works for The Believer, something for The Awl on Young Americans-era David Bowie as white negro and postmodern minstrel, and an essay on the future of the human body for a museum exhibition catalog.

Posted on

The Deleuzian Delusion

Michel Foucault once said that the twentieth century might eventually be considered Deleuzian, and he still may end up being right.  Gilles Deleuze, and his frequent cowriter, Félix Guattari, wrote some unignorable books in the late decades of last century, the two volumes Anti-Oedipus (University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987) being the two most prominent in either’s canon. Each has an extensive body of work in his own right, but Deleuze casts a large shadow over his friend and colleague. Such a shadow in fact, that it prompted Ian Bogost to Tweet the following on March 3rd, 2012:

@ibogost: Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?

Assemblages, rhizomes, bodies-without-organs, repetition, difference… I can’t claim to have an answer to Bogost’s question, as I can’t claim to understand much of the Deleuze that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of it, and a lot of it more than twice). I do know that a lot of it is difficult simply by dint of the contrarian angle on subjectivity: These books challenge the fundamental way(s) most of us tend to feel that being in the world works. Holland (1999) opens his book with the obvious: “The Anti-Oedipus is not easy to read” (p. 1). About writing it with his coauthor, Deleuze said, “Between Félix and his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how” (2006, p. 238). And about A Thousand Plateaus, he mused, “Now we didn’t think for a minute of writing a madman’s book, but we did write a book in which you no longer know, or need to know, who is speaking…” (quoted in Nadaud, 2006, p. 19). On page 22 of the latter, they even write it out, in black and white: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is compose of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” How is one to make sense of bastard philosophy such as this?

I once asked my friend and mentor Steven Shaviro what path to take as I embarked upon the plateaus alone for the first time. He suggested using Claire Parnet’s Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 1987) as a sort of crib notes to the two major volumes mentioned above. Dialogues was compiled between the writing of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze talked about the book’s in-betweenness (i.e., its being between both the two books and the three authors), writing that what mattered was “the collection of bifurcating, divergent, and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without going from one to the other” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). And so it goes. My Deleuzian delusion is that I’ll ever get a handle on this stuff.

Somewhat thankfully, there is now Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z (Semiotext(e), 2012), a three-DVD set of those liminal lines between Deleuze and Parnet. Covering topics alphabetically, from A for “Animal” to Z for “Zigzag,” it’s a rare and interesting look at the man and his letters. Unlike the film Derrida (Jane Doe Films, 2002) on Jacques Derrida, of course, this is not really a documentary. Parnet, a former student of Deleuze’s, knew him well, and director Pierre-André Boutang likens Deleuze and Parnet to a Jazz duo, playing off of each other in an improvisation of concepts and cons, using the alphabet as a grounding framework. “Deleuze had taken into account the fact that each reel lasted ten minutes,” Boutang (2004) wrote, “which produced a rhythm. And the charm of 16mm film is that the sound reel lasts longer than the image. With some people, you cut once the image stops. You don’t feel like doing that with Deleuze” (p. 7). During the discussion about culture (C is for Culture), Deleuze says, “Talking is dirty. Writing is clean.” If you snuggle in to watch this DVD, get ready for four hours of dirty, dirty talking.

Many others have tried to make sense of Deleuze in book form, with various tropes and varying degrees of success. The most recent being Gregory Flaxman. Flaxman is not new to Deleuze: His previous book was The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). His latest, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, Volume 1 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), uses the idea of friendship as an initial condition from which to reexamine Deleuze’s philosophy. Covering everything from Deleuze’s apprenticeship with Friedrich Nietzsche to his vow to overthrow Plato, Flaxman reintroduces aesthetics to Deleuzian studies, showing how Deleuze situated fiction in the center of a minor philosophy. He writes, “Deleuze declares no abiding loyalties: not only does he mingle with countless philosophers, but he flirts with just as many writers, filmmakers, and artists” (p. 181). This nomadic “promiscuity” is one more reason that the well of Deleuze’s ideas isn’t likely to run dry any time soon, and Flaxman’s is a deep and welcome reconsideration. Moreover, his focus on friendship is intriguing. Stivale (1998) wrote, “This rapport of friendship lies, I believe, at the very core of these authors’ collaborative engagement…” (p. ix). Nietzsche freed Deleuze from the arid areas of academe, and Deleuze focused Guattari without truncating his thoughts too much (which, if you’ve read any Guattari without Deleuze, you know they needed a trim here and there; though Deleuze might not agree with my assessment: He speaks highly and fondly of Guattari in A to Z [L for Loyalty]).

Speaking of friendship, if you’d like a more personal — and historical — look at Deleuze and his main co-conspirator, there’s François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press, 2010), which, appropriately enough, is 651 pages long. The duo met shortly after the revolts of May, 1968 (to which Anti-Oedipus is largely a reaction: “Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties,” Guattari said in Chaosophy [2009, p. 69]). Guattari had just been passed over as Lacan’s successor, which sent him into a deep depression tempered only by throes of mania. With a milder manner and more comfort within his confines, Deleuze was the calm of their storm, a storm that still surges through classes and discussions in philosophy, postmodernism, post-structuralism, cultural studies, film studies, net criticism, and so on. So, what was their beef with Marx, Freud, Plato, and every other thinker (save Nietzsche and Foucault, of course) that preceded them? It’s all here. Dosse’s book is the definitive story of these two major collaborators, thinkers, writers, jokesters, and, perhaps above all, friends.

