Mumford -- Art and Technics (vi)

"...until recently we have taken for granted that, since we ourselves live in a Machine Age and boast of that fact, every other age was correspondingly dominated and influenced by its tools and technical devices. Despite our own devaluation of symbolism we had nevertheless made the Machine the symbol of life itself, and transferred our own obsession with that particular idol to every other phase of human history." (38-39)

"One has only to compare the cave paintings of the Aurignacian hunters with the tools that they used to see that their technical instruments...were extremely primitive, while their symbolic arts were so advanced that many of them stand on a par, in economy of line and esthetic vitality, with the work of the Chinese painters of the Sung dynasty." (39)

"Early man had created vast and wonderful symbolic structures in language at a time when a handful of tools sufficed to meet his needs in hunting and agriculture...
a civilization of great complexity arose in Egypt and Peru before the invention of the wheel as a means of transportation. If man were preeminently the tool-using animal, this long backwardness in technics would be hard to account for." (40)

And so man is therefore preeminently the...aesthete? Symbolist? Builder of complex civilizations? If as a species we are not quite "preeminently" aesthetic, Mumford's gloss at least restores aesthetics to its rightful place of phylogenetic priority.

The anthropological bent here could be an excellent testimonial in favor of the arts as a basic necessity, a human right, a core subject, etc., or it could be the opposite. Perhaps aesthetic refinement and self-indulgence are not just tendencies but desires, not mere bad habits learned from European romanticism but rather top-shelf items in a hierarchy of needs. Or, perhaps today's rigidly formalized consolidations of aesthetics (broad) into art (much narrower) are indeed perverted/alienated/denatured/artificial forms of expression which civilizations use to channel dangerous impulses into benign ones. As I see it, the phylogenetic priority of aesthetics is precisely what justifies and demands its consolidation into formalized practices. Basic human needs tend to become sites of formal knowledge gathering, cultivation, and refinement precisely because of their importance to human life, not in spite of it. Indeed, they almost inevitably become sites of alienation for the same reason; but proscriptions against formalization are alienating too.

-----

...here again [in printing] the esthetic symbol preceeded the practical use. For the first application of printing was in the domain of art, the printing of woodcuts: it was only at a later stage that the interest in the word led to...the invention of movable type. (67)

Is it an incidental detail that the particular piece of social technics which precipitated this was "the word?" Does this not seal the deal that mere words, like symbols, operate on "art" in their ephemeral ways much as machines loom more materially?

Mumford -- Art and Technics (v)

"What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture--that a great client was essential in the production of a great building--holds for every other form of art..." (28)

"[the] stage of full maturity...that only great art reaches...in both the artist and his community it demands a certain dedication, indeed a certain sacrifice, that sets it off from the more decorative and pleasurable phases of art." (29)

Cue Branford on Cecil for a not-so-friendly reminder that there are limits to what artists can reasonably expect from audiences. That said, neither community nor clientele is exactly the same as audience; in fact, Mumford reminds us here, the latter is rather limited in influence compared to the more pervasive, less tractable influence of both the wider community and the specific person or group controlling the purse strings.

I suspect that virtually every gigging musician can recall at least one instance (but probably more than one) of client and audience being out of step, where all chains of accountability ran through the client and none directly between artist and audience. Perhaps this scenario belongs too properly to the commercial rather than the artistic world to be relevant here; it most certainly belongs to the community, though, and it most certainly represents a temporary breakdown of that institution. Communities get the art they deserve, the art for which they have laid the foundation via whatever conduct and discourse prevails therein; clients get the art they ask for, whether they know what they're actually asking for or not; and audiences too often are left to choose from among the debris field of broken relationships and communication bottlenecks.

