David Byrne Journal

11.14.09: And the Winner Is…

2009-11-14T12:34:00-05:00

I was invited to be on the jury of the Estoril Film Festival, which, like many others, has a number of sections — tributes to directors (David Cronenberg, Victor Erice — Spirit of the Beehive) and actors (Juliette Binoche), a smattering of crowd pleasers (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist) and an actual film competition. The force behind the festival, Paulo Branco, a Portugal-based art film producer, had his folks select competition films from the pile that often gets overlooked at the other big name festivals, where films by big name directors are often in competition. So, we got some small to medium (Moon) films that often deserved another look or more attention than they’d gotten, though a few had indeed won prizes previously. Unlike Cannes this festival is not a marketplace, but an award or series of awards might help a small film find distribution. As it gets slightly easier to make a film — with digital projection and computer editing — marketing and distribution are no easier or cheaper than before, though innovative strategies appear, as with the super cheap to make Paranormal Activity in the US, which Paramount released city by city before it blew up.

We’d usually see 2 movies a day, and after viewing the dozen selections, we 4 members of the jury haggled over a nice lunch. Here are the winners and some others we all liked a lot.

Best Film: Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Wow — I loved this film, even if the video projected version wasn’t so great looking. It’s very formal and stylized, and it begins in a way that appears to be completely hilarious and absurdist (one juror said it just seemed random at that point) — but soon it turned dark and became very disturbing. I noticed online that some people absolutely hate it. There was one scene where I turned away.

[Source]

Here’s a trailer. (Spoiler alert: some images in the trailer give away too much, in my opinion.)

This from Variety: “Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents' cruel whimsies -- think an eternal ‘Big Brother’ house as designed by Lars von Trier.”

We split the second prize, as we loved both films.

The Girl, a Swedish film by Fredrik Edfeldt.

This is a beautifully made and shot film about a young girl in a rural house who is left in the care of a young aunt while her parents go on a good works trip to Africa. Soon enough, the young aunt abandons the girl as well — and she has to fend for herself, which isn’t completely bad, as most of the adults seem like jerks.

[Source]

And:

Eastern Plays, a Bulgarian film by Kamen Kalev about a young, artistic though aimless man who drinks a bit too much beer (the actor was also a junkie in real life). He rescues a Turkish family (and their beautiful daughter) after they are attacked on the night streets of Sofia by some fascist skinheads — one of whom is our hero’s brother. Slow moving, but wonderful. Sadly the lead actor passed away before the last few scenes in Istanbul were to be shot. The film integrates news footage of soccer hooliganism, racist attacks and Eastern European street fighting with the characters and the story in a way that feels natural.

[Source / source]

Other films we all liked were:

Le Roi de l'Evasion

This hilarious French film by Alain Guiraudie is about love among French farmers and tractor salesmen. These middle aged and older guys all appear to be normal hicks, but they love to frolic together in the woods and elsewhere. It’s a farce, I guess — I laughed a lot. The lead is an overweight tractor salesman named Armand who rescues a young girl from a group of teen bullies — she, though only 16, then falls obsessively for him, and he decides to try going straight, and the two end up on the lam, with the young girl chasing big Armand in his skimpy briefs though field and forest. I could just imagine the director pitching this concept in Hollywood!

[Source]

Les Beaux Gosses is a French film by Riad Sattouf about pimply teens and their attempts at scoring girls. Sounds like a typical American Pie scenario, but these kids are (to me) funnier and more realistic in their awkwardness and geeky looks. Much, much better and funnier than any recent Hollywood teen movie. I think this one could be the most popular of the films we saw — the audience, like me, was laughing a lot. If close-ups of awkward tongue kissing and pimples turn you off then avoid this one.

[Source]

Lastly: Le Famille Wolberg, a Belgian film by Axelle Ropert about a Jewish family — the husband is a mayor, the wife had an affair, and we watch the model family fall to pieces in a very subtle way. The film touches on a lot of hot topics in Belgium, so it’s not just about one family’s problems.

11.10.09: Sintra — A Mystical Home in the Clouds

2009-11-10T13:47:00-05:00

Slightly inland from the seaside town of Cascais, nestled on a low mountain that seems to generate its own cloud cover, is the retreat of former royals and wealthy citizens called Sintra. The mountain and its cloud cover must have made for a pleasant coolness in the hot Portuguese summers. C and I made a couple of day trips up there to visit some former palaces, residences and monasteries.