Desire is under it all, according to the iconoclastic French duo. The capitalism machine creates layers and layers of desires and subsequently splits selves into schizophrenia (hence the subtitle of both volumes of their two-volume work: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). William Carlos Williams (1923) once wrote, “The pure products of America go crazy.” That’s not exactly what they meant, but maybe that’s why Deleuze, along with Guattari, have such a hold on the academy’s mass mind: Our spirits are all spiraling apart in so many separate ways, just as they said they would all those years ago. But maybe, as they were, we can still be friends.

References:

Boutang, Pierre-André. (2004, February). Everything About Gilles Deleuze and Nothing About Gilles Deleuze. RevueVertigo, no. 25.

Boutang, Pierre-André (Director). (2012). Gilles Deleuze: A to Z, with Claire Parnet [DVD]. United States: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. (2006). Letter to Uno: How We Worked Together. In Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Parnet, Claire. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1995). [front cover copy]. In Gilles Deleuze Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, Félix. (2009). Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977. New York: Semiotext(e).

Holland, Eugene W. (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Massumi, Brian. (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Nadaud, Stéphane. (2006). Love Story between an Orchid and a Wasp. In Guattari, Félix, The Ani-Oedipus Papers. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 11-22.

Stivale, Charles J. (1998). The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York: Guilford.

Williams, William Carlos. (1923). Spring and All.

————–

I am indebted to Steven Shaviro, Katie Arens, and Ken Wark for what little I understand about the subject(s) at hand.

Posted on

Temporary Eponymous Zone: SXSW 2012

SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone again. The outdoor shows that would have been a drenched disaster went on without weather-induced incident.

I started off my own, soggy SXSW Interactive with a quiet breakfast with Howard Rheingold. He was here to talk about his new book, Net Smart (MIT Press, 2012), and it was his first time at SXSW since he was the keynote speaker for Interactive ten years ago. His book Smart Mobs (Basic Books, 2002) was just out then. Lots has changed around the conference since, but the ideas in that book were prescient (as proven by its echoes in Amber Case’s SXSWi keynote this year). Net Smart will definitely send out the same temporal ripples. Other than books, Howard and I talked about everything from the weather and breakfast to life and careers. It was so nice to sit down with one of my mentors for a face-to-face interaction after over ten years of virtual ones.

Next on the list of rain-limited events was a trip to Red 7 to see my friends Jake Flores, Ryan Cownie, Seth Cockfield, Brook Van Poppelen, Lucas Molandes, Nick Mullen, Blake Midgette, Kath Barbadoro, and others put on some free funny. Now, a show like this is a fairly typical night for me here in Austin, but this line-up is like three really good versions of those nights all put together. We had to go through a wormhole to find the back door to Red 7, and once inside we found our friends in the dark, damp, abandoned-warehouse feel of Red 7’s backside (there was some other event hogging up the inside space). Assorted badges followed us in, but most quickly left. The venue was perfect for the material in play though: dirty, dark, wet, hilarious. For those outside the community, the Austin stand-up comedy scene is one of its best kept secrets. It boasts not only open mics nearly every night of the week, but damn funny line-ups on a regular. Jake’s show was no exception. Against all the SXSW rules, we left early to catch Ume at Stubb’s.

Ume played on the big, outdoor stage at Stubb’s, which left us happily skanking in the mud. Eric Larson was out of town, but Mark Turk filled in nicely on bass, even after only two rehearsals. He and Rachel held down the rhythm and rumble while Lauren brought the flash. Fresh off of a Left Coast tour with Cursive, Lauren kept up her supernova energy (this was also only the second of no less than eleven shows Ume played during SXSW). The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve ended with a new song that sounds like Lauren is singing for Kyuss. The track is thick, heavy and huge. According the Eric, the working title is “Black Stone.” I’m anxious to play it very loud on my headphones. We saw them again on Tuesday at Bat Bar with Eric happily reinstalled. Even with sound issues, they never disappoint.

Ume's Lauren Larson rocking Stubb's. (photo by Lily Brewer)

Monday found me getting my Music badge, which I’d tried to get the previous Friday, but was denied. Credentialed up, I met Alex Burns for lunch. Alex and I have worked in tandem on at least two versions of 21C Magazine as well as several years together on the Disinformation website. Alex is another great mind with whom I’ve been in touch and exchanged ideas for over a decade and finally met IRL at SXSW. People say it every year, but it cannot be overstated: The sidebar conversations that an event like SXSW affords are very often its true value.