The notion that the community has a role to play in helping its art to reach the greatest possible heights has unfortunately become conflated with the task of initiating the non-initiated into such esoteric art practices as the administrophere sees fit to impose on them. This in and of itself does nothing to create the conditions under which art thrives.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (iva)

"Our power and knowledge, our scientific discoveries and our technical achievements, have all been running wild because Western man turned his back upon the very core and center of his own life. ... More and more, from the sixteenth century on, modern man patterned himself upon the machine. Despite sentimental compunctions of various sorts, compunctions expressed in the romantic movement, in nationalism, in the reactivation of Christian theology, Western man has sought to live in a nonhistoric and impersonal world of matter and motion, a world with no value except the value of quantities; a world of causal sequences, not human purposes. ... In such a world, man's spiritual life is limited to that part of it which directly or indirectly serves science and technics: all other interests and activities of the person are suppressed as "non-objective," emotional, and therefore unreal." (12-13)

And so the place of the "non-objective" in education, for example, remains a highly polarizing issue which nowadays must be relitigated by each generation. Educational quality that cannot be quantified cannot be proved. Deficits of trust lead to ever-louder calls for greater Accountability, an edifice which is built only from the objective standpoint.

As with technical progress in the arts, I'm more convinced of the correlation than the causation here when it comes to human beings seemingly "pattern[ing themselves] upon the machine." Technological progress certainly provides means and models that did not previously exist; but there already existed strictly human dynamics which point in the same direction. The less cultural consensus we share, the more our various atomized cultures must be litigated by our consensus-based institutions, and the further we sink into the abyss of radical empiricism, low-trust economics, and institutional sclerosis. Certainly mechanization is instrumental here, and also materially and symbolically aligned with such rages for order; but for mechanization to itself serve as an idol is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a tyranny of objectivity to take hold. All that is needed is enough of the right (or wrong) kind of people.

Indeed, common culture can in fact be seen as its own tyrannically objective force, even in its pre-mechanized epoch.

Europe, at that time [the fourteenth century], had created an imposing symbolic structure, in the dogmas, the philosophy, the ritual, and the daily pattern of conduct promoted by the Christian Church. Medieval civilization was overcome not by its weaknesses but by its achievements. So successful was this effort at symbolization, this habit of seeing every fact and every event as a witness to the truths of the Christian religion, that a plethora of symbolic "inner" meanings lay over every natural event and every simple act: nothing was itself or existed in its own right, it was always a point of reference for something else whose ultimate habitat was another world. The simplest operations of the mind were cluttered by symbolic verbiage of an entirely nonoperational kind. (57)

For Mumford (continuing),

In order to come clean, man took refuge in a different kind of order and a different kind of abstraction: in mechanical order, in number, in regularity, in drill. Unfortunately, Western Man in his search for the object, presently forgot the object of his search. In getting rid of an embarrassing otherworldliness he also got rid of himself.

This implies that there is an element of backlash in the post-enlightenment tyranny of Technics, that it somehow began as an overcorrection for a tyranny of art. To the contrary, I read this as the best demonstration yet that language and "symbolization" are actually branches of Technics, not of Art. The greatest "success" of the medieval Christian Church was social control, and this

plethora of symbolic "inner" meanings [which] lay over every natural event and every simple act

was a huge part of that enterprise. This was a world as unreceptive to the artistic and the ephemeral as any work review with your boss at the office ever could be. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that modern corporations and offices have developed their own lexicons and dialects, and their own code-switching practices; and it is not for nothing that the imposition of code-switching itself, of which it could just as well be said that

the simplest operations of the mind [are] cluttered by symbolic verbiage of an entirely nonoperational kind

is properly seen as an instrument of oppression when it is demanded of people based on their self- or perceived identity rather than by the real requirements of the task at hand.

The individuals who today populate such institutions serve objective, technical masters, be those masters human, mechanical, or conceptual. These people are totally managed and hence must manage back. It is true that the specter of real, violent death imposed from without has been replaced by the relatively humane specter of Career Suicide. But at least the medievals believed in an afterlife.

The ultimate lesson of all this is that there is no escaping from freedom, as it were, back into consensus. Both the bounded cultural world Mumford describes above and the fragmented one Americans live in today impose an objective Way that is not so easy to swim against. This indicates that institutions, in spite of their sclerotic predisposition, are more susceptible to progressive change than people are. We have ceded a lot of "personal responsibility" but refuse to cede control. Few of us could survive in the wild, so to speak, but most all of us want our needs met on our terms. Trust is still strictly conditional; changes in the conditions are trivial compared to the stability of the institution of conditionality itself.

Mumford is easily misread as a crank or a technophobe. His superficial biases certainly get the better of him on many occasions here. But ultimately he writes not against progress but in favor of balance between opposing forces. This is the most compelling part of his argument because it describes a human dynamic that can be seen in quite a few other yin-yang dualities besides the one which gives this work its title.