One of these is called Quinta de Regaleira, the former home of a baroness that was later bought by Carvalho Monteiro, a super wealthy Brazilian, at the turn of the century. After buying the house he then bought up the rest of the hill where the baroness’ home was situated. After a false start at commissioning a design for a place for himself, he decided to hire an opera set decorator to design both the house and its chapel, but also to effectively turn the whole mountaintop into a colossal set, with fake ponds, underwater labyrinths and a series of underground tunnels that functioned as a metaphorical voyage of initiation and self-discovery — a voyage inspired by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and alchemists as well. Disney take note — this guy was doing freaky cosmic theme parks before anyone else.

So I asked myself, as readers of Dan Brown’s books no doubt have, who were these Knights of Templar?

They came into existence after the crusades had gained a foothold in Jerusalem. The first crusade, or shall we call it invasion of the Middle East by western Europeans, was in 1099. Jerusalem was captured from the Arabs, and Europeans began to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in significant numbers to see and feel the aura of the place where their faith originated. While Jerusalem was, for these pilgrims, a kind of protected Green Zone, the approach to it was not. The route from the port of Jaffa (alongside present-day Tel Aviv) inland to Jerusalem was dangerous, and scores of pilgrims were slaughtered by what we might now call insurgents, or freedom fighters…or defenders of their homeland? The hapless pilgrims needed to call Blackwater or some other ruthless mercenaries for hire to protect them. So, one hundred years later a French knight proposed the creation of an order that would attempt to protect these pilgrims — the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, so called because they were given a headquarters by King Baldwin II: the Al Aqsa Mosque, which, significantly, had been built over the former Temple.

What was this Temple of Solomon, I ignorantly asked myself? According to Wikipedia it was, in its first incarnation, “the first temple of the ancient religion of the biblical Israelites, originally constructed by King Solomon… It was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant” — so we’re in Raiders of the Lost Ark territory now. Other powerful relics were rumored to be buried at this site, but all we know is that the Templars got hold of bits of what were referred to as pieces of the “True Cross.”

The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times…marking important events in Jewish history. Here is a (somewhat exaggerated?) visual depiction from a Freemasonry website — it brings to mind the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago. Freemasons sometimes claim that the architects and masons who built this massive thing were the original Freemasons — hence the association with the Knights.

Eventually the Romans took it over, and built their own temple there — and at present there is once again a mosque on the site, which includes the oft-disputed Dome of the Rock.

[Source]

Beneath a section of the Dome of the Rock there is a cave known as the Well of Souls. All sorts of wild myths abound: “Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad ascended heavenwards from the stone above the cave, a related tradition has grown up that states that the Last Judgment will happen at the Sakhrah, and that the souls of the dead gather in the well of souls to wait for that event, and to pray… [and lastly,] according to pre-Islamic folklore, the well of souls was a place where the voices of the dead could be heard along with the sounds of the Rivers of Paradise.” [Source] That’s a lot of mythical weight to bear!

The Knights were quickly endorsed by the Catholic Church, and wore recognizable white mantles featuring a symmetrical red cross (this cross appears regularly at Monteiro’s theme park). They became an expert fighting unit — proto-Jedi Knights, spiritual warriors and protectors. About 100 years after their founding the Pope not only recognized them but gave them special privileges — one can imagine how noble their cause would have seemed to the European imagination. They were granted tax-free status, and were allowed passage anywhere they wanted to go — borders were no longer of any import to the Knights. Being a kind of military and financial institution (see below), this papal bull was immensely helpful.

[Source]

Though as individuals they were legendarily poor and relied on donations to continue their work, their order quickly amassed massive assets and devised innovative financial techniques. For instance: a pilgrim or entourage might want to visit the Holy Land but not leave their valuables unattended back home. So, they would place them in the hands of the regional Templars in their hometown, and in turn they were issued a paper certificate, which they could redeem for money in Jerusalem. The first form of checking, and banking of a sort, was born. Already the plot thickens — you can imagine the kinds of assets the organization accumulated. The whole island of Cyprus belonged to the Templars at one point!

Their power increased and they became an established institution (partly financial) in Europe and elsewhere in the following centuries. But not everyone was happy about this. King Philip of France ended up owing them a lot of money and he wondered how he could get out of his debts. He pressured Pope Clement V to go after the Templars. At first the Pope was timid in his attack on the Jedi — but King Philip must have had some leverage, because after a bit the Pope summoned the Templars to him and arrested and tortured them all, accusing them of heresy, homosexuality and weird initiations. Some signed confessions under torture (which they later recanted) and most of the powerful Templars were burned at the stake.