Dave Allen, Hank Shocklee, and I hamming it up in the green room. (photo by David Ewald)

While meeting in the green room preparing for our panel “What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology?,” Hank Shocklee stopped by to say hello. As one of the sonic architects behind the sound of Public Enemy, Hank has had a profound influence on the way music sounds in the twenty-first century, as well as my appreciation thereof. It felt more than appropriate to run into him before we took the stage. Dave Allen (North), David Ewald (Uncorked Studios), Jesse von Doom (CASH Music), and I had done a version of this talk in San Francisco last September at SF MusicTech Summit. At SXSW Music, we were joined by Anthony Batt (BUZZnet, Katalyst, etc.) and novelist and music critic Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm, On Celestial Music, and many others). This gathering of minds represented every aspect of the issues we were addressing: From artists to fans and from technologists to journalists, we used everyone’s expertise and experience to express our opinions about the direction music is headed as an industry, a cultural practice, and as a commercial enterprise. Ours is a discussion that will continue as long as people love making and hearing music and other people try to capitalize on that love.

Speaking of music technology, the Vinylrecorder T-560 was on display at the trade show. This device allows one to cut a vinyl record from recordings on a computer. It’s like burning a CD, except it offers the “warmth” of vinyl playback. As many times as events at festivals like this prompt me to question what year they think it is (e.g., Bruce Springsteen? Counting Crows? Billy Corgan? We’re only doomed to repeat history if our elders keep force-feeding it to us.), I have to admit that the idea of pressing my own records looked like the kind of useless fun I often enjoy most. Home recording fun notwithstanding, the back-to-the-future approach of the Vinylrecorder is a great metaphor for many of the attitudes represented in music technology: “How do we use what we have now to get back to the way things were?” they seem to be asking.

This is part of the reason we gathered to talk about these issues. There’s no going back. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry, but you still have to be good at what you do. The internet has made fame much easier and fortune nearly impossible. You have to learn the technology. It’s easier now than ever to get heard, yet harder to stand out. Events like SXSW emphasize just how noisy and cluttered the current music milieu is. How do you cut through it all? If you want engagement, be engaging. Show us something. Doug Stanhope has a joke about how you never see ads for drugs. “If you have a good product,” he says, “people will find it. You don’t need to advertise.” No one owes you a living just because you make music (or Doug as a comedian, or me as a writer, etc.), but if you do something people want, they will find you. Rain or shine.

————

Many, many thanks to Dave Allen, David Ewald, Anthony Batt, Jesse von Doom, and Rick Moody for the great discussions both on and off the stage; to Hank Shocklee for the chat; to Rebecca Gates for coming by; to Howard Rheingold and Alex Burns for sharing meals and beers; to Andy Flynn for hooking it all up; to Ume for rocking everything as usual; to Tarryn Lambert and friends for the lively debate; to Brooke Pankey for braving the city streets on a bicycle with us; to Luke and Abby Brewer for walking nine miles even though we couldn’t get their young selves into a show; and special, special thanks to Lily for enduring the whole week with me.

Posted on

David Preston: Hacking High School

After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He’s now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this introduction as brief as possible and just let him tell you about it. Some men just want to watch the world learn.

Roy Christopher: What drove you from the hallowed hells of academia to teaching high school?

David Preston: (Hang on, let me hop up on my soapbox) Every generation thinks school can’t get any worse but somehow we manage. When I was a kid I hated school but loved learning (and still do), so when I graduated I thought I could liberate the other inmates by learning about the institution and how to fix it. After college I wrote about schools as a journalist and then I went back for a master’s and a Ph.D. in education. But in grad school I discovered the politics, how difficult it is to ask pressing questions without incurring the wrath of well-funded powers-that-be. Eventually I figured there wasn’t enough lipstick for this institutional pig and found my way into management consulting, where I worked with executives and organizations on learning and planning. Even though I was making good money and keeping my hand in by teaching courses at UCLA, the idea of school nagged at me because I could see the trend worsening. Really smart, highly-motivated students and executives told me how completely unprepared they were for life after graduation—and these were the successful people! Today’s students have it even worse. They don’t learn about their own minds, they don’t learn about how they fit in the larger scheme of things, they don’t learn how to use the tools available to them, and they don’t learn the basics of how to manage their bodies or their money. Forget the achievement gap and the union versus reform sideshow—even the best prep school curricula are designed for a world that no longer exists (if it ever did). Once upon a time the American high school diploma signified that a person had the tools to be self-sufficient; now it’s like one of those red deli counter tickets that tells you to line up at the recruiter’s office or financial aid. And the worst part is, today’s students know all this because technology allows them to see the world for themselves. They don’t have to be told that school is an irrelevant exercise in obedience.

I’ve been critical of school since watching my first grade teacher pull kids’ hair for getting math problems wrong, but after 9/11 I thought about the issue differently. I reflected on how our thinking influences the world we’re living in and the future we’re creating for ourselves. Whatever big-picture issue you care about—the environment, the economy, human rights, politics—is defined by how people think and communicate about it. And the institution ostensibly in charge of helping people learn to think and communicate is fucked. So, when a friend of mine suggested in 2004 that I take a “domestic Peace Corps” sabbatical and offered me an opportunity to teach high school courses, I turned him down immediately. But over the next couple of weeks I realized that you never hear anything about education policy from inside the classroom, and I’d get to be an embedded anthropologist. Boots on the ground. I wanted to find out what today’s students are actually like (they’re not the Digital Natives you read about!) and what actually goes on in school on the days they don’t give tours. I may have been fantasizing about Hunter S. Thompson riding with Hell’s Angels or Jane Goodall hanging with chimps when I said yes to going back inside the belly of the beast.

