McLuhan—Mass as Simultaneity, Simultaneity as Fragility

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

In terms of the industrial age, it can be pointed out that the difference between the previous mechanical age and the new electric age appears in the different kinds of inventories. Since electricity, inventories are made up not so much of goods in storage as of materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially removed sites. For electricity not only gives primacy to process, whether in making or in learning, but it makes independent the source of energy from the location of the process. In entertainment media, we speak of this fact as "mass media" because the source of the program and the process of experiencing it are independent in space, yet simultaneous in time.
(p. 347)

Automation brings in real "mass production," not in terms of size, but of an instant inclusive embrace. Such is also the character of "mass media." They are an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time. Thus commodity industries under automation share the same structural character of the entertainment industries in the degree that both approximate the condition of instant information. Automation affects not just production, but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, or just is his own news.
(p. 349)

This recentering of the "mass" concept on the notion that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time gets at something important yet often overlooked about Post-Industrialism, Postmodernity, The Spectacle, or whatever TF we're calling it at the moment. Perhaps this emphasis on simultaneity is too narrow to be a total theory of mass media, and perhaps this is because the former mass media have now sprouted lots of "on demand" tentacles. Still, even now McLuhan invites some trenchant questions: was "on demand" not a bigger deal in the outmoded context of broadcast TV, i.e. within which it itself was nothing less than the seeds of destruction, than it does now, post-destruction (mid-destruction?), when it has become taken for granted? Even now, early Sunday afternoons in the fall are great for running errands, and getting the internet to work on my iPhone this past Memorial Day afternoon was a dicey proposition. In other words, beyond the ability of the media proper to determine behavior there remain structural factors which determine not just how but also when we engage with media. Hence I would venture that mass behavior in McLuhan's sense above is still a significant phenomenon in media consumption even as the implosion proceeds apace.

It would be quite an interesting project for some Media Scholar (not me, I am just a tuba player who likes to read) to take inventory of the current morass specifically around this question of simultaneous involvement. I'll bet that there is media consumption which is more truly "on demand" and media consumption which is more truly independent in space, yet simultaneous in time. Given that the various media have not quite, not yet, not fully congealed into a truly unified and undifferentiated sector (though it often seems we are hurtling towards this faster than we can comprehend), some correlation might emerge from such a study, i.e. we might find revealed a few obvious commonalities among those media which tend toward mass simultaneity and those which, somehow, continue to resist it. A now-familiar example: people playing around on the internet while they are at work; a structurally-determined mass-ness which nonetheless, we might conjecture, is also structurally confined, i.e. to things like discussion boards, simple games and short videos, and of course, the humdinger, social media, but also inherently resisting extension all the way to feature-length video, immersive gameplay, etc., the latter media expeditions being too demanding to be multi-tasked and too difficult to hide from the boss.

And as for projects of resistance, things are so far gone these days that just doing the opposite of the mass seems like a solid starting point. Apropos of the present retribalization, this means looking out for mass behavior even on the smallest scale. One of many subliminal cognitive reconfigurations which is precipitated by the move from a Minneapolis-sized to a Los Angeles-sized conurbation is that one no longer feels guilt or FOMO about being able to attend only one of the two or three in-network events happening on a given evening; rather, when you're always missing out on something, or better yet, a dozen somethings, you either get desensitized to the guilt or you lose your mind, and if the former then perhaps you ultimately are liberated from a certain kind of herd mentality (and also from sensitivity to otherwise notable absences at your own shows). In this respect, the dynamics of a small scene are much more mass than those of a big scene. Small-scene people actually behave more like a mass than do big-scene people. Scandalizing? Libelous? To the extent that we have passed what Tim Wu calls "peak attention," McLuhan's übermass has also passed into history and ceased to apply to the present whole. But within given communities or (GASP) networks I would argue that it still very much applies and has some explanatory power. Again, if you desire very strongly to get away with, say, taking your clothes off in a public place and hopping around like a frog for long enough to work up a sweat, might I recommend the Twin Cities' western suburbs on any Sunday afternoon when the Vikings are playing? Please don't actually do this. But please do consider this humorous thought exercise in relation to, say, Jane Jacobs' eyes-on-the-street theory of mixed use, or in relation to any of a number of eco-parables about subhuman animals mindlessly following the pack to their own demise. Please do consider what it is about simultaneous involvement that creates "fragility" in N.N. Taleb's sense, for both individual and group.

Bro, where'd ya go?

The first time I heard or read the word "blog" was when I over-heard it on the radio while trying to work on something else. Some glib NPR infotainment piece about blogs, their rise and potential fall. Circa 2004, give or take a year. The funny thing is, something quite glib was uttered in the course of this puff piece that immediately captured my attention and imagination. This was solely responsible for my first aborted attempt at blogging, consisting of exactly one post which, if memory serves, was very much like post #1 here. A few years later I tried again and it stuck.