[Source]

One cried out to the King and Pope as the flames consumed him that he would see them later; both of them died within the year…but not before the church and king had usurped the accumulated lands and property of the order.

By around 1300 the Templar Order was effectively gone, but as an inspiration they lived on.

Reader Luís Bonifácio adds: "The Order was disbanded in all countries of Europe with the exception of Portugal, where King Deniz, when notified by the Pope to disband the Templars, proposed to confiscate all their belongings, and to form a new Knight Order called the 'Order of Christ.' The Pope accepted, and all the knights, churches, monasteries and territories of the Knights Templar were transformed into the 'Order of Christ,' which was simply the Knights Templar by another name, commanded by a member of the Royal Family. Their symbol continued to be the red cross, with a different design, which you can still see in the sails of the NRP Sagres (sister ship of the USS Eagle). A century later, the Knights of this Order, led by the Grand-Master Prince Henry the Navigator, started the Portuguese Discoveries, an expansion towards Africa, America, India, China and Japan. The Order remained in the lead of the Expansion until Portugal's annexation by Spain in 1580. After 1580, the Order was disbanded, and today remains one of the most important honorific orders of medals in Portugal. In the XVI century, the role of the Order of Christ in Portuguese history was taken by the 'Company of Jesus' (the Jesuits), until the early XX century."

Both Knights Templar and Freemasonry were essentially secret societies — though very different from one another — which led to lots of speculation and rumor. They both also had a vaguely spiritual bent — an idea that initiates might be given special knowledge that was passed down, and strange rituals that both bound the members together and were metaphors for personal discovery. [Source]

Various spinoffs of the Masons in the US in the earlier part of the last century made the initiation and other ceremonies into lovely little quasi-theatrical events. Here is a “set” and backdrop from one such ritual that was for sale via the Webb Gallery in Texas:

One could argue that here was a whole genre of theater that existed out of public view.

So, back to Monteiro’s theme park mountain. The house is pretty great — with Arabic-themed rooms, and a hunting-themed room with mosaics of beasts to be killed and a huge tusked boar bust in marble looming out from the wall — but it is the gardens that folks come to see. Visitors head up the hill, along winding paths, past follies and fountains, through a forest of exotic plants imported from Brazil until one reaches a pile of moss covered stones.

We were told that in the past a hidden staircase led to the top of the pile, but as that route led nowhere, one was sometimes led through a crevasse to a hidden stone door with no handle. And the door was way too heavy to move by hand. How to get inside? Our guide showed us a hole in a crack near the rock door, in which was concealed a lever that released a counterweight, allowing the door to swing open — like a fairytale or an episode out of Arabian Nights come to life! Through the door was what is referred to as the initiates’ well…though it was never used as a well.

In Monteiro’s conception this allowed one to metaphorically descend into the underworld — a realm of self-testing, self-discovery and rebirth. At the bottom of the stairs was the entrance to a couple of tunnels. Our guide escorted us into one of them, saying the other led to a dead end. We pulled out our little flashlights.

Monteiro had a whole maze of tunnels constructed under his mountain — some led to grottoes, with no way out, and one led to another well that had no winding staircase to bring one up and out. To really leave the tunnel complex, and symbolically escape from the underworld (the subconscious?), one had to take a tunnel with no light at the end — to head into darkness. Eventually one emerged in the back of a little (man-made) grotto, and had to exit using stepping stones — stepping in a proscribed manner, right foot first.

Fun, eh! None of it is natural, but with the algae and mossy growth it all seems quite believable.

There is a chapel with a Knights Templar cross on the floor and a Masonic eye in a triangle on the ceiling. A mosaic shows a saint on a seashore preaching to fishes — the fish are leaping out of the water with their mouths open in rapt attention. Inside the main house there is a library that must have been constructed as a kind of contemporary art installation. The walls were filled with books on all sides, and around the perimeter of the floor was a mirror that appeared to extend the bookshelves down below the floor we were standing on. The carpeted ground in the center of the room seemed to therefore “float” — it was a creepy, unnerving sensation. I believe the lowest shelf you can see is actually a reflection:

Nearby Quinta Regaleiro is the remains of a small monastery formerly belonging to the convent of the Capuchos order. Like the magic mountain, it too was somewhat peculiar. There was no sign of a large building that might harbor loads of monks — just a small, rough cobblestoned area with two crosses on top of vaguely triangular stones. C looked behind one of the crosses, and sure enough there were steps that led to a crevasse between two huge boulders. In the crevasse was a door.

