Wonderful post from Tim Jones at EFF explaining the Google/Blogger deletions of music blogs due to copyright complaints, “Music Journalism is the New Piracy.” Many of these blogs had substantial readership. Pretty much anyone posting music is at risk due to the confounding difficulty of these charges. One blogger had explicit permission for every file on the blog. “In other cases, it appears that the bloggers may have posted or linked to copyrighted material without permission. But, as targeted blogger Patrick Duffey explains, it’s often next to impossible to know exactly which content is being accused of infringement”.
There’s snow everywhere. Buzz happened. I can’t sleep. And today I got the highest number of uniques all year for a post that is full of typos I just can’t get around to fixing. But there is this: Roky Erickson and Okkervil River hanging out in a toy shop.
Future Hit.DNA looks interesting. Anyone read it? Here’s the author dissecting Ke$ha: “The song is in D minor, but that chord first comes in at the 7th beat of the 16 bar progression. So when the song ends cold on the first note of that progression, it ends on Bb. This gives the listener a subtle feeling of an unfinished song, even though it ended on the 1st beat, which is typical of most songs. By not resolving the chord, the listener is more apt to hum the song and therefore more likely to need to listen to it again.” (via.) Meanwhile, everyone is putting blockquotes around something Brian Eno said in the Guardian today. This is my favorite part: “”Instruments sound interesting not because of their sound but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments which is what you like and respond to. If you were sitting down now to design an instrument you would not dream of coming up with something as ridiculous as an acoustic guitar. It’s a strange instrument, it’s very limited and it doesn’t sound good. You would come up with something much better. But what we like about acoustic guitars is players who have had long relationships with them and know how to do something beautiful with them. You don’t have that with synthesisers yet. They are a very new instrument. They are constantly renewing so people do not have time to build long relationships with them. So you tend to hear more of the technology and less of the rapport. It can sound less human. However ! That is changing.”
MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover on his task to imagine a new opera by the Opera of Monte Carlo (with video.) “I started imagining that this web of musical memories — the embodiment of an entire life — needed to transcend traditional notes and instruments, jump off the stage and physically envelope the listener, both aurally and visually. This turned into a mental impression of floating, undulating, palpable 3-D sounds represented visually through slowly moving, morphing objects filling a stage — like “Fantasia” become physical (but with my music and without dancing elephants). I felt the need to go beyond the flatness and harshness of usual multimedia tools to create something that was at the same time transcendent and magical but also completely human and down-to-earth.”
Rebecca Mead doesn’t like what we’re calling the last decade. “Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade ‘the aughts,’ but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of ‘aught’ to mean ‘nothing,’ ‘zero,’ or ‘cipher’ is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word ‘naught,’ which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase ‘all for naught,’ is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of ‘the aughts’ as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word “aught,” a concise and poetic near-synonym for ‘anything’ … To call the decade ‘the aughts’ is a compromise that pleases no one, and that has more than a whiff of resigned settling about it.” While I’ll agree there’s something significant in how it takes until the last few months of the decade to decide on a name for itself, “aught” is far less obscure that Mead suggests. Wolfram Alpha is useless for finding out how many high schools perform the Music Man each year, but I’d wager it’s quite a lot… meaning there are thousands and thousands of people out there familiar with its frequent references to building a church in “aught six” or graduating in “aught seven.” It may not be a frequently discussed common cultural reference like Citizen Kane or The Catcher in the Rye, but because The Music Man is so frequently performed, lots of people actually know the script. Maybe you played a townsperson once or your neighbor’s daughter did. (is there’s a theater term for this?) Anyway, I think the “aughts” can be contributed to Prof. Harold Hill, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “oh four” and “oh five” become “aught–” looking back.
At age eighteen, Vic Chesnutt went from a reckless young man to a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic. All of his close family died off by the time he hit 25. He’s struggled with substance abuse. He owes $50,000 in medical bills. And yesterday, the 45-year old songwriter confessed to NPR’s Terry Gross that he’s tried—unsuccessfully—to kill himself at least four times. Here’s that interview. Gutted to learn he succeeded.
These tracks were most frequently deleted by the Last.fm community from their scrobbles in October 2009. (via.)
Why Gears of War, an Xbox 360 game uses Gary Jules’s Tears for Fears cover in its commercial (via.)