When you run out on a Blogspot, as I ran out on my firstborn, eventually it is resorbed into the cybervoid. You do get a friendly notice from the hivemind at google long before resorption is imminent. This has happened only once with Fickle Ears, and it practically made my heart stop, which is pretty embarrassing but also sums up well where things stand for me vis-a-vis anyone giving two shits about anything else that I've done. This blog project is now my hipster-nerdverse answer to Second Life. This was not the plan, but this is what has happened. McLuhan was quite correct to call these things "extensions of man," though I prefer "projection" because it more fully captures the aggressive aspect which is bound to be part of the equation for a washed-up high school athlete. This blog gets read about as often as my symphonies get played, but I believe in it, most of all because, just like that breezy NPR story said (or like I now imagine it to have said), the blog is a diary and a soapbox and a therapist and a record-keeper and perhaps a few other things, all and none of these things all at once, oddly able to shapeshift in spite of being, seemingly, a rigid, backward, slightly clumsy technology of failure, a technology of the millennium which with full millennial irony almost immediately ceased to have any obvious resonance with everything its sibling technologies have wrought. Meanwhile, I am a typical only child, and I'm here to stay.

Apropos of such a failure, no two people use these little monsters in quite the same way, and this makes community and exchange far more elusive than McLuhan seems to have thought it might become, depending I suppose on what exactly you understand "village" to mean. Lewis Mumford idealized the "neolithic" village as the most stable, secure, peaceful existence mankind has yet known, and so lashed out at McLuhan like a cornered animal. They were both prescient in their own ways. But neither got all of the details quite right.

There are only three other blogs that have really, really resonated with me. One of them, speaking of malign prophets, is Professor Gann's Postclassic, and when I say it "resonated" I mean to evoke a cast iron skillet falling off the stove during an earthquake rather than the gestalt of a clean orchestral tutti. Still, Gann is just about the only person writing about music who actually is all the things his right sidebar says he is. This makes his fieldwork invaluable even for someone who occasionally finds his positions absurd. Better a scholar courting absurdity than vice versa, I think. I'm not going to provide a link though, because if you're reading this the percentage chance that you've already been there is in the high nineties.

Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music has been a much more enjoyable horizon-expanding experience. Daniel's writing style also very much appeals to me and has influenced my own writing greatly, unlikely though that may seem. Unfortunately even with Daniel's help I didn't really understand exactly what The Radical Music referred to until I got to CalArts. (Or did this merely distract me with an academic caricature? Hmm...) I am not an experimentalist, nor all that Radical of a musician, and I have very precisely articulated/rationalized reasons for why I am not these things. But the funny thing is, in absence of full context I have always been able to read the writings of experimental musicians and think that I agree with every word. I've had some odd, very adolescent false starts this way. But I do owe Daniel quite a debt not just for providing raw information and for generating plenty of "heat and light" but also for exemplifying in quiet eloquence what a civil internet might look like. Daniel is the reluctant virtuoso of the blog whose example guides much of what I do here, though again I realize that probably sounds inexplicable and perhaps also is unfair to him. Influence works in funny, indirect ways.

Both of these blogs seem to have gone dormant, happily without yet being gobbled up by the streetsweeper, but for years now rather than the mere months which are customary for all of us. Predictably given my tastes and purposes, Gann's project does feel more or less complete at this point, while Wolf's feels open-ended and inexhaustible. Gann once confessed to being wary of repeating himself, a problem which every blogger has if we're being honest, while Wolf's purview itself seemed to ensure a certain ludic unpredictability very much in the spirit of the musical work he makes and writes about. As a reader I don't miss the pressure of keeping up, but now the disappearance of these two curiosities, both of which kept me on my toes in a way that a rigidly empirical orientation cannot, is felt as a palpable absence in my personal intellectual theater.

For all the time (too much perhaps) that I once spent bouncing off the walls of the blogosphere, there is only one other blog I would truly count as an influence. I spent only a very brief time with it, but it made a strong impression. Returning for the first time in a decade, I was sad to find that it has long since been resorbed, or possibly intentionally removed, and sadder yet to find the Internet Archive seemingly not quite in sync with the Blogspot way of organization. And yet, if you use the URL followed by the year you can indeed find your way to most of Stanley J. Zappa's It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack) and therein you will find plenty to chew on.

ee.gg.

[Update: criminy, these archive.org links work only on desktop, not on mobile. WTF?]

Peek-a-boo! Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening!

Adorno, Phoebe Snow, and the Colors of Spring--Emo Mix

Business Extending Peacefully

The Illusion, The Understanding

Exchange Value Destroys Use Value

The Truth About Tuxedos

Large Fry, Small Fry

10/10/11. God is Dead. Occupy Wall Street. Shit On Police Car. Wipe Ass with New York Times.

EYES RIGHT! Sgt Shamar Thomas, USMC and The Revealation of Self-Production and The Unity That is Realized in Precisely that Spontaneity

Forcible Retardation, Pinched Hatred, Neurotic Stupidity and the Genius of Children.

Capitulate Before the Superior Power / Purchase Spiritual Peace

Sensory Pleasure Turns into Disgust / Displacement of Feelings into Exchange Value / Neurotic Mechanisms of Stupidity in Listening / The Arrogantly Ignorant Rejection of Everything Unfamiliar

Whereupon Teddy Drops A Chocolate Yule Log on the Ambivalence of Retarded Listeners, Jazz Administrators and Pattern Based So-Called Improvisation

The Younger Generation, Rowing for the Older Generation

It's weird, but something about SJZ's presentation of Adorno just feels right. It's a well-staged collision between Adorno and the punk aesthetic, the kind Greil Marcus tried to bring off but couldn't without looking like a douche. The medium is the message, and there's a message-message too. It works. The liberal use of highlighting is especially crucial. I have already started stealing this idea and intend to continue to do so. No "anxiety of influence" here. But do go to the source.

This is also awesome.