I taught at the country’s fourth-largest high school in LA. It had a year-round calendar with three tracks to accommodate five thousand students, most of whom didn’t carry books because they didn’t want to get jumped on the way home. But this one student, Zolzaya Damdinsuren, came into my class during a sweaty summer school afternoon and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. This is a whole other story, but the bottom line is that I spent a month in western China, Tibet, and Mongolia with Zolzaya and his family, and the experience changed me. By the time I returned I had decided not to return to my consulting practice. Instead I resolved to create learning solutions that would help people whether they were in school or not. I moved to California’s central coast and I’ve been hacking education ever since.

RC: Tell me about your current education project, the one you’ve been piloting for a while now.

DP: I’m helping students build a massively multiplayer online learning network. I started with the students in my high school classes. Initially, 100 students created 100 blogs and learned about online security, privacy, filter bubbles, search, online business models, and how to use social media to curate and broadcast information. We reached out to authors, we conducted a flash mob research project that created a mindmap out of a William Gibson interview in 24 hours, and we held video conferences with illustrious celebrities such as yourself. That was fall semester. Now we’re reaching out to recruit a study group of 20,000-50,000 people to prepare for the AP English Literature & Composition exam using both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. This is proof-of-concept: the ultimate goal is to create an online exchange that offers the resources and tools people need to acquire information, demonsrate mastery and build a portfolio of work. In five years I want to see a teacher make a million dollars, not because of some collective bargaining agreement, but because she’s that good. Maybe she’s an author, maybe she’s a mechanic. I want to create a model of community in which learning is an economic driver. I think the outcome will be a competitive market of entrepreneurs, job candidates and creatives who aren’t just eager to tell you what they can do, but eager to show you what they’ve already done.

RC: What insights have you found doing this work?

Until about two years ago I was focusing on interdisciplinary curriculum and information-referenced assessment models as ways to extend what I could offer students. But basically these were just ways of remixing the standard curriculum and providing more formative feedback to learners. Even my use of social media was essentially limited to conserving paper, helping absentees, and trying to make the same old lessons seem more engaging or entertaining.

You see that sort of thing all over the Web. Blended learning, virtual schooling, online lessons, LMS, SIS—some of the ideas and applications are really cool, but it’s all essentially Skinner’s Box 2.0. It’s what happens when anything good gets sucked into the school policy meat grinder. Apple in the world = Think different. Apple in school = Electronic textbooks. Peter Drucker said the worst thing management can do is the wrong thing more efficiently. Standardizing and streamlining is great if you’re starting with something of quality, but otherwise incremental change makes the problem worse because it reinforces the idea that change is impossible. You can’t lose twenty pounds by eating one less Twinkie a day. You have to radically, fearlessly redesign from purposeful scratch. That’s how evolutionary adaptation works: one day there’s no fin, then the water rises and—Whoa!—everybody who’s still alive and reproducing has fins. So I gave up trying to tweak the finless and started thinking more about where we are trying to swim. This took the form of a simple question: What does it take to be an educated global citizen in the 21st century?

The real opportunity of the Internet is creating a network that takes on its own momentum, grows, and exponentially increases its value. In fact, I think at this point network theory has a greater payoff in learning than learning theory does. The really cool part is that as the network grows and gains experiences, it also changes purpose and direction. School isn’t built to tolerate that, which I think is a big issue, considering the need for innovation in this country.

It’s exciting to be a part of something so dynamic. In too many places learners are forced to wait for an institution, or a government, or an economic sector to get its act together and do right by them. Learners don’t have to wait for Superman. They are Superman.

RC: Well, one of the things I wonder is where the funding comes from. That still seems to be a major problem with education reform, and I’m not just talking about funding for technology and other resources, but funding for teachers: One of the main reasons interesting and innovative people avoid teaching in high school is because there’s so much more money to be made elsewhere. How do we fund this revolution?

DP: Learning needs to become the economic driver. We need a learning environment in which learners and mentors select each other, co-create interdisciplinary curricula and demonstrate mastery in ways that translate to the broader economy and life in our culture. Such an open market would allow learning innovators to create revenue streams that feed communities and align compensation with perceived value and performance: if you suck you starve, if you rock you make bank. This is happening already. In Korea, teacher Rose Lee is known as the “Queen of English.” She makes over $7 million a year. If clients are willing to invest that much in university prep, imagine what they’ll do for top-shelf professionals who can prepare the next generation for economic success without needing the university at all. Creating a new economic sector around learning makes mentoring a much more dynamic and potentially lucrative endeavor than teaching ever was.

Until that exists, though, it’s still possible to integrate coursework and network once learners get the basics of the Internet and online privacy/security. It doesn’t take much money for an individual teacher to offer online learning opportunities. I started off guerrilla style. Everything I’m currently using with students is available for free to anyone who has access to the Internet—and every student has access to the Internet. It drives me crazy when I hear well-meaning adults suggest that we not work online with students because not everyone has a computer at home. We read books with students, and some of my students don’t have those at home either. This is Problem Solving 101. If you don’t have a computer at home you have an access problem. That would be a cruel proposition if the problem wasn’t super easy, but we are surrounded by solutions. Go to a friend’s; go to the computer center or library; spend $3 at the copy store. If an entire community is impacted to the point that an individual really can’t access the Internet, document the case that supports getting the community connected. Agitate. Citing lack of Internet access in 2012 is an admission of defeat that suggests a lack of determination and imagination.

