One and Many

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Wild in the Streets - Garland Jeffreys (1973)

All respect to the Circle Jerks cover of this, but that the original is from 1973 makes it seem more appropriate for this particular historical moment.

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From a collection of strange and often offensive things that kids have written. This however is neither strange, offensive, or inappropriate.  Only awesome. I'd give this kid an A for life.

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Terry Riley - You're Nogood

I've been listening to this pretty frequently lately. If you listen to it on headphones, make sure to not be nauseous or intoxicated as you might feel the need lose it at several points.  Here's a great description of the track from the blog Dinosaur Gardens:

In 1967 Terry Riley was playing one of his “All Night Flight” concerts in Philadephia, featuring his soprano saxophone, keyboards, and tape delay devices, which went on for hours in the trance-inducing Minimalist fashion — as documented on the Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band “All Night Flight” Vol. 1 CD. (Later, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp would adopt similar methods for their “Frippertronics” concerts and LPs like No Pussyfooting and Evening Star.) After the show the proprietor of a local discotheque asked Riley to compose a piece to be played in his club, and Riley obliged — but with a version of Harvey Averne’s “You’re No Good”, a single off Averne’s 1968 Atlantic LP Viva Soul.

Riley took a Motown-inspired pop tune and transformed it into a twenty-minute exploded view, slicing the track into long and short bits and looping them, as Steve Reich had done a few years earlier with his “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” pieces. The Riley remix (“No Good” becoming “Nogood” to echo his Poppy Nogood character) is wonderfully perverse: beginning with a two-and-a-half-minute piercing sine wave drone, increasing in pitch to the point of unbearability before suddenly breaking into the Averne song, which becomes more and more fragmented and complex, towards the end adding Moog shrieks. Averne’s song refuses to die even under this treatment, determined to keep the good times rolling even as it’s being puréed.

“You’re Nogood” was rescued from undeserved obscurity by the Cortical Foundation, run by Gary Todd, which lovingly repressed a series of very well-received Riley CDs as well as work by Derek Bailey, Hermann Nitsch, and the Scratch Orchestra (whose “The Great Learning” has since been reissued by Deutsche Grammofon). In 2001 Todd was seriously injured, and there has been no further word of his health or the possibility of future releases on his label. We wish him all the best.

Make sure to listen to this on stereo speakers.

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Franco Berardi aka Bifo speaking on a number of subjects related to his new book After the Future.

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To be sure, one often has the sense that the crowd theorists rush to foreclose any destabilizing potential within their on discourse. The generative potential of crowds is anxiously pathologized; their mimetic dynamic is quickly banalized. But something similar happens with Hardt and Negri's multitudes as well. Ironically, a theoretical discourse so deeply defined by its phobia toward mediation is nevertheless so completely pre-mediated by a political telos that, in its given form, it becomes all but analytically useless as a tool with which to explore the movement of any actually existing social formations. It always already has us hurtling towards a revolutionary climax, craning our necks to catch a glimpse of the receding place where our destination was predecided. Rather than galloping ahead in the name of politics, why not dwell more experimentally in the places where a social field rippled by the reverberations of embodied affects is mediated and re-mediated through more or less authorized narratives and practices? If the relation of the multitude to the crowd is about anything important, then it is, I think, about this: the relation between vital potential and the social mediations that at once produce and constrain that potential. The point is not to oppose ethics to politics; rather, it is to resist the trampling of the delicate ethical ground of social becoming and mutual making in the mad rush to the end of history.

William Mazzarella "The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd" Critical Inquiry Vol. 36, No. 4

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Andy Warhol - Crowd, 1963

Jeffrey Schnapp reads Andy Warhol’s crowd photographs of the 1960s as marking the passing of “a model of politics based on the physical massing of bodies in public places or the performance of symbolic marches in real time and space” and the arrival of a new “politics of gestures that relies on virtual, indirect, and asynchronous forms of presence, organization, and participation.” According to Schnapp, the figure of the crowd has currency today only in a knowingly aestheticized way: as a formation evocative of an older politics that can be quoted in contemporary mobilizations, “just as typewriting now continues to play a role under the regime of digital writing and printing.”

- William Mazzarella quoting from Jeffrey Schnapp's essay "Mob Porn"

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The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user—the reader, the music listener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product "a place in life" (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of "creativity"; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.

Maurizio Lazzarato "Immaterial Labor"

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Breakdown from The Awl of some depressing (if you think the news media is important to a functioning society) statistics from the recently released FCC report "Information Needs of Communities."

My favorite part:

"It has been tempting to think that Americans are paying less for content." But in 2003, people spent on average $740 a year to consume media and information—on cable and Internet service bills, for print, and on their mobile packages. In 2008, that went up to $882. Most of the increase comes from paying more for TV and radio—about $130 more, on average—as well as some from rising spending on cell phones. So it’s the mobile service providers, cable companies and Internet-providing cable companies who are getting the largest portion of the money for content.

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If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the 'virtuous Keynesian circle' as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. now rather than speaking of the toppling of 'supply and demand,' we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the 'realization' of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Maurizio Lazzarato "Immaterial Labor"

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Polvo - Fast Canoe on Exploded Drawing

I bought this albm at a used CD store in the summer of '96. My expectations for the first notes of a record heard through crappy headphones played on crappy CD players in weird strip mall used CD stores were never the same.