The final placeholder of the decade? Or the first of the next?

I have done three posts worth of blog work today, but nothing is quite ready to serve just yet. This is one consequence of using other writers as prompts rather than digging deep for shareable content with a personal perspective. This outcome was unthinkable when I started blogging, so thoroughly had the academic pressure cooker alienated me from books, reading, and learning itself. It seemed odd that almost all music bloggers were more interested in writing about books. Now that I’m one of them, this invites the positing of a maturation or developmental process whereby the ability to focus long enough to read a book emerges only in one’s thirties. I reject this notion, in my case at least, via a claim of self-awareness. When I eat poorly, sleep poorly, and utterly exhaust myself, I feel exactly like I did as an adolescent, and I have the same ability to focus as I had then (basically none). It is one of my great regrets that I waited too long to take my first break from school.

Riding the Knobs

The workers who have been repairing the house next door to my apartment building were either absent or silent this morning, offering the hope that the mandatory 7am wake up calls I have enjoyed for the last several weeks may be subsiding. The rest of the year I am up well before 7 on work days anyway, but we have enjoyed a temporary reprieve from these early mornings during the holidays as long as I’ve had the job, working in the afternoon and early evening instead. Thus there is some cruel irony, not just inconvenience, in the noise next door appearing when it did. I do also have real jackhammers in the neighborhood, for bridge work scheduled to run into 2021. And of course there is the endless barrage of emergency vehicles, closing train doors, vehicles at work honking twice to announce their impending movements, etc. We use loud noises to get each other’s attention, ostensibly for safety purposes; but this is anything but safe for our ears. I have taken to wearing earplugs to bed and keeping them in all the way through my outbound commute. Is this really all that dangerous when I can still hear all of the warnings perfectly well?

Mumford -- Art and Technics (iii)

...that the development of art historically has its parallel in the development of the individual, and that human infants exhibit, without embarrassment, many characteristics we find most marked [25] in the artist--above all a certain innocent self-love, which makes him regard his own productions as precious and worthy of attention. Without that fundamental vanity, man might never have had sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism to transform them into works of art--works taking stable form under and exacting discipline, and so capable of influencing the feelings and conduct of other men. (24-25)

Here is the old saw, artists as infantile. We find certain infantile traits "most marked" in the artist; they are noticeable, then, but are they determinative? Essential?

Whatever LM means precisely by "innocent self-love," whatever is "fundamental" about his notion of the infant-artist's "fundamental vanity," one can certainly confirm the resemblance anecdotally, and perhaps copiously in certain milieux (e.g. art school). I would, however, caution against defining artisthood this way; that is, to move from correlation to causation, as many in the post-Freudian continuum did. Creativity is one of those traits of children that lead armchair psychologists to trumpet the value of staying young at heart; but for every one of these traits there are a handful of others which are handicaps to artists much the same as they are to any other adult. I cannot help but think here of the popular, movie-made image of Mozart as against that of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms, or dozens of other Grown Ass Men and Women whose art has outlived them. Perhaps, then, it would be better to say that the arts are a sector where it is easier get away with not growing up, especially if you're talented (true of most fields), or even if you're not (I think this is the biggest difference).

By locating "sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism" as arising only from the artist's vanity, LM makes out "stable form" and "exacting discipline" to be quite the chores. By this account, a socially maladaptive/pathological trait (infantilism) is in fact well-adapted to and defined as normal within the world of art. The mind of the artist, this child's mind in an adult's body, could never find "discipline" rewarding in and of itself, but if discipline is what it takes to sate the artist's vanity, then it is a means to an end which will be milked for all its worth. I have known and worked with several people like this, generally for short periods of time.