JG Ballard, Our Greatest Living Novelist is No Longer
When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer – back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?
The world’s finest living novelist died today. Most fans were expecting this, as he announced he had advanced prostate cancer over a year ago. Still, there’s something distressing in learning his yet to be published book, a memoir, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life will be his last.
If you don’t know his work apart from Empire of the Sun, start with Millenium People and work back in time. Or, if you’re a fan of Crash, start with The Atrocity Exhibition and move forward toward his more conventional narratives. Whether an experimental novel or traditional literary one, the themes were all the same. And it’s almost impossible to describe his themes briefly without calling them “Ballardian.”
A pretty characteristic Ballardian moment comes up early on in Concrete Island. The protagonist has crashed off the highway and on to the land below. He is thinking about his son he was supposed to pick up from school, “Ironically, in this warm spring weather the line of crippled war veterans would be sitting in the wheel chairs by the park gates as if exhibiting to the boy the variety of injuries which his father might have suffered.” The motorists, if they even see him, continually mistake him for a homeless person and are therefore unwilling to assist him. He is left stranded on the “concrete island,” and depends on the totaled car for survival –even seizing the water reservoir of windshield wipers for something to drink.
Squint/Opera images inspired by The Drowned World
Another great one is The Drowned World. The title is pretty self-explanatory, but it plays out with a sensitivity to the natural world typically absent in science fiction. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people actually lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature. London “looked like a sewer.”
It helps to know a little about JG Ballard, to appreciate his particular sort of darkness. He grew up in Shanghai during the war, and spent part of his childhood tiptoeing through dead bodies in the streets. He was even sent to an internment camp. Rick McGrath has a very comprehensive look at this period in his life. Later, he moved to England, married and had children in Shepperton, his home until his death. His wife died unexpectedly, living him a single suburban father at the age of 32. Trauma and mortality is in every sentence of his books, presented scientifically, without any treacly navel-gazing.
Ballard’s lifelong work station(note the typewriter.) The Delvaux was commissioned from a photograph (the original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940.)
There is a distrust of technology and human nature in Ballard’s novels, a sense of the absurdity of shopping malls and an intuitive understanding how architecture, especially in its most banal forms, affects our emotions. Ballard shunned email and Internet, it was irrelevant to his obsessions. His concern was space, the body, travel, the dark underbelly of a suburban tract housing development.
Apart from maybe Beckett, no other modern writer crossed as many cultural mediums in his scope of influence. Artists, architects, philosophers, and musicians took to his books immediately, but strangely — for reasons I still can’t understand — he is still largely ignored by the “book world” outside of the UK. His fanbase speaks for itself. Ian Curtis, hugely influenced. David Cronenberg, of course. Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag. Filmmakers Mary Harron and Vincenzo Natali. Just about every artist I meet has Super-Cannes on his shelf. Here’s a fascinating post and another from Ballardian on “Autopsy of the New Millennium,” an art show in Barcelona last summer entirely dedicated to dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard. New wave (and its brief c. 2003 revivial) was largely inspired by some of his wilder sci-fi novels. Gary Numan, The Normal, Anne Clark and John Foxx very clearly articulated his concepts in their music.
JG Ballard ideas are so vivid, they almost have to be played by an instrument or drawn to discuss. If you are at intrigued, take a look at Simon Sellars’ fantastic website Ballardian and listen to some of his fascinating interviews. And more to come here, (when I have the chance,) to discuss what I consider his most important novels: High Rise, Super Cannes, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Millenium People. But a final note, it’s really a shame how long American publishers have ignored Ballard. Just look at Google Trends: US search strings for his name come 5th, after UK, Ireland, Australia, and Canada. And Spielberg made a movie from one of his books!
Update: wonderful point made by Ekstasis: “…The death of a futurist is always a strange thing, losing access to all the possibilities they saw, to their perspective on our collective future. Limited access is still possible, of course, through the arcane procedures of interpretation. This is cold comfort, though. Interpretation can, necessarily, only yeild ideas colored by our own perceptions, our associations, ham-strung by our particular paradigms. Surely, as always, the world will go on, but now with more limited options, whole avenues closed off to us because we lack the vision. We’re lucky to have had him as long as we did.”
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