The monastery itself was not huge, and was tucked into the natural boulders and vegetation — we were told that these monks sought a kind of enlightenment in harmonizing with nature. Inside, the rooms were often lined with cork bark, as those trees were growing everywhere around. The bark walls, and bark covered doors and window blinds, made the tiny rooms appear even more primitive — as if some other kind of civilization lived here. The rooms for the individual monks, their cells, were so tiny and the doors leading to them so low and small, it seemed the monks were a species of Hobbit.

11.09.09: Estoril, Portugal — The Future, the Past, the Present and…

2009-11-09T18:08:00-05:00

C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.

We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.

I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.

I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.

Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.

[Source]

Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.

I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.

A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.

I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.

In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.

In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.

In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?

10.24.09: Internet Antichrist

2009-10-24T12:24:00-04:00

I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?

The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.

Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.

This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.

One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]

In other words, he saw it all coming.

[Source]

Is this man the antichrist? Or merely a prophet?

In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.

More about Licklider from Wikipedia:

“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”

Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.

In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.

“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]

“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.

I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.

Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.

Those were the days when computers looked like this:

They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.

Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.

“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]

We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.

“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.

“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.

“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].

“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]

The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.

By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.

[Source]

A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)

In the Meantime

While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.

The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.

Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.

When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!

Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:

[Source]

I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.

A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.

Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.

Here is one such chamber:

[Source]

They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.

In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.

After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.

Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.

The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.

Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.

Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.

It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.

I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.

The End of Privacy

Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.

Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.

Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.

Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)

[Source]

So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.

I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.

To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.

The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.

So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.

10.18.09: A Cooking Ape

2009-10-18T11:43:00-04:00

I read a review of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human in the NYRB. As usual the article summarized much of the book’s ideas. The author, Richard Wrangham, argues that the eating of cooked food by early protohumans was, to a large and unacknowledged extent, what enabled them to walk upright, get brainier, become more social and even to verbalize. In a nutshell, he says that since cooked food allows a more efficient transfer and absorption of nutrients than raw food does, the digestive track could evolve into a smaller-sized part of the animal (raw foods require large stomachs and long digestion), which then allowed the little guys to begin to stand up more, as their bellies were smaller. It also enabled the brain to evolve into a larger organ, as large brains require a lot of nutrition only available to hominids by eating cooked food. I’m beginning to see how some of these factors converged in ways that were lucky for us.

Cooking, Wrangham claims, necessitated that some part of the household guard the hearth (and children), and it also meant that groups larger than a single family were more practical. It’s been argued by others that the increased social interactions of early humans were what formed many of the brain’s pathways that determine how we behave and get along, or don’t get along. These new complex social structures also required larger brain capacities, as others have suggested… and both allowed and demanded the evolution of language to help mediate some of that social drama.

Wrangham also says that once we started eating cooked food, our mouths and jaws no longer had to be equipped mainly for tearing, ripping and intense prolonged grinding… which left early mouths available for other purposes — vocalizing… and maybe singing, too?

It’s an amazing argument — to tie all these crucial protohuman attributes to cooking. And equally interesting is how each attribute facilitated the others — all seemed to be interdependent.

Needless to say, Wrangham doesn’t buy into the relatively recent raw food movement — which claims that we humans are more naturally engineered for eating uncooked food, which is therefore presumed by adherents of this movement to be better for us. The assumption there is that early man and woman didn’t cook. Wrangham says that if they didn’t cook they wouldn’t have survived, and could never have evolved into us, as cooked food is so much more efficient at delivering nutrients. He says that standing and talking would never have happened on a diet of raw foods.

10.13.09: Space Is Deep!

2009-10-13T15:27:00-04:00

I had a dream in which I was on a tractor, lurching along, pulling a wagon that was piled with large backpacks. Along for the ride were some rather well-known German DJs, one of whom was named Luke Vibert. (Luke is a real guy, and is not German — I had been listening to a Warp Records compilation earlier in the day, so maybe that’s how he got into my dream…)

[Source]

Then there was a kind of intercut scene, away from the slow tractor travel, of these DJs in a club, behind their decks and laptops on the DJ platform. Some had guitars slung around their necks (but were not playing them), shouting into a special DJ mike with their German accents, “Ve are African men!, Ve are African men!” The crowd was dancing wildly.