Of course no sooner has the infant-artist axis been established than LM reveals a schema for an artistic maturation process (a deep-psychological one, in contrast to the merely behavioristic observations which precede). In the highest stage the artist "lose[s] himself in [the] act" of creation, which has become all about "begetting fresh forms of life," the work becoming "itself an independent force", etc. This all sounds lovely, but it's not clear (nor is it ever really addressed) that there is any real correlation between good intentions, good artists, and good art. I would question whether creation and reception have ever been well-integrated enough to bear the weight of the prescriptions he issues for them here. For LM it is the second of three stages, the "adolescent," during which "exhibitionism passes into communication." To the contrary, I would argue that "communication" per se is essentially a branch of technics, not art. To speak of communication rather than something more vague or euphemistic, to speak of symbols rather than signals, is precisely to hone in on "that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded." Communication is the technical end to which language is merely the most capable and nuanced means; art is also nuanced but not nearly so capable. To define art and artisthood as literally communicative points, ironically, toward the fully-rationalized world LM writes against. This is art-ontological technics run amok, elevating a more technical, tractable function over fuzzier ones, and conflating concreteness of expression with maturity of purpose.

Bring Back the Muzak: Reprise

In rock music, the important thing about a harmonica solo is that it is played on the harmonica. In a cavernous retail space, where everything but the harmonica and the backbeat blend into the aural clutter, the true quality of the blaring harmonica solo is revealed, and is therefore made newly important.

(Composed in and posted from a San Francisco Whole Foods, therefore also recalling a half-overheard conversation between CalArtians venting about how they grew to hate the Bay Area music scene: “Yeah, yeah! And all the rock bands have tabla...”)

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ii)

...the very growth of mechanical facilities has given people a false ideal of technical perfectionism, so that unless they can compete with the products of the machine or with those whose professional training qualifies them for such a public appearance, they are all too ready to take a back seat. (pp. 6-7)

If "professional training" has contributed to a chilling effect borne of meaninglessly inflated standards, then the technologies responsible are not the ones which automate and dehumanize the task in question but rather the technologies which enable culture to be recorded, archived, and disseminated. (Perish the thought that the last step, reception, will eventually somehow be automated too.) I would say that in music, at least, we can observe the emergence of "a false ideal of technical perfectionism" which is borne entirely of human dynamics and which predates the usual technological suspects. Eminent musical technicians have set many a new bar unaided by concurrent technological advance and without taking mechanical reproduction as their model^{1 2}. But they have been reliant on information technology to make available relevant artifacts of the past, distant and recent alike. For temporal artists who need to gather firsthand evidence, faster travel has helped too (it could have saved Bach several weeks of walking), but in a pragmatic rather than a generative way.

So, mechanization has been the primary means of development of a mass culture which shrunk the world and accelerated change in the widest-reaching ways. Yet even today there are only a few corners of the musical universe where machines are truly admired to the point of serving as models for human musical ambitions. It seems to me that musicians fairly reliably get where they're going in this respect via the dynamic interaction of nature and nurture, and indeed that this interaction is a bit too dynamic for "compet[ing] with the products of the machine" to ever hold much interest for more than a few of us, not even when we are surrounded by machines as seductive as the iPhone and the 3-D printer. In other words, we must eventually zoom in from the bird's eye view where Mumford has perched himself, at which point it becomes clear that not everyone is inexoribly led to form such "false ideals" no matter how thoroughly such ideals surround them. Even now we still have a few evangelists for slow food, quiet music, close reading, etc. The early-period Situationists confronted the 1950s at far younger ages than did Professor Mumford, yet they certainly shared his contention that

with all our superabundance of energy, food, materials, products, there has been no commensurate improvement in the quality of our daily existence. (13)

Perhaps, then, the Situs' basic critique was not as radical as their proposed solutions. By the same token, perhaps Mumford resolves the Structure-Agency problem too one-sidedly because he is interested in interventions to which only Structure is susceptible; in reform rather than revolution. But then a sociology of technical perfectionism is needed before practical reform can be theorized, and I don't think we have that here. Later on we learn, in fact, that Mumford himself (suddenly ahead of his time rather than behind it) expects to find the social valuation of mechanization leading rather than trailing technological development itself.

men become mechanized, they themselves are transformed into mechanical, uniform, replaceable parts, or they teach themselves how to perform, with accuracy, standardized and repeatable acts, before they take the final step of inventing machines that take on these duties. The social division of labor precedes the mechanical division of labor, and the mechanical division of labor, in general, precedes the invention of complicated automatic machines. (64-65)

And he continues,

The first step is to reduce a whole human being into a magnified eye, a magnified hand, a magnified finger, subordinating every other function to that whose province is enlarged. This specialization takes place even under the handicraft system at a late stage in its development. By breaking the once unified process of work into a series of fractional operations...the output can be increased at the simple cost of taking all the fun and interest and personal responsibility out of the operation for the worker.