RC: What are you up to off-campus?

DP: For the last six months I have been neck-deep in the work I’m doing with students. Writing curriculum, reading blogs, and replying to messages around the clock seven days a week. It’s insane. I’ve never worked harder as a teacher or had more fun. Now I’m documenting the process and starting to promote it. I’m writing a white paper, starting a blog, designing the system architecture for the learning exchange, consulting, and speaking about the proof of concept. Next event is the CUE conference in Palm Springs on March 15.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of liberating learning from school. Our present is competitive and our future is uncertain. My old mentor used to say that in chaos there is profit, but success in 2012 is not for the passive, weak, or risk-averse. Intellectual and financial freedom isn’t something that can be given to you. You have to take it.

Posted on

Fresh Prints: Digitization and Its Discontents

When John Naisbitt was researching his best-selling book Megatrends (1982), he had a file system of shoe boxes. The shoe boxes were labeled according to major trends he had spotted in local newspapers from across the country and filled with the actual clips from those papers. Not only is this method of research rendered obsolete by the all-encompassing web, in light of the web’s ubiquity (especially to the so-called “digital natives” who’ve grown up with the web), it sounds downright silly.

A fraction of Kevin Kelly's library.

Kevin Kelly has a lot of books, and like me, he works with them, adds to them, uses them. But he’s ready to leap into a future without them in their current form. Calling us “People of the Screen” (not his most original idea), he writes on his website,

I work with books. I wrestle with them, play with them, mark them, write in them, dog-ear them, talk to them. I use them. But my books on paper, as gorgeous as they look, are usually bimbos. I can’t search them, clip them, cut and paste their best parts, share their highlights, or my marginalia, link them to my other books, or continue our conversation for very long. That’s why I am moving to digital books as fast as I can.

I have to admit to finding this somewhat troubling. Not so much the move to digital books, which I’ve been toying with myself, but the enthusiasm with which Kelly touts the move. I maintain that the move to digital makes sense for other media–music and movies, where the media themselves require no more than speakers and a screen, respectively–but that books are an example of good design. Compact discs and DVDs are not an examples of good design. A cassette tape or a video tape is not an example of good design. For music, the iPod is an example of good design, one that is far better than any previous music device. There’s no carrying anything else along (e.g., CDs or cassettes). There’s no flipping of the tape, or rewinding or fast-forwarding to find that perfect track. The music just flows, like words on a page.

We’ve discussed these transitions at length in terms of organizing principles, but what we’re really talking about here, especially in the case of the printed word, is delivery systems. The book, as cumbersome and intractable as Kelly’s attitude sees it, is an example of good design. Books are built to last, their batteries don’t run down, most of them are extremely portable in small numbers, and they exist just fine without screens. This last point is one I’ve been thinking on a lot lately. As much as I do not lament the past inconveniences of flipping over of a record or rewinding a cassette tape, I am more and more aware of how the computer has devoured all of our media activities, and part of my anxiety against the leap to bits is the fervor with which we’re putting everything on a screen. I’ve been looking for things that don’t require screens: riding bicycles, skateboarding, walking, face-to-face conversations, and so on. Reading books is still among these activities, but the screen’s threat to that activity troubles me. This cartoon from Reddit user Gordondel illustrates the point:

And this one (source unknown), speaks to the very speed of our increasingly digitized culture, in contrast to the analog methodology of John Naisbitt above:

Again, I do not lament the change in music, especially where discovery is concerned. It’s the best it has ever been for a music fan like myself, and for years I’ve wanted the ability to search my bookshelves with the same ease that I search for music, both new and on my hard drives. I have also discussed this shift on this site ad nauseam, as well as invited my music friends to discuss it here. When it comes to what I do — that is, synthesizing the ideas of others into (hopefully) new insights, like a DJ mixing records (I like to think, in my grander moments) — there is no question that digitizing makes sense. Though, as Alex Burns noted in a recent email to me, citing ebooks has yet to be formalized (i.e., there are no page numbers), tools like DevonThink and Steven Johnson‘s Findings work wonders for locating quotations, citations, and connecting tasty morsels among digitized texts. Limited by the selection of books that exist in the digital future Kelly is cheerleading, our libraries just aren’t there yet. The printed word still carries its own inherent DRM by dint of resisting digitization in a way that other media do not. Where we easily rip(ped) our CDs and DVDs to hard drives and co-located clouds, no one is rushing through their bookshelves with the same fervor. This changes the power structure of the format shift.

To that point, earlier today, Jay Babcock posted a link to an interview with journalist and Free Ride (Doubleday, 2011) author Robert Levine by Ben Watt, DJ, label head, and musician/songwriter with Everything but the Girl. In light of the SOPA/PIPA crisis, their discussion is germane and deserves a wide readership. Digital vs analog discussions inevitably turn to the internet, and furthering the distiction between music and text above, Levine states,

I have a contract with Random House: They gave me an advance that represents a risk to them, since many books don’t sell very well, and they take most of the revenue on each sale to compensate them for that risk. If you pirate my book, I don’t lose all that much money directly, but it definitely affects my ability to get another deal and ultimately — because working on something for two years costs money — write another book. Random House is my partner. Like all partners, authors and publishers have differences of opinion — the former want higher royalties and the latter don’t. But commercial-scale piracy hurts both. As to whether authors and musicians should have publishers or labels, that’s a separate issue.