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In a previous post I linked to a Neiman Journalism Lab piece about the future of sportswriting on the web and how its a model case of journalism on the web in general.  In it, grantland.com, the about to go live collaboration between ESPN.com and Bill Simmons, was held up as the latter half of a corporate capitalism/journalist-artist dialectic that would be push sportswriting and journalism in general into the future. I didn't register my issue with Grantland being held up as the example of the artistic half of the relationship at the time because I was more concerned with a Mark Cuban quote in the piece, but this piece that I found via The Big Lead says everything I've ever thought about Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, and Malcom Gladwell (the latter two being tagged as freelancers for Grantland) in ways that I probably never could and with more devastating dismissiveness than I can muster.  There are incredible quotable passages all over this piece, but here's one of my favorites:

Allegedly it's a serious cultural website maintained by a man whose cultural mind looks like one of those spooky MRIs of "ecstasy brains," with all the black dead spots, and a bit where someone burned "SWEEP THE LEG" into it with a laser scalpel. Its celebrity contributors list reads like a Who's Who of people whose only metric for understanding the human experience is the singular preciousness of themselves or the nauseating insipidity of corporate-retreat science. Then there's the preposterousness of the name. Bill Simmons is to Grantland Rice what Tucker Max is to Hunter Thompson.

On the "singular preciousness of themselves" characterization of Klosterman, see also this article that was linked in both the Mr. Destructo piece and the Big Lead piece. 

For a while, I thought I only hated Bill Simmons because he was a Boston sports fan, but this piece has shown me that much of my distaste has a basis in the facile nature of his writing and the rather unfortunate face he gives to American sports fandom.

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R.I.P Gil Scott Heron

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Court of first model tenement house in New York, 72nd Street and First Avenue, Manhattan.. Abbott, Berenice -- Photographer. March 16, 1936

via NYPL's Changing New York collection

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Bedhead - Living Well on What Fun Life Was

I listened to this record probably 3 to 4 times a week my senior year of high school. Primarily while napping.  Criminally under appreciated, this is from their first album, which is by far the haziest and most quiet-loud dynamic of their three LPs.  Later efforts lack the warm blurryness that isn't quite shoegaze and isn't quite slowcore of What Fun Life Was.  The anthemically sad and distant guitar lines work particularly well for a song that seems to be about somebody dying and the lack of what one can actually do for that person.

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As someone who's in the preliminary stages of doctoral dissertation that will in part be focused on the contributions that fans give to the sports entertainment complex via blogging and fan produced websites and as someone who teaches about the role of social media technologies in a constantly changing world of information dissemination, this insightful and thought provoking piece by Tim Carmody for the Nieman Journalism Lab is highly encouraging.  The juxtaposition between ex-AOL exec and current SBNation CEO Jim Bankoff's ideas for creating profit by selling to a tech and sports savvy demographic and Dan Shanoff's likening of the new sports journalism landscape as a technologically enabled second golden age full of boundary pushing artists is indicative of arguments about the internet's impact on a variety of practices.  Wonderful new place to find new markets or wonderful new place that allows for new artistic expressions?  Of course, these two things, while we still live in a society organized around the logic of capital, are not mutually exclusive and are interconnected in deeply structural ways.

I'm particularly interested in Carmody's important point about Dallas Mavericks owner and tech billionaire Mark Cuban's recent comments about denying press passes to web journalists:

Now, slamming bloggers (or reporters, period) for trafficking in headline-grabbing gossip is old hat. More significant is Cuban’s argument that between the organization’s PR machine, players’ use of social media, and amateur blogs, sports teams can communicate just as well with their audience, and fans’ desire for information can be just as satisfied, without the need for professional journalists as intermediaries. It’s a provocative claim, but also a signal that sophisticated writing about sports is being produced for digital media by many different organizations with very different interests.

There's a lot to be said about Cuban's stance here. I agree with Carmody that it means that good stuff is being written by a variety of different people with different understandings of how that writing should be utilized and what it means to be a writer/journalist/amateur/fan/PR person. But, I think it should be pointed out that Cuban is very nearly explicitly pointing out that the only the only point of journalism is to benefit his brand, and he'd rather have a group of highly controlled individuals (his PR people and his players) and unpaid fans do that. Again, not all that new of an idea, but I think the reliance on content produced by people who the organization itself doesn't have to respect or fear (ie. the amateur fan bloggers) is something new. Part of what intrigues me the most about the effect of the internet on journalism is this kind of thinking. Cuban seems to be taking fan blogging for granted here, but I suppose if all your concerned about is building interest (negative or positive) in your franchise then it doesn't really matter what the fans say about you. 

Shout out to the almighty Sam Han for alerting me to this article. 

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June of 44 - "Anisette" on Tropics and Merdians

I have listened to this 5 times today. Still not tired of it.

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Data, especially in a culture that is information saturated, can be terribly overwhelming. Seeing it in clear (and colorful) formats that utilize comparisons and simple language is very helpful, especially for someone like me who is tasked with expressing sociological concepts that often require some statistical validation for those who I teach, even if my general philosophical bent is deeply anti-positivist. In other words, I like charts and graphs just as much as the next sociologist but I know that data and information can say nearly anything and any person who claims truth because of the skill with which they can visualize a data set is probably full of it.  This hagiography of data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte from the most recent issue of Washington Monthly (here in printable format) argues for a type of technocratic elite of data visualizers who follow the maxims of an oracle of information delivery. How will we understand the world around us?  How will we sift through all this data that is so readily at our fingertips? Only by following in the path of man who proclaims to be here "to fight against decoration replacing precious substance!" As if data is substance in and of itself.  As if the aggregation of behaviors into numbers isn't itself a process of decoration. There will always be loss in representation. To pretend otherwise is to mask the intent of that loss.