Those who enjoy pillorying millennials for sport can entertain themselves unpacking whether "fun" and "interest" are reasonable things to expect out of your job. For the rest of us, the phrase that leaps off the page is "personal responsibility." Here Mumford, the non-revolutionary, encapsulates in concise, plain language why mass production is not merely tedious but in fact socially destructive. Personal responsibility, this central tenet of classical conservatism, is directly countervailed by the ways neo-conservatives like to pursue economic growth. This is worth keeping in mind anytime the "anti-business" epithet is trotted out in American political warfare.

I would propose that the now-endemic corporate and governmental construct of Accountability, a superhuman human standard whose rigidity gives it a clear affinity with mechanization/automation but which clearly issues from of all kinds of forces besides machine worship, is in fact a desperate effort to re-wrest control of the post-responsibility worker, whose predictable response to a world where "fun" and "interest" take place only outside of work now creates an unsustainable level of friction within the prevailing social and economic systems. Machines are both models of accountability themselves and far superior to humans as tools for testing and imposing accountability on other humans. Plus, they don't need to have fun.

I did at one time perform (and rehearse) extensively with an ensemble where contact mics and digital tuners were de rigeur during rehearsals. I take every opportunity to relate this experience to other professional brass players and have yet to find one who thinks this is a good idea. I'm also positive that the formative events leading to this outcome in that group of people need not await the invention of even more accurate tuners in order to find full expression. Here the machine was neither competitor nor prophet; it was merely meeting an unmet psychological need. Where stakes are not so high and solutions not so elusive, meanwhile, I would expect to find very few people and institutions worshipping the machine. The self-cleaning oven is foremost about exempting us from the chore and only secondarily about doing a better job of it.


1. Daniel Wolf:

let's throw out any claims for an inevitable progression in musical history from less to more complex -- it didn't happen as we left antiquity, with its now-lost enharmonic genus and wealth of modal melodic types, it didn't happen in the way from the late 14th through the early 16th centuries, it didn't happen from the late Baroque to classicism -- successive musics focused on different issues, and the location of audible or associative complexity in musical textures moved as well. We need a more complex view of musical complexity.

2. Milo Fine:

each succeeding generation has "improved" technical wiring; which is why, for instance, contemporary composers are generally one generation ahead of people actually being able to realize what they write. This is much more inevitable than it is admirable; a natural progression of technique, but, of course, not necessarily resonance.

Millennial Ambivalence: The Road

If you're from the future and you're reading this blog from start to finish, it probably comes as a surprise that this weekend brings another junket and another Scrabble indulgence. The ascetic image I like to cultivate here is more cultivated than real. I have always worked on projects in bursts and then floundered for days, weeks or even months. I take lots of breaks which can last for lots of different durations. I seem to have a fixed quantity of creative energy which, like semen, is best spent in large bursts rather than constant emissions. My old roommate in The Valley claims that Asians can work more steadily and that this is why they excel. (He voted for Trump.) Blog Month itself was partially conceived as an experiment in working against what seems to be my ineluctable nature. It is informative that I have several times failed to adhere to its strictures.

Poring over lists of arbitrary words in solitude and then venturing out to mediocre hotels and senior centers to sit across the table from other socially stunted word grinders is not everyone's idea of a vacation. It's not really my idea of a vacation either, because I'm allergic to the word "vacation," and to the middle-class obsession with leisure travel generally, and to all of the specious rationalizations for leisure travel as a means of personal growth. It's the intellectual and creative challenges, and the competition, which draw me to Scrabble; the temptation to bankrupt myself traveling to more and more tournaments is a serious drawback.