And I'm not the least bit ashamed to say I totally agree with this.

Finally, please don't neglect to enjoy the order-from-chaos aspect of the labels list. Beef-Beethoven-Beheading! hipster-Husserl-hypocrisy! Pink Martini-piss smell-Plato! In a world where even fleeting moments of happiness are elusive, this makes me smile. Bro, where'd ya go?

Sticking with the Village motif, I decided to get tribal and do some googling confined to the domain blogspot.com. Lotta people were all over Wordpress when it first came on the scene, and it would be years after that before the Blogspot got any kind of comparable makeover. I confess that I did consider bailing. Nowadays I'm inclined to double down on the hipster-nerdverse aspect and remain on the present platform. I do take pleasure in having a deep archive even if most of what it contains is execrable rubbish. But I also sincerely despise slick packaging, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what the leavers were after. Happily there's still plenty of heat and light being generated by my tribe in a no-to-low-frills sort of manner. Some interesting shite that I managed to dig up:

Ever heard of Justus Buchler? The name sounds like a joke, but it's dead serious, and quite compelling.

Part 1

Part 2

Roger Bobo, the GOAT himself, is blogging strong! I especially recommend this short post, after which you can safely skip approximately 73% of the overwrought muck that I've posted here over the years.

Also of this variety, re: judging competitions:

There were groups that played perfectly together and projected no musical personality whatsoever. These groups, absolutely amazed by not being advanced to further rounds, were invariably the ones who would approach the judges, demanding an explanation as to why. Trying to explain was not easy.

A tired subject perhaps, until the last sentence. The rare wisdom is all in the last sentence.

And of course no excursion in brass would be complete without the gearheads trying to ruin everything.

I wrote the essay, "Specters", about some of the interesting people, those who would follow the various orchestras that I had played in through the years in our rehearsals and concerts.

Sadly, the stories of an old man who played in the Moscow Youth Orchestra when Tchaikovsky would bring by a new score by to hear the orchestration or another old man in another part of the world had a big part of his life rewriting symphony scores with all the inaudible orchestration deleted, do not hold the same interest as rotary vs. piston valves or "Is Bigger Better?" To me that's sad.

Everybody now, in your best millennial tween voices: SAAAD!

I love that our GOAT has brains and heart as well as chops.

Elsewhere...

A super-interesting 8-part series begins here. A taste:

Prewar Modernist architects had looked back to the look of cleanness of white undergarments that signaled a actually clean body (in contrast to the earlier look of white linens that had simply covered a dirty body). In the postwar years the material abundance made of industrial manufacturing changed the game once more. JFK, the president who committed America to landing on the moon, changed suits as many as four times a day, often went through six fresh shirts a day, and habitually wore a girdle to the point that his muscles atrophied. Mid-century Modernist fashion designers,who were the first to extend their couture brands to mass market merchandise, were now returning the early Modernist architect's gaze. But they were not admiring architecture's look of cleanliness, they were admiring the rigid structure.

Through the above site I found my way to this one:

Robertson conducts a large and varied cast through a long time and a complex plot with great skill to a most satisfactory click of closure. But, Hames argues, the difficulty of integrating the characters' lives with a political history that mostly consisted of tiny conventicles and ceilidhs in literally smoke-filled rooms and debates in widely unread periodicals, and that now and then took public form as 'set-piece' events in parliaments and streets, can defeat even the best novelist – even though Robertson was himself on those marches and in those rooms. It's a problem familiar in science fiction: one reviewer cited refers to Robertson's 'info-dumping', a term from the lexicon of SF criticism.

I am quite ignorant of the principals but not the principles, hence this was logged at once in my personal card catalog of meditations on the lie that tells the truth.

Here is an intelligent and erudite examination of a work which is fundamental to my own bloggerel.

Elsewhere...

Abstract comics!!

This made me just the slightest bit homesick, emphasis on the sick part.

Critics taking a beating? Bibliographical use of the comments feature? I'm there.

Exhaling...

Just as the best places for Raising A Family are not/cannot be the best places for an artist to find a fertile balance of arrogation and humility, so I have often aspired to emigrate from the parochial intellectual climate of the here-and-now to a self-curated intellectual community of online scholars. "Small pieces, loosely joined" in the coinage of one popular author. The ideal seems unachievable and the need remains unmet. In the bigger/scarier city I settled in as an adult, from which the so-called Family Millennials and their as-yet-unborn entropy machines are said to be fleeing in droves, superficially it seems possible to find almost any other variety of human company one might desire. The reality is that even after uprooting and moving across the country, certain structural obstacles remain. I can confirm, against my abiding pessimistic streak, that the aforementioned "small pieces" are indeed in evidence, both online and IRL. Not surprisingly in hindsight, it's the "loosely joined" part that has remained elusive and seems impossible. That is cause for as much skepticism and despair as even I am capable of mustering. As a co-worker and scarred LA veteran once put it to me, there's no "scene" here because there's no "community." A continent's worth of great players does not make a scene if said players are too spread out, spread too thin, and spread too far up their own buttholes. And now, adding insult to injury, we've been forced even further apart and, assuming we are able to return to our non-scene at all, will be confronted with the historic ruins of a dead civilization, something much trickier and traumatic to confront than mere scorched earth from which spontaneous regeneration is more assured. The online world, meanwhile, was already imploding even before the Plague. The social media have become less rather than more differentiated. To become even "loosely joined" to anyone or anything on the internet is now the greatest hazard rather than, as it was once imagined to be, the whole point of the thing. So, I will continue to shelter in place, to append "site:blogspot.com" to any google queries which otherwise prove to be overbroad, and to feign optimism to the extent possible under the circumstances. Feel free to share anything you've been reading or writing lately in the comments.