It’s always more complex than we think. Digitization often undermines our ideas of intellectual property (It should be noted that large-file sharing site MegaUpload was shutdown while I wrote this piece). Levine continues, “the fact that barriers to entry have come down is what’s great about the Internet, and the fact that piracy is rampant is what’s wrong with the Internet, and I think we need to separate them.” The question then becomes: How do we move forward in one way without moving backward in another?

That aside, after debating the all-or-nothing, digital divide of books, I purchased my latest e-reader because I wanted the option of ebooks. Let’s face it, a lot of books are cheaper in digital form. I had to debate the divide remembering that some of my favorite movies are yet to be available on DVD, but once we all decide that we’d rather have ebooks than book-books (what I call “The Tyranny of Adoption”), the latter will go the way of the CD, DVD, and LP.

Recently I was contemplating my next ‘zine project, an archaic practice the physicality of which I still find rewarding in both process and product (much like shopping in brick-and-mortar record and book stores), and I was thinking of making it available for e-readers as well. One of the first things that occurred to me was the lack of a two-page spread in that format. In ‘zines, magazines, and books, the fold between signatures, between pages, provides a landscape view of two pages at once. This expanse of visual real estate is not extant on an e-ink or tablet screen. Much like the one-sidedness of the MP3, the ebook is all fronts.

Let me stop here and attempt to gather the threads unraveled above:

  • Digitization is not inherently a bad thing.
  • Some media thrive in strictly digital format. Others need more nuanced modes of delivery.
  • (That is, some things do not need to be on screens.)
  • Wanting searchable book content does not mean not wanting books.
  • We decide what works for us.
  • No matter what, we still need to reconcile intellectual property with digitization (IP with IP).

New devices and media formats, whether we’re designing them or adopting them, curate our culture. We have to think cumulatively about these changes and decide what we want. Book culture has served us well, and we might be ready to let go of it in its current form (reactions to yesterday’s Wikipedia blackout in protest of SOPA certainly do not support literary culture as we know it). Let’s just be mindful of the culture we’re creating.

————–

One for Fun: While I was writing this piece, Jason Kottke posted the video below of John Scalzi’s thirteen-year-old daughter Athena seeing an LP record for the first time [runtime: 1:41]. One cannot help imagining the same fate for books:

ibfx4AFlgH4

————–

Acknowledgements: To be fair to Kevin Kelly, his original post was about digital publishing, and I agree with his points and enthusiasm for that. Given my ebook anxiety, I couldn’t help but take his massive analog library as an opportunity to discuss the readers’ side of the issue. Thanks are due to Dr. Martha Lauzen, who told me the John Naisbitt story during my master’s degree days studying with her at San Diego State University. Gratitude is also due to Alex Burns, Jay Babcock, Steven Johnson, Jason Kottke, Dave Allen, David Ewald, and Lily Brewer for sharing links, lively discussion, and correspondence.

Posted on

Terminal Philosophy: A Cultural History of Airports

My dad is an air traffic controller, so I’ve grown up with a special relationship with airports. These grounded waystations are like family members, some close siblings, some distant cousins. Is there a more interstitial space than an airport? It is the most terminally liminal area: between cities, between flights, between appointments, between everything. The airport is a place made up of on-the-ways, not-there-yets, missed-connections. The airport is a place made up of no-places.

Above SFO (photo by Brady Forrest)

In the late 1970s, Brian Eno attempted to sonically capture the in-between feeling of being in a airport. He’d already started making “unfinished” or ambient music, but this was his first with a specific, spatial focus. I seem to remember conflicting reports of where Eno came up with the idea for airport music, but he told Stephen Colbert that he was in a beautiful, new airport in Cologne and everything was lovely except for the music. “What kind of music ought to be in an airport? What should we be hearing here?” Eno says he thought at the time. “I thought that most of all, that you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend that you weren’t going to die on the plane.”

In a recent interview in The Believer, Laurie Anderson talks about the in-between of airports and Alain de Botton’s book A Week at the Airport (Profile, 2009), in which he explores Heathrow airport:

Because you go through Heathrow or any airport and you go, What’s behind that hollow cardboard wall? And he decided to find out, so he spent time there, and every time I’ve been through Heathrow since then, I know what’s behind those walls. The way the whole airport shakes every time an airplane lands, you’re like, ‘Am I in a structure or just a diagram of a structure?’ You’re not really sure. Added to the fact that there are no clocks there, either, so you’re sort of lost in this flimsy world, which is the way they would like to keep it.

In Christopher Schaberg’s The Textual Life of Airports (Continuum Books, 2012) he explores the texts of these structures, structures whose flimsy architecture veils stories of spaces in between public and private, screening and secreting. They’re not home and they’re not hotels. Schaberg reads airports as texts to be read, but he also looks at the very idea of reading in airports, which is a common practice. Where else do you get stuck that there’s almost always a bookstore nearby? Ironic that we need the forced downtime of a long flight or layover to do something so rewarding, and I’m speaking for myself as much as anyone as I look forward to that time and meticulously compile what it is I will read while traveling.