I have been a core member of two bands which have toured on a scale of weeks rather than days. I learned that when a musician claims to "love touring," either they are lying or they are really saying that they love the things that touring gets you, like money (maybe), looking busy (always), an intensification of focus/interplay in an ensemble which can only come from performing a lot on a compressed schedule (probably), being received by new people/communities (depends on where you are), and group bonding in transit (temporarily). I am not ignorant of the benefits other people see in these things, but four of the five of them hold no interest for me and have no relevance to my work. And because touring is even less conducive to keeping up with other projects in "spare" time, I dislike it even more than the idea of travel for its own sake. I must confess, though, that the ensemble sharpening aspect is real: a short tour is ideal for getting a band in peak form, especially on difficult music, and as long as you are not already a mere short tour away from strangling each other. Touring is the new rehearsal, because actual rehearsal sounds like a lot less fun than traveling.

Freud -- The Pschopathology of Everyday Life (i) -- Know Thyself

"In this and similar incidents, I have concluded that actions unintentionally performed are bound to be a source of misunderstanding in human intercourse. The perpetrator, who has no idea that there is any intention linked to them, does not credit himself with one, nor does he consider himself responsible for them. The second person concerned, however, since he regularly draws conclusions about the intentions and attitudes of the first from such actions, knows more about that first person's psychic processes than he is ready to admit himself or thinks he has imparted. He will be indignant if faced with any such conclusions made on the basis of his symptomatic actions, declaring them groundless, since he was unaware of having any intention to carry them out, and he will complain that the second person misunderstands him. Such misunderstandings, strictly speaking, actually arise from too great and too subtle a process of understanding. The more 'edgy' two people are, the more likely they are to give each other occasion for disagreements, each denying his own responsibility for them while taking it as proven for the other party. This may well be the penalty we pay for our inner dishonesty in allowing ourselves to express certain ideas only through the devices of forgetfulness, inadvertent and unintentional actions, ideas that, even if we cannot control them, we would do better to admit to ourselves and to others. In general, it may be said that everyone is always psychoanalysing his fellow men, and as a consequence learns to know them better than they know themselves. The way to carrying out the famous injunction to know thyself is through studying our own apparently fortuitous actions and admissions." (Ch. IX, trans. Anthea Bell)

On one hand, this is a powerful admonition towards a radical honesty which is deeper and more utilitarian than that of simply blurting out whatever comes to mind. The latter merely sows the seeds of diversionary conflict, revealing much to the recipient and little to the issuer, thereby perpetuating a particularly volatile inequity of understanding. Rather, it is actually "our own apparently fortuitous actions" rather than those quite conscious and summary blurtings out which afford the greatest opportunities to build self-knowledge, and the barrier to working through them ourselves is not public but private inhibition.

On the other hand, this is a deeply presumptuous theory whose full implications are rather bleak. How is dialogue possible at all when alter, as a rule, is accorded a privileged status vis-a-vis ego's own internal operations? Is this not precisely the leap which leads inexorably to radical empiricism, denialism and gridlock? Is this not a how-to manual for diversion into endless litigation of personal motives and biases instead of debating ideas on their merit?

The implied subordination of ego's self-knowledge to alter's gathered observations is very much of a piece with the wider questioning of individual subjectivity. Those inclined toward such questioning can wiggle out of some very tough rhetorical spots by deploying this tactic; how to constitute ourselves as subjects, after all, when we cannot even prove to others around us that we mean what we say? Infinite regress is a constant danger here, and so ultimately we tend not to push each other or ourselves too hard. We suspend the armchair psychoanalyzing when something fundamental has to get done, because it would never get done if we litigated every slip of everyone involved. (By "we," of course I mean "non-politicians.") While Freud indeed presages the parallactic era here, he was not actually living in it yet, and neither, I hasten to add, are very many of us now actually living in such a milieu; that is, not if we can imagine any non-oppressive social utility for experthood and authority, including self-knowledge. And so while I do think this passage should knock more than a few heedless extroverts off of their self-constituted high horses, the ultimate admonition here is not to close ourselves off to those who might judge us but rather to open ourselves up to ourselves; to smooth out disparities of understanding not by withholding but by releasing, first and foremost within, at which point subsequent release to our social surroundings is no longer conditioned (or at least not so severely) by self-repressions.