Consensual Art—Interlude

Peter Laugesen: And I also think that, you know, connected with potlatch and art and all this stuff: Art is simply a gift. Art should be a gift. Art should be given freely to everyone. Not because they maybe want it, but maybe because they don't want it. That's potlatch. I think we should change the slogan we have here to exactly the opposite: "Fear Everything Expect Nothing".

"Fear Everything Expect Nothing"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 281

Living in Los Angeles has convinced me that this only works if people have a reasonable means of escape/abstention. Trapping those who "don't want it" in subway cars or in their own neighborhoods seems to me quite contrary to much Situationist thought. We become the bureaucrats this way, no matter our intentions or class position. The saying "captive audience" comes from a bourgeois idiom; radicals nonetheless ignore at their own peril.

Perhaps if people can escape then it's no longer a potlatch. Fine. Sending them running is warlike enough for me! But they don't all run, not even when you most expect them to, not even in San Diego, Bismarck, or Pocatello, and that is the wisdom of sentiments such as the above.

Consensual Art (iiia)

The portion of LA Metro's Red Line between Hollywood/Highland and Universal City frequently becomes a stage for pop-up dance performers. It is the longest stretch on this route without a stop, and in my experience also among the least likely to be boarded by police. The greater duration and lesser enforcement hence seem to jointly determine performers' choice of venue. I rode home from work this way for a solid year and have thereby been treated to dozens of Friday evening performances.

Bring Back The Muzak (or something)

One of the lengthier and more in-depth chapters of Anthony Haden-Guests's 1973 book The Paradise Program is about the Muzak company. Among other things, it makes clear that Muzak was doing very interesting and timely Music Cognition research decades before that term achieved wide currency. Also that the human and material resources the company devoted to this and all other facets of their business were anything but lightweight even as this process dictated that the programming itself could be nothing but.

I for one find this history newly relevant in light of the poor musicianship and uninspired curatorial sense that I've recently heard piped into so many LA establishments. One musically astute non-musician acquaintance of mine is known to react even more viscerally against this than I do, and, claiming a well-placed source in the local Whole Foods hierarchy, is convinced that simple nepotism is at work. This seems to me at best a partial explanation. For one thing, the Wild West of digital music distribution is finally starting to stabilize into fixed settlements, the squatters are jockeying for position, and the Spotify playlist game is among the biggest pile of crumbs left to fight over. There is, in absolute terms, more music being made specifically for this purpose than ever before, yet with the Gatekeeper summarily deposed there is nowhere near the level of care going into curation that Haden-Guest unearthed in his fieldwork. In Econ101 terms, the market pressures are, if anything, more intense on today's individual music creators than they were on the small handful of Muzak's competitors, and the barriers to entry into this market have been reduced to an almost negligible level; yet this is still a race to the bottom, it just has more contestants and fewer rational actors.

As a teenager I worked for 3 years at the Bruegger's Bagels at East Hennepin and University Avenues in Minneapolis. In addition to learning a few of the many life-lessons such jobs are supposed to teach young people, I also had the opportunity to passively consume a relatively constant selection name-brand Muzak. Only the classic Miles Davis rendition of "Someday My Prince Will Come" made any impression on me whatsoever; in fact I now can't recall any other specifics about the song rotation. But The Paradise Program did bring back to me one crucial detail: the 15 minutes of dead air for every 45 minutes of programming. Cue the obvious snark about how that sounds like the best part of an hour of Muzak; but it turns out that this recovery time was a carefully-considered, deeply-investigated, research-led decision, one which I wish every retail proprietor would consider. If we've lost those programmed respites forever, then I for one will have to stop using the word "Muzak" pejoratively.

The First of the Rest

I
Early last spring, spurred on by a band director's curious statement as reported to me by a mutual student, I sat down to write my next pointed tract on the relationship between technical and creative musical development. My greatest initial trepidation therein stemmed from the danger of slipping into needless reprises of arguments which I had already presented here and elsewhere several times over. Yet even as such fears melted away in the face of fresh insights, a new problem presented itself: while the line of development was clear in my head from the outset, the task of fleshing out each small detail of the argument suddenly seemed inexhaustible; the simplest statements of position on a particular matter led to multiple pages of excursus on all manner of peripheral details, musical and otherwise, details which I had never intended to dredge up but which the offending statement itself had shown could not be taken for granted. Indeed, the realization that nothing could be taken for granted quickly displaced the particulars of the incident as the impetus behind the essay, and at this point the task seemed too broad.

The paper I had envisioned writing was hence threatening to take on dimensions all out of proportion with the real salience of the theme. In short, I found that I was no longer capable of addressing the obstacles faced in refining and enriching our pedagogy without being burdened by their rootedness in so many intractable real-world questions which otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with music. This came as a particular shock to someone who for the bulk of his formal education would simply stop writing when he felt intuitively that he was finished, who consistently turned in papers that were a half-page short of the prescribed minimum length, who repeatedly dared his instructors to blink, and, if I may brag a bit, succeeding without exception in doing so. Then one day, all grown up and having become thoroughly burdened and preoccupied with "adult" concerns such as feminist separatism in the arts, cultural co-optation, the ethical dimensions of aesthetics, and so on, this student opened up an already sprawling text file on his laptop and was overtaken seemingly in an instant by a classic case of paralysis-by-analysis. There was at that point no possible way for me to continue with the arduous project I had begun, not even if it has yet to entirely cease appearing as the logical and necessary next step in the portion of my life's work concerned with education.