Schaberg’s travels through the texts of airports include many actual texts about flying, but also his time working in an airport. Inevitably, 9/11 plays a major part in these texts and his reading of them. If nothing else, that day affected us all when it comes to air travel. Everything from Steven Speliberg’s Terminal (Dreamworks, 2004) to Don Delillo’s Falling Man (Scribner, 2007) runs through Schaberg’s screening machine. It’s an amazingly subtle analysis of a very disruptive event.

“Most of us want to reach our destination as quickly and safely as possible,” writes Alastair Gordon in Naked Airport (University of Chicago Press, 2008; p. 4), which Ian Bogost mentioned in our 2010 Summer Reading List. The book is a cultural history of airport structures. His approach is starkly different from Schaberg’s, taking a distinctly historical view from 1924 to 2000 and how each of these eras dealt with the structure of airports qua airports. Gordon’s text is definitive, taking into account how historical events shaped the built environment of flight through every era. Everything from Roosevelt’s New Deal to 1960’s stewardess wear figures in the story. Naked Airport is a seductive, secret history of a common structure.

Books are always a good idea when traveling via airplane, but I urge you to consider these two texts the next time you leave home. They will enlighten your flight (and your in-betweens) in more ways than one.

————-

Here’s the clip of Brian Eno on The Colbert Report from November 10, 2011 [runtime: 6:27], in which he briefly discusses Music for Airports:

References:

Botton, Alain de (2009). A Week at the Airport. London: Profile Books.

Gordon, Alastair. (2008). Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schaberg, Christopher. (2012). The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight. New York: Continuum Books.

Stern, Amanda. (2012, January). Being an Artist is a Totally Godlike Thing to Do–And I Have a God Complex: An Iterview with Laurie Anderson. The Believer, 10(1).

Posted on

2011: Are You Going to Eat That?

It’s December and time to reassess the year, and 2011 is a joy to revisit. It was easily my best year ever personally. I signed a book deal, spoke at several conferences with some of my best friends, got engaged to a wonderful woman, built some new bikes, redesigned my website (finally), and finished coursework and comprehensive exams on my way to a Ph.D., among other things.

This year was crazy, from the death of Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street to the ramping up of some sort of political happening. I also saw, listened to, and read a lot of good stuff. Here is the best of the media I consumed this year:

Album of the Year: Hail Mary Mallon Are You Going to Eat That? (Rhymesayers):  Hail Mary Mallon is the melding of word-murdering minds Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic and the laser-precise cuts of DJ Big Wiz, all three Def Jux alumni and no strangers to the raps and beats in their own rights. In the interest of full disclosure, these dudes are my friends. To be perfectly honest, if they were wack they wouldn’t be.

These three have been touring and clowning together for years in different guises, and it’s obvious when you hear how well they play together. Are you Going to Eat That? is the dopest record out this year.

Production-wise, “Mailbox Baseball” sounds like an Iron Galaxy outtake, while “Grubstake” evokes the stripped down reduction—all 808s and sparse scratches—of a salad-day-era Rick Rubin. Aes and Rob pass the mic like the Treacherous Three. “Table Talk” is a 21st-century “High-Plains Drifter.” But don’t get any of this twisted: this is not a throwback, it’s a leap forward.

It’s all good (“Breakdance Beach” is dope, though it does get grating upon repeated listens), and the skills are barn-razing and bar-raising. Whether it’s Hannibal Lector or Cannibal Ox, Hail Mary Mallon prove that rap will eat itself.

Here’s their video for “Meter Feeder” [runtime: 3:47] directed by Alexander Tarrant and Justin Metros:

G-QxnfpTG6c
 
 
Close Second: Radiohead The King of Limbs (Waste): “I’m such a tease and you’re such a flirt…” The most important band in the world has returned with another cure for the malaise of the age. Pick one: They’ve saved rock and roll, killed rock and roll, and still emerged from the muck of the music industry well ahead of the curve. Everyone in media keeps them under the microscope to see how they will win. Again. Lean in, here’s the secret:

Radiohead makes great records.

And they do it consistently. They’re also quite adept at parsing the patterns on the horizon of the mediascape, but that wouldn’t matter if their records weren’t good. Damn good.

The King of Limbs is no exception. It’s more mellow than the sparsest parts of Amnesiac, but not nearly as insular. It might be their most even record. Thom Yorke’s voice, which I have to admit used to grate on me as often as it moved me, has gotten mature enough to carry the toughest of tunes. He is the voice of Radiohead, literally and figuratively (no small task either way), and he handles it with confidence and control.

Radiohead was never as joyfully abrasive as Sonic Youth or The Flaming Lips, but The King of Limbs reminds me of the releases of the former’s A Thousand Leaves and the latter’s The Soft Bulletin. All three records are still weird in their ways, but they’re also far more subtle than the previous work of their creators. Radiohead have always been masters of subtlety, and with The King of Limbs, they’ve earned their Ph.D. It’s such a tease and such a flirt.