Cut back to the tractor, still lurching along, and the DJs begin some other shout outs — “Space Is Da Place!”...”Space is All That!”...and...”Space is Deep!”

At the time (in my semi-sleep state), I thought these phrases were wildly inventive.

10.02.09: Bikes and Cities So Far

2009-10-02T17:15:00-04:00

I did a week of events (NY, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA) around the theme of Cities and Bikes and how we get around. I began each one with a broad introduction that I hoped would set the scene — a background on how our cities became so car-centric, and some alternatives in various places around the world. There were some funny slides too.

As I mentioned earlier, at these events I was followed by a city representative, a representative of a local advocacy group, and an urban theorist. Different folks in each town. Q&A at the end.

The turnout was great — the theaters for the most part were lovely and averaged around 700 seats. It really does seem like this was a little catalyst for an issue that has reached a point of acceptance.

The “theorist” in San Francisco, Michael Teitz from UC Berkeley, proposed a lovely and surreal thought experiment in which the car had never been invented. An alternate present, with, for example, tunnels being a priority in many cities, as they make it easier for cyclists to avoid hills. In Los Angeles the man in this theorist role, Don Shoup, is a sort of famous specialist in parking. Such a thing may be laughable to some like me who don’t own a car, but in LA and elsewhere it is a serious issue with many ramifications. He pointed some out — if the price of a street meter (or a free spot) is lower than the nearby lot, then folks tend to circle the block in search of these bargains, to the point where the streets become clogged with naïve and hopeful drivers who spend a crazy amount of time looking for a spot. We’ve all done it, I know I have. I have also done concerts in “new” areas of LA (like downtown) and gotten complaints from folks who didn’t know if or where they could find parking close by. I think attendance suffered at those gigs because folks were worried about it.

The events in some towns, like Portland, well known for being bicycle- and public transportation-friendly cities (despite the frequent rain), were almost like little rallies; whereas LA, like Austin in a way, is so spread out that it has more obstacles to overcome.

I spent the morning walking around LA’s lively downtown district. One whole store sold nothing but glass pipes (for smoking) and another sold nothing but super realistic BB guns, and accurate reproductions of Glocks and Uzis.

An old cafeteria has a waterfall inside with a mechanical bear that emerged from a hole!

I suggested to the city rep that one might try adding bike lanes, etc. in specific neighborhoods, little by little, and not try to instigate a whole citywide program. Downtown, Santa Monica and Venice would be obvious candidates. Her response seemed to imply that the state of LA politics and bureaucracy makes that impossible — if one hood gets something, they all want it. Of course, if the mayor or other higher-ups were more sympathetic, as they are in Portland (or even Mikey B in NY), that entrenched bureaucracy might open up here and there. A poke from the top can indeed unclog a logjam.

Naturally there were some questions from the audiences about the messenger who nearly ran me over and, from the other side, why can’t I have a bike lane on my street? The question raised by the first issue is: can our behavior change? One is always skeptical if that can ever happen; one doesn’t naturally think that North Americans can be like the Dutch or the Danes. I think it was at the NY event where I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy in response to this question: who would have believed that those independent-minded New Yorkers, with all their attitude, would stoop to picking up doggie shit in little baggies and carrying it steaming in their hands to the nearest trash can? No one. But they do. Pretty much all of them. So, people can change some old habits — it happens.

09.29.09: Seattle — Angry Man Breakfast

2009-09-29T00:16:00-04:00

Reading the morning paper here in Seattle, I was struck by the mood of what appeared to me to be propaganda. I didn’t begin ranting, foaming at the mouth or spraying my yogurt across the hotel dining room.

At It Again

A front-page photo/graphic in today’s NY Times shows what is rumored to be an Iranian nuclear facility of some sort. Maybe it’s just the graphic style of these things, but it looks exactly like the various photo-graphics we were inundated with before the invasion of Iraq. Pictures of buildings where WMDs were being stored, hidden or manufactured…all of which were proven to be merely rumors spread to lead and lure us into the morass we are in now. Folks fell for it then, and given everyone’s short memories they might go for it a second time.