This only feels like a setback. It certainly looks like a setback as far as the right sidebar of this blog is concerned. In reality, it is a realization that had to be made in order for me to move ahead, final confirmation of something I've known for a long time but haven't been willing to fully accept: that everything I've written prior is fundamentally naive, no matter its learnedness on particular subjects here and there; that I've learned just enough to emerge from naivete but not nearly enough to be considered wise; and that until I obtain the requisite book smarts, everything I write subsequently will issue from the middle ground between these two poles, which is the absolute worst place to be in every way both as a thinker and as an artist. And so as most anyone else would, I did initially absorb all of this as a setback, emotionally at least. This is the primary reason for the long silence here. The other reason is the immense amount of time I have been investing in offline reading projects with an eye towards pushing through this impasse. (Against my better judgment, I am now tracking all of this through a Goodreads account if anyone wants to make contact there.) There is not much for me to write passionately about right now other than to post book reports on esoteric authors as a way of laying my proverbial nuts on the floor. Having read plenty of these book reports in the course of my first decade of blogging, I've chosen to forgo this thirtysomething rite of passage until I've had time to digest the material and conceive some more original insight.

Such it is that the final nail has belatedly but inevitably been hammered into the coffin of my intellectual adolescence, of which there can be no doubt this blog has served as the focal point since its inception. I do not intend to give up blogging, nor to cease raising the occasional ruckus over mainstream music education's myriad vicissitudes of expedience, but it is high time to admit to myself and to anyone who cares about me and/or my work that things simply cannot remain as they have been, and that the necessary changes are not all comfortable ones to make.


II
I remain most interested in and committed to what for lack of another term with greater contemporary currency I must anachronistically continue to call "absolute music," or at least to the ideal of it if that is as far as the skeptic and the populist are jointly willing to indulge me on the matter. Nothing has yet convinced me that the abstract musical experience is somehow pathological or degenerate in any of the many ways it has frequently been made out to be, and I hasten to single out the accusation of escapism for an especially pointed disavowal. Rather, it is precisely because I have always been quite preoccupied with the bigger picture that music has always seemed both overwhelmingly ineffectual as activism and itself vilely disfigured by the weight of being asked to do so much more than it is capable of. Ignorance and/or apathy vis-a-vis the copious observable evidence in favor of this position has always stuck me first and foremost as a profound insensitivity on the part of those who would otherwise like to position themselves as the feeling, humane party to this debate, in contradistinction to the emotionless, tone-deaf formalists¹. Whatever the shortcomings of formalism, a blind faith that "music can change the world" in no way follows directly from them. Such blind faiths betray not sensitivity but numbness, not altruism but self-absorption; in other words, they betray precisely the condition which they themselves most customarily ascribe to formalism itself. Perhaps it takes one to know one?

I am, I will confess as if it were not so obvious from virtually everything I've written here, quite sensitive in this way and in other ways too. As a result, it is true that constitutional factors are at the root of my inability to abide the more-is-more aesthetics of so much contemporary art regardless of any of its alleged epistemological (un)moorings that may also contribute. At a certain point it makes no difference to me whether the artist's intentions are manifested as overbearing political content, multidisciplinarity, abuse of dynamic extremes, conceptual provocation, or, as befits the trope, all of these at once and more; eventually my fragile viscera simply reaches overload and I have to sign off.

I see a Hollywood movie in the theaters only every couple of years, and I feel downright autistic from the moment I enter the lobby to the moment I depart it. Contrary to the formalist stereotype, I am hardly oblivious to the calculated emotional roller coaster; rather, I am usually on the verge of tears and simply have to go home and sleep it off in order to come to my senses. The fact that such an overwhelming majority of my cultural compatriots not only willingly endure this but in fact actively seek it out and repeat it compulsively merely confirms that they must be wired differently than I am². At that point I am tempted to throw up my arms in a conniption fit of relativism and say, "Live and let live! We agree to disagree! It's all so byooo-tiful! " I have certainly flirted with this mindset during the recent dormancy period here, for reasons outlined above. But of course it is difficult (impossible?) to fully live up to this intention, it is an intention which is unlikely to be reciprocated by much of anybody else, and besides all of that, I would say that any time we neglect to unpack what is going behind the scenes of such a contentious issue, we evince a certain apathy that is unbecoming of a socially engaged artist. So let's continue to hash it out, no? I promise that dormancy periods here are only ever temporary, no matter how long they might seem to go on.