Even Closer Third: Ume Phantoms (Modern Outsider): If ever a band were poised for the next level, Ume has been teetering there headlong for the better part of the past few years. Phantoms is the kind of record that neuters naysayers and emboldens enthusiasts. Lauren, Eric, and Rachel are some of the friendliest folks you’re likely to meet, but on stage they are ferocious. While Eric (bass) and Rachel (drums) are the stable and able drivetrain, Lauren (guitar and vocals) is the high-octane, internal combustion engine, careening ahead on the edge of control. Theirs is pop music in the sense that it’s explosive. Their live shows are where the real, volatile magic happens, but Phantoms captures their energy serviceably. For further evidence, here’s the video for “Captive” from Phantoms directed by Matt Bizer [runtime: 4:01], the most shared video on MTV.com:

kzPwXefCR1w

Runners Up: Wolves in the Throne Room Celestial Lineage (Southern Lord), Seidr For Winter Fire (Flenser), Cloaks Versions Grain (3by3), Jesu Ascension (Caldo Verde), Big Sean Finally Famous (GOOD Music), Knives From Heaven s/t (Thirsty 3ar), Pusha T Fear of God/Fear of God II: Let Us Pray (GOOD/Decon/Re-Up), Random Axe s/t (Duck Down), IconAclass For the Ones (deadverse), Crack Epidemic American Splendor (self-released), Deafheaven Roads to Judah (Deathwish), Panopticon Social Disservices (Flenser), Graveyard Hisingen Blues (Nuclear Blast).
Most Overrated: Opeth Heritage (Roadrunner), Kanye West & Jay-Z Watch the Throne.

Live Show of the Year: Deftones, June 4, 2011, Austin Music Hall, Austin, TX: Say what you will, but it’s absolutely unfair to lump Deftones in with bands they have next-to-nothing to do with (e.g., Limp Bizkit, Korn, Tool, et al). Deftones are as sophisticated as they are heavy and as beautiful as they are aggressive, as much like the Cure as they are Clutch. Their live show confirms all of this and more.
Runners Up: Mogwai, May 16, Stubbs, Austin, TX; Wolves in the Throne Room, September 27, Red 7, Austin, TX.

Comedian of the Year: Louis CK: No one else comes close.

Event of the Year: South by Southwest: SXSW is always a blurry blast, but this year was especially good. I got the opportunity to speak at Interactive and run around with friends seeing great music the rest of the time. You know who you are. Here’s to next year.
Runners Up: SF MusicTech Summit, Geekend Roadshow Boston.
Most Overrated: TEDxAustin.

Book of the Year: James Gleick The Information (Pantheon Books): James Gleick always brings the goods, and The Information is no exception. This is a definitive history of the info-saturated now. From Babbage, Shannon, and Turing to Gödel, Dawkins, and Hofstadter, Gleick traces the evolution of information theory from the antediluvian alphabet and the incalculable incomplete to the memes and machines of the post-flood. I’m admittedly biased (Gleick’s Chaos quite literally changed my life’s path), but this is Pulitzer-level research and writing. The Information is easily the best book of the year.
Runners Up: Insect Media by Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press), The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading by Peter Lunenfeld (The MIT Press), The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark (Verso), remixthebook by Mark Amerika (University of Minnesota Press), Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (Atlas & Co.).
Most Overrated: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Crown).

Educator of the Year: Howard Rheingold: Howard’s homegrown Rheingold University started this year and quickly established an impressive online curriculum. I took the first class and joined the very active alumni in continuing our co-learning with Howard’s help. It was through this group that I got the opportunity to speak to David Preston’s Literature and Composition class — one of the best experiences I’ve had in education.

Site of the Year: Shut Your Fucking Face and Listen: My man Tim Baker and his band of ne’er do wells have put together a site that’s as hysterical as it is historical. Mostly focused on music, they veer off on pop culture tangents and mad rants that are always more entertaining than their subject matter. Get up on that.

TV Show of the Year: Breaking Bad (AMC): I have Tim Baker from SYFFAL to thank for this one. This show doesn’t just rearrange the furniture in the standard TV drama’s livingroom, it tosses it on the lawn and sets it on fire. I’ve only made it through the first three seasons, but my guess is that by the end of the recently inked fifth and final, this will be hailed as one of the greatest shows ever to creatively corrupt the television medium.
Runners Up: Party Down (Starz); Lie to Me (Fox).

Movie of the Year: The Muppets (Disney): I haven’t laughed so consistently through a movie since maybe first seeing Doug Liman’s Go in the theater. It’s not flawless (maybe one too many metacomments and one too many eighties references), but it is downright entertaining from titles to credits. So good to see a chunk of your chlidhood revived so well.
Runner Up: Tree of Life (Plan B).

Video of the Year: “Yonkers” by Tyler, The Creator: Written, directed, produced, rapped, and eaten by Tyler himself. I’ve already spouted my feelings about OFWGKTA elsewhere.
Runners up: Pusha-T featuring Tyler, The Creator “Trouble on My Mind,” Big Sean featuring Chiddy Bang “Too Fake,” Hail Mary Mallon “Meter Feeder” (embedded above).

So those are a few of the things that caught and held my attention this year. What were yours?