Now I’m not saying this is definitely NOT a nuclear facility — only pointing out that the manner of presentation of alleged facts is the same.

Perspective

On the same front page we are told that socialism is collapsing in Europe because a number of countries have elected center-right politicians. I beg to differ. As the article says, the center-right accepts as a given “generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, [and] sharp restrictions on carbon emissions.” Those three ideas would place them on the left in the USA, though the writer says, maybe correctly, that in Europe the left traditionally goes further. That those givens are still not generally accepted in the US, and are currently the yelling, screaming indications that politicians are “socialist” (and therefore un-American), puts this supposed “collapse” in perspective.

Resurgence

Another front-page article brings the good news that the economy is rebounding and getting bullish again. While in some ways that might not be surprising (no serious regulation has been put into place to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown, or to restrain the hubris and greed of the bankers), it seems sort of like good news just for the sake of good news — feel-good stuff. The economy has been out of whack for so long that to cheer its “return” and resurgence to what is essentially a misguided and broken system is maybe not the best idea right now. That much of the country is living unsustainably means that while Goldman Sachs and some others might be raking it in — profiting from the downturn, some have claimed — that isn’t the real world.

9.28.09: Austin

2009-09-28T11:50:00-04:00

Bikes, Cities and the Future of Getting Around

I’m on a one week tour — a series of events focusing on bikes and cities timed to coincide with the release of my Bicycle Diaries book. I told the publisher I didn’t think I’d be very good as a reader — which is the usual way authors are trotted out to promote their books — so I suggested instead we do a series of forums focusing on our cities and how bikes have become a symptom of a new interest in urban living in North America. (This has a little bit of the added effect of hinting that the book is not just about riding a bike.) The publicity department of Viking, the publisher, generously helped put these events together. Sometimes they are held in bookstores, as those are the venues the publisher knows; and sometimes, like last night in Austin, in small theaters.

At each event there will be a representative of the local city government; an advocate; a theorist/designer/planner or historian; …and me. We each do short (10-15 min.) presentations about our area of expertise and then there is some Q&A and then we’re done. So far, I’ve been to NYC and Austin and Seattle and it’s working pretty well. By bringing these elements and people together the events serve as a catalyst, a reminder and a symbol that perception and policies are changing — about bikes as a way of getting around and about how our lives in cities can be. The interest and turnout might be as much for the content as what’s on stage.

The morning after I arrived here I rode around Austin and discovered that a surprising amount of the downtown area has been given over to parking.

There are parking lots everywhere and, maybe because of the oppressive heat in the Texas summers, lots of indoor parking structures as well. Some of these take up a whole block and some only take up the ground floor of a downtown building. Either way, they kill any potential for life, business, interchange and encounters on those blocks. It seems that not only did the city accommodate cars with some massive freeways that are often jammed up, but they have given some of their best downtown real estate simply to house automobiles. I was reminded that the vibrant “people” streets (South Congress and 6th St.), no matter if you love or hate those scenes, would never exist if there were massive parking structures on every block there. The vacant lots on S. Congress are now filled with tent kiosks and tiny Airstreams and other trailers that serve as specialized food carts (like the ones in Portland). I got a mushroom tamale and berry smoothie at one, and they were great.

Austinites were surprised when their city bike lane and trail rep Annick Beaudet revealed how many of the city’s residents commute by bike already, and how much new infrastructure is going to be added in the coming years. If they can conceive of replacing some of those parking lots and structures with mixtures of cool housing, office and retail they would inevitably lure more folks into the central district, where cars are not absolutely essential for every activity. Where will all those new workers, consumers and residents park then? — well, some will find it more practical to use public transportation and some will…ummm…ride bikes. The policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages.

After the Austin event I rode to the Continental Club (the hotel has loaner bikes) to see the guys in Heybale do their usual Sunday evening set. The band, partly made up of veterans from the bands of artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, play their repertoire of mostly classic country songs (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Webb Pierce) and a few originals with consummate skill. The guitar player Redd Volkaert and the pedal steel player in particular are amazing musicians — their frequent and concise solos are both surprising and inventive, and technically mind-boggling. More than once I’ve seen young musicians standing close to the stage with their jaws hanging open as these guys whip off another effortless solo. I was reminded of the days when Clapton was heralded as a guitar godhead — well, these guys are in that class, though the tunes are a little different. At least three of the band members sing, and pretty well, too.