Of course the Professor has not, yet, furnished us with a means of distinguishing "those paranoiacs who draw conclusions from the trivial signs they observe in other people" from "those healthy people who, correctly, judge character by the fortuitous and unintentional actions of their fellow men." Do such means exist? Here is a chicken-and-egg question if there ever was one. And yet with so little honesty and directness to go around in the post-industrial, post-positivist, post-individual-subjectivity, post-purpose social world we presently inhabit, it is not a question any of us can afford to simply ignore. Neither self- nor common-interest is served that way. For Freud here, we telegraph to others the things we're unable or unwilling to face up to within ourselves. But even if we can't control the outflow of information, let alone the manner in which it is subsequently interpreted by external social agents, we can at least cultivate an internal environment of ruthless introspection, self-analysis, self-therapy, and self-evaluation; and only then, having earned the privilege, we might check our work simply by asking around strictly among those who have done the same for themselves. (Writing is my outlet of choice for the introspective phase of this process, whether or not anyone reads. But thanks for reading.)

Two Sides of the Hard Line

From Kyle Gann, Except That

Like much of my music, the piece doesn’t wear its strangeness on the surface. On the surface are the normal elements of music: melody, harmony, meter, even a slight retro pop sensibility. ...Its surface naivete is a carefully calculated construction. It is almost cartoon-like, and I’ve always admired cartoons (in fact, at age twelve before I became a composer I wanted to be a cartoonist) for their clean, hard lines, their indifference to realism, their personality-expressing, deliberately pixelated approximation of reality. The strange part...is backgrounded, and is so modestly finessed that a casual listener might not even notice it. ...In its notes, it’s a piece that could have been written seventy years ago – if the preceding two centuries had been very different.

From Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, p.69

The constant battle is to find the elements that will look best in this medium and still allow the strongest communication of the idea presented. A drawing must be made in line, duplicated on cels, painted in flat colors, photographed over a background, and projected onto a giant screen. Tiny, sensitive lines on the drawings are now enlarged until they are more than a foot wide, and very, very black. In the mid-thirties, we wished for shading, for textures, for areas with no outlines, but they were not practical. We had to find other ways of putting over the points in the scenes, and in so doing developed character animation into a communicative art that astounded the world. But at the time there was neither glory nor pride in our efforts, only the nagging limitations. As we passed each other in the hall, we shook our heads and shared the thought, "It's a crude medium."

Millennial Ambivalence: Work

I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said something I immediately regretted about never wanting to retire. In that moment, conceiving of my profession as playing tuba in public, it seemed like a fair statement. What I really meant was that I hate being idle and I hope never to stop doing the work that I care about. A decade and a half later, it seems like no one in any profession cares about work, period, not even those whom many others envy. Work is, definitionally, unimportant, usually involving offering up something others don’t really care about either and convincing them that, in a moment of weakness, they could take it or leave it and don’t want to miss out. A great many people are idle at work in precisely the way I can’t stand being idle anywhere. If I was stuck in that bind and couldn’t ever retire from it, things would be dark indeed.

So, as of the precise moment that I am clicking the “Post” button, I do not like idleness and I do hope to retire someday. But I also self-identify as part of the silent majority who likes work, not just activity; who finds the structure helpful, even if it is minimal; and who is mildly to moderately unhappy being totally unemployed. Because there is so little dignified work, this seemingly adaptive and salutary characteristic is functionally the reverse: however much you dislike idleness, you can always find a job that you hate even more. Slowly but surely, pre-millennial generations are having to admit that millennial altruism only looks idle and destructive because the structures these generations bequeathed to us are insidiously designed to punish initiative, shame creativity, and enforce idleness as a defense mechanism. The scholars who foresaw this almost perfectly were dismissed as extremists, so the realization has had to proceed literally block by block, industry by industry, until enough scattered individuals have become upset enough at the meaninglessness of work that they actually start to relate to us a little bit more. Some have long since accepted that money can’t buy happiness while insisting that consumption is good for the economy. But now, production is not good for the worker, and no rate of growth will make it any more possible to buy our way out of that abyss.

Millennial Ambivalence: The Hot Food Bar

When Whole Foods became Whole Paycheck, we could at least rationalize this by reciting the old adage, "You get what you pay for." ("Cheap gets expensive" is the polka singer version. Is this of German origin?) But when Whole Paycheck became Whole Economy, everything became much harder to rationalize.

For me, today was a gift, an unexpected day off from work which happened to coincide with a local Scrabble tournament. Unusually for me, I went looking for a restaurant afterwards rather than rushing home to cook for myself. After much Yelping and some wandering, I did what I