The oversensitivity defense certainly is a useful deflection for me to invoke here provided that the prosecution is capable of understanding this term matter-of-factly rather than in the pathologized sense so often invoked by faux-liberals eager to defend their habitual microaggressions. Even if I were a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, though, I think that after several years of concert-going in Los Angeles I would still greet the exceedingly rare opportunity to experience live music without the ubiquitous multi-media projections exactly as I do now; that is, with no small amount of relief. As it is, notwithstanding the inevitability of the (very) occasional masterpiece in virtually any idiom, it only seems clearer that the present inescapability of mixed media is a textbook case of turning up the volume of the conversation simply in an attempt to be heard over the chatter of cultural overproduction and oversaturation. If formalists are to be aggressively held to account for their alleged self-referentialism and sophistry, then conceptualists should be at least equally compelled to answer for their various excesses. I would say that they actually should be held to firmer account because the culture within which they operate incentivizes such excesses in wild disproportion to most every other modus operandi. What perplexes non-believers most about formalism is the difficulty of establishing motive; what perplexes about conceptualists is that there are so many motives to choose from that you can never know for sure which ones are real, intentional, or sincere, or in fact if any of these descriptors apply at all³. I think that what I just wrote is absolutely an instance of hating the game and not the player. Hence, as the Theorists would have it regarding more pressing social identity issues, we really do need to see difference here rather than simply reenacting the familiar relativist abdication of judgment, because difference is in fact political in this instance as in so many others. Aesthetic relativism is, as I have written before, both a social grace and a social ill, so let's indeed answer for ourselves even if no one asked and see what insights this exercise generates. Triangulation is most detectable where cheap thrills are appealed to the most shamelessly, but it would be a mistake to pretend that it was not at play elsewhere, including in absolute music itself. To be clear, I am all for cheap thrills; even so, we know what eventually happens to people who eat only junk food.

See how you can be a socially conscious musician without burning effigies of politicians during your concerts? It's not impossible, people. Get over yourselves.


III
Of course, my frozen essay was not to be about absolute music, activist art, or multidisciplinarity, but rather about particular technical aspects of music pedagogy in young brass players. I'm taking this diversion only to head off the accusation of hypocrisy, that is, the notion that my awakening to the inadequacy of my extramusical learning is an indictment of my previous insistence on absolute music-making. To the contrary, this awakening has only confirmed more strongly for me that musicianship and citizenship are overwhelmingly separate spheres. I've never advocated for ignorance or escapism, just for a necessary degree of compartmentalization as dictated by the facts on the ground. It is a compartmentalization which, in my humble opinion, any human being capable of wiping their own behind ought also be capable of maintaining without spiraling uncontrollably into the nihilism and narcissism of the archetypal Formalist strawman. I certainly consider myself amply capable of this maintenance (I've had some practice), and if lengthy reflections such as this one aren't enough to earn at least a modicum of credibility on this front, then I should probably just give up trying.

I will at least concede that the narcissism is kept at bay far more easily than the nihilism which seems to lurk around every ontological corner⁴. I suppose it was only a matter of time before nihilism started to penetrate the part of my self-constructed intellectual inner sanctum most explicitly concerned with people; that is, with pedagogy and "The Theory-Technique-Creativity Nexus," which was to be the title of my paper. Disembodied works of art are easier to get along with on a daily basis than people are, even if there's no such thing as perfection in either case. Such it is that I find it (perhaps temporarily, but in any case quite thoroughly) impossible to spill another ounce of effort inveighing against scale nazis, pattern pushers, or passive recreators, each of whose conditions I am now compelled to see as ineluctably contingent upon their wider cultural worlds, and which I hence have no hope of meaningfully reforming, no matter how well-conceived or well-executed my writing on the topic might be. Members of these groups, some of whom I count as valued colleagues and collaborators in other ways, will just have to lie in the beds that they have made for themselves, and I in mine. These people will continue to dominate the pedagogical scene as long as the culture at large continues to produce them in such numbers and favors their paint-by-number expediency over the long road of pan-stylistic internalization. Having reached that conclusion, belatedly it would be fair to say, it is no longer worth my time to agonize over how to best communicate ideas that will not be received with action, even if they are received with a variety of more superficial, ultimately meaningless praises, as some of my earlier pedagogical writings have been. To be sure, I have no illusions of being able to change the larger culture all by myself either. That is a larger task, not a smaller one. But at least an ill-fated joyride in that direction sounds interesting to me; at least I can be stimulated by it; at least I can sound smarter, if not actually be smarter, by investing earnestly and intensely in extramusical learning for the first time since my mid-teens. As friend and bandmate Max Kutner aptly put it in a recent conversation, reading French Theory is great as long as you don't start writing tunes about it. I really couldn't have said it better. I have a different relationship to "tunes" than I do to people, and I think that makes me a scholar, not a hypocrite.

Responding to incredulous, disbelieving rejoinders when I reveal that I have not earnestly practiced scales since 10th grade, that I credit this very intentional decision with helping me get to where I am today creatively on the horn, and that I later discovered a modicum of laboratory support for my youthful conjecture in the form of the "exposure effect" is something which no longer interests me as it once did. I would like to think that thoughtful contributions to this effect could be considered part of good citizenship broadly construed, but at this point it feels more like an entropic blowing of smoke in the direction of old dogs of all ages who are incapable of learning new tricks. Therefore, unless you are my student or otherwise make a conscientious inquiry on such matters, I am done with them for the time being. Let's talk about culture, and then let's "escape" into music-making as whole people and conscious citizens without either forgetting or being limited by what we've learned.


notes
1. By the same token, the next time you see a musician or their work described as "introspective," ask yourself, "Can one become an artist of any caliber, by virtually any value system, without a fair quantity self-reflection?!" I think not, which seals the fact of the co-optation of the term. It also seals the diagnosis of (b)latent sexism when this term is indiscriminately applied to the work of women musicians.

2. On the other hand, Jon Wagner's Contemporary Film Theory class at CalArts not only served as an ideal survey of Critical Theory but also made me realize how easily I could get sucked into Second Cinema. I had to bald-face lie my way into this class, for which the prerequisite is "an abiding interest in film." By the end of it this was only a little white lie. Only Mrs. Stammers' IB Theory of Knowledge has had the impact on my intellectual life that this class has, and it meant a tremendous amount to me to receive a totally unexpected email from Mr. Wagner at the end of the term thanking me for my papers.

3. If no one else who went to CalArts is willing to speak what we all saw, then I will: multidisciplinarity at CalArts is first and foremost a way for third year BFAs to keep in touch with friends from other programs after they all move out of the school-mandated dorm stay and into their own far-flung apartments spanning the seven boroughs of Santa Clarita. Operating in parallel to this surfeit of juvenilia are a handful of graduate students, many of them working professionals and fantastically talented, who seek out the school specifically for its emphasis on collaboration across disciplines. I lost track of all the bitter stories I heard from this latter contingent about how departmental turf wars undermined access to resources they needed to do this work. You may socialize free of charge, but equipment and space cost money.

Contrary to my stated anti-relativism, those who know me offline know that I'm a very good sport about being involved in projects which don't necessarily align with the "absolute music" orientation I outline in this post. At school I almost always had fun performing in multi-disciplinary projects (as I say, I think that was the point of most of them), and occasionally I learned something of enduring value too. Overwhelmingly, though, what struck me most immediately and intensely about the bulk of the multidisciplinary work made at CalArts was its sheer callowness. The work I've seen out here in the postgraduate Real World is only slightly more encouraging, and really, how could its evolution be any more than slight having incubated in such an environment?

While on the whole I wouldn't trade my time at CalArts for anything, this was and is all very dispiriting. How could the social and turf war issues possibly be unrelated to it?

4. Early returns indicate that reading more books is making me less certain about important issues, not more, and hence more readily threatening to toss me to the dogs of nihilism rather than snatching me from their jaws. But at least I've found the ability in early middle age to have fun doing something other than music and sports.

Living Beyond Style (for realz)

If there's one thing regular attendance at The Blue Whale has brought home to me, it's that the notion of being beyond style is deeper than the lip service nearly all of us living and working today tend to pay to it. That is to say that I have been hearing a lot of music there that very much reflects the image the rest of the country has of L.A. (slick, polished, resolved, catchy, technical), some of which I wouldn't otherwise be going out of my way to experience, but which has, generally, been so well conceived and executed as to transcend the limitations (as people like me tend to see them) of the styles in question.

The saying about "good music and the other kind" comes to mind here, though to get on a razor's edge about it (and really, Modernists, where else would we want to be?), it is a saying that, much as we love its utterer, skirts more issues than it addresses. Even from the unfiltered vantage point of an individual audient, such all-or-nothing evaluations paper over the nearly intractable complexity of the listening experience, comprised as it most always is of numerous "good" and "bad" aspects all at once. Such it is that a group like the Billy Childs Electric Band, which I caught recently, constantly threatens a listener like me with all the rhetoric of showbiz and a notable banality of pre-composed material, all while melting my face right off as a total musical package that ranks in the top 10 live music experiences I've ever had.

Indeed, Childs' compositions and keyboard chops alike are almost impossibly polished. In Minneapolis, we run people like that right out of town with behind-the-back shit-talking. They don't fit the narrative we've constructed for ourselves to inhabit, the one where we repackage all of our shortcomings as conscious musical decisions and deride anyone whose faults are less obvious, whose technical polish is laid on thicker than ours, and, most of all, who are more obviously stylists than innovators. I must confess to having fallen victim to the Minneapolitan mindset myself on more than one occasion, and that is to say that Minneapolis, though it is an admirably pluralistic and original place in many ways, is not quite as far beyond style as we'd all like to think. Style, as any professional musician learns quickly, is only slightly less political than sex; to be beyond it, then, is not so simple as merely refusing to talk about it.

To wit, it's easy to highlight the superficial commonalities between the Childs group and the best of my hometown in spite of the stylistic grand canyon that separates them: high-level listening and interplay among the players, an incredible dynamic range (I doubt many Minneapolitans have ever heard a group this slick play so incredibly soft), and an unmistakable jazz aesthetic. The differences are just as stark: Childs' music is more through-composed, more harmonically "inside," and far more refined in overall tone color than most anything you can hear in Minneapolis without venturing to the Dakota.

Even after a relatively short time out here, I can already see the warnings of so many Minneapolitan rogues in evidence: clearly there is a more dominant mainstream at play in L.A. than in Minneapolis, and clearly I will find my way into friction with it at some point along the way. To be 100 percent beyond style is to be ambivalent about one's own stylistic direction, and to hew to whatever this mainstream dictates for you. Clearly I have no intentions of going quite that far as a performer or composer. I must say, though, that as a listener, given the quality of work out here, I certainly can imagine worse fates: I am learning a ton from what I'm hearing, and concurrently having a swell time doing so.

Beds of Sin (iii)

This almost hit me in the head at work the other day, so I picked it up after it came to rest and snapped an iPad picture for the blog:

I realize that the pine cone and the maple leaf have their fans, but seriously, isn't this soooo much cooler? There's just something about Los Angeles, from the architecture to the flora to the sunsets. It makes up for the quotidian inconveniences of modern American life in a way that fall colors, dendritic snowflakes, and the IDS Tower just never quite could. And though I've never been one to take overt cues for my music from environmental sources, I do think the aesthetic change of pace has had a charitable impact on me and my work. So sure, come on over everyone. We'll make room for you.

Beds of Sin (ii)

[Fickle Ears makes its first and probably last foray into the issue of human reproduction, posted today in honor of the author's thirty-first birthday]

The only time I've ever heard the notion of population control raised matter-of-factly in conversation was, not surprisingly, among a group of gay men. Even so, I don't think it's possible to come live in Los Angeles from somewhere smaller (even if that somewhere gets called a "big" city) and not have the thought at least cross your mind. And if it is possible not to think that way, then you're free to judge me for having slipped into it anyway, but you won't stop me from thinking it.

Los Angeles is a place where a lot of people would like to live, or think they would. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so it's undoubtedly foolish to think about population control while you're stuck in traffic. If people here had fewer kids, more pasty-faced midwesterners like me would surely flood in, guns and sunscreen bottles blazing, to clog up the freeways again and pursue our acting careers. All of that aside, though, I am constantly reminded here, as I was when I worked at the MSP airport, how lightly people seem to take the notion of having children and how ill-prepared they truly are to handle it. I'm even learning that to be 30 (make that 31) and childless in L.A. arouses a certain amount of...suspicion in working class circles. Now isn't that a tad bit over the top?

As far beyond the pale as, say, a two-child policy might be in the U.S., I'm willing to say that simply leaving sociology and biology to their own devices strikes me personally as no more or less crazy at this point, not when people I work with during the day are heading off to second full-time jobs at night instead of sleeping just to feed their kids; not when we have millions of intelligent people out of work along with millions of underserved children, yet we cannot collectively seem to figure out a way to play those two problems off against each other; and not when children (let's not forget pets in this one, either) are more or less seen as material possessions even by some we would otherwise consider to be among the economically, physically, and socially fittest parents around.

It would be nice to think that simply winning the fight for reproductive rights and affordable health care would solve the problem. It certainly couldn't hurt. I submit to you, however, with all the empathy of a rock that this is a cultural issue as well, one that all the condoms in the world won't fix. So, sorry to be one of those people, but the whole thing just makes me cringe, and more so with each passing year, another of which, I'm reminded today, has just passed before my very eyes thanks to my parents' own one-child policy.

Beds of Sin (i)

"People just keep coming here," a relative of mine once said indignantly, and as if she wasn't talking to one of the more recent emigres. Who wouldn't want to live in Los Angeles? I have feared straight through from the moment the first seed of temptation sprouted in my mind all the way through the present moment that the answer might be: "anyone with a conscience." I've hidden from no one the fact that the climate was always a consideration for me, but I have plenty of better reasons for coming to live here, and so far I'm content that they're all in evidence. And contrary to that peculiar form of midwestern conjecture one is bathed in upon declaring the intent to relocate, I've yet to feel the shadow of the entertainment industry stalking my every artistic move, and I remain unconvinced that people here are, as a group, any more or less superficial than they are back home.

It could not be more transparent, on the other hand, that the whole operation is enabled by a constellation of environmental and humanitarian atrocities the sum total of which I'm not sure many people I've met here know or care much about. Some of the blankest stares I've ever seen have followed what I thought were innocuous questions about water issues, made to people who have lived here their entire lives. Several co-workers of mine have the infuriating habit of taking their lunch breaks in their cars with engines idling and air conditioners blasting away for 30 minutes at a time. These are low-wage earners in the era of $4 per gallon gas; clearly there's no deterrent strong enough to combat animal instincts.

Naturally, my footprint is smaller, but I am an animal just like everyone else, a walking entropy machine complete with central nervous system and reproductive organs to assist in the task. I'm drawn to year-round outdoor basketball, musical communities that are large and informed enough to be self-policing, and double-digit personnel options on just about every instrument I'll ever need to form an ensemble to play my music. The extent of my impact on climate change, air quality, clogged freeways, depleted water supplies, and housing shortages remains to be seen, but this much is (and always was) clear: owing to geography and sociology alike, it will necessarily be larger here than it would have been in Minneapolis or virtually any other place I might have gone; it will be leveled against an environment which is under siege in a way that Minneapolis, despite its own notable sprawl and the alarming recent emergence of its own air quality issues, has never experienced and probably will not experience for a very long time; and it will be leveled at the expense of more desperate, aggrieved and oppressed people than the entire Twin Cities can claim in either number or degree. For all of that, I never had a perfectly clean conscience about coming here, and I never will.

No matter what sorts of high or trying times might await, my living here will always be "me time" through and through. It is a concession to the voice that says "do something for yourself for once" and in direct contravention of the one that says "you've had it pretty good to start with; leave something for everyone else." People just keep coming here, and I didn't have to be one of them, but here I am competing against all the other transplants and quite a few natives of myriad vintages for just about every known resource and privilege a human being might require. I'm crossing my fingers that we don't run out.

Same Difference (iii) – some comic relief re: the fashion issue

I haven't ventured to L.A. all that much since I've been at CalArts, but when I have, the heightened importance of grooming has frequently been in evidence. The first time I saw a musician sporting the more or less archetypal musico-hipster outfit from the neck down in combination with the perfectly trimmed goatee and freshly styled hair of an accountant, I knew I wasn't in Kansas (or Minnesota) anymore.