I happen to love those songs, though I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste. What’s just as wonderful as the band is the audience they’ve amassed over years playing this Sunday night residency — all ages: 20-somethings and folks my age and older, many of whom have come to dance the two-step or the waltz, depending on the song — and they fill the floor as soon as the band starts. I’ve seen 20-year-old girls in dancing dresses and grandmas in the same outfits. Last night one of the very best dancers in the joint was a young man who didn’t look like your typical country music fan — he could have been Mexican, Indonesian or Syrian. All the girls were happy to dance with him.

Living the Dream

The next morning, as I changed planes at Dallas Ft. Worth, I saw a guy talking on a cell phone outside a fast food place on one of the endless concourses. He was in full cowboy costume and it was, to me, so extreme and clichéd that he could have been a member of the Village People. I don’t think he would have appreciated hearing that. He had the full gear — a checkered Western shirt, old Tom Mix-style hat, jeans, boots, a belt with a giant buckle, and a handlebar moustache. Halloween ain’t for a few more weeks!

I guess you can get away with that here in Texas, though this guy was pretty out there. There isn’t much call for ropin’ and herdin’ around DFW, unless it’s rodeo season, but even then the rodeo guys I’ve met don’t dress like this. This guy, it seems to me, is role playing. If he’s not that guy he’s going to at least look like that guy. If he were to walk into a NY office in that getup, folks would point him to the casting call across the way. But Texas is, sometimes, big and crazy enough that one can take the risk and reinvent oneself and folks go along with it.

Flying out of DFW I marveled at the sprawl.

09.07.09: The Invisible Manifesto — Battles @ Terminal 5

2009-09-07T11:44:00-04:00

Biked up the west side to Terminal 5, a venue that has put on a lot of shows recently, but that I hadn’t been to since its days as a kind of sleazy disco, when I saw Fischerspooner some years ago. The physical aspect of the place hasn’t changed much — it still feels like a massive, cold, corporate club — but tonight’s show was a parcel of acts on the innovative Warp label, with Battles headlining, so it promised something new.

[Photo: Global Graphica]

I liked much of their first record, and the video of the band playing in a mirrored room is incredible, so I was curious. I heard they’d be playing new stuff, so I wondered where they would take whatever it is that they do.

It was pretty amazing — fairly constant driving beats over which guitars, keyboards and loops, fed through all kinds of effects, were layered. The vocals, if you can call them that, were also looped and treated so that they emerged as incomprehensible textures, articulating vaguely melodic riffs. All this leapt from one section to another in ways that made it hard to discern the underlying form or structure of each piece — though the sounds were generally and consistently engaging and involving. They could have been making it all up on the go, but I sensed there was a lot — a LOT — of pre-planning that went into the set. (This was confirmed by some friends who know them and said, yeah, they practice all the time and it’s all very worked out.)

[Photo: Music Slut]

Their poor drummer sometimes looked shagged out, his shirt soaked as he slumped over his kit catching his breath during the few moments when he wasn’t playing — though he never tired or flagged. When the time came he started up again, like a machine recharged. Some of the loops and abrupt changes were hilarious — I laughed out loud — as they sounded like they wouldn’t work, like they were all wrong, but then somehow the insane part would find a context and surprisingly plop into place and it all seemed right. There were pedals all over the stage; even the drumming was going through pedals and loops. The guitarists had their instruments slung way up high, and I realized that was because they were constantly leaning over to hit pedals on a table or tweak the software on their laptops, and if the guitars had longer straps they would have been swinging around smashing all the gear to pieces. It made for a semi-geeky look, but they’re obviously geeks with a mission and purpose, no nonsense.

The “songs” had plenty of dynamic structure within them — ups and downs, and quiet bits and explosive bits — but there were no crescendos and the set as a whole had no typical dynamic build, unless we were all supposed to recognize the last two songs, which from an audience point of view would have signaled “here’s the single.” The dynamics within each “song” were also fairly abrupt — the changes from one section to the next were sudden, like edits. The band is often grouped under the “math rock” genre — which I guess refers to the “cold,” abrupt lack of transitions and inscrutable structure. Parts started, went on for bit, and then ended, just as suddenly as they had begun. No easing into sections, no chorus and verse, no emotional builds and transitions — those seemed to be verboten. There’s a dogma at work here — rules that guide, restrict and limit the music — but I’m only guessing regarding some of the clauses in this invisible manifesto. It was pretty amazing, but not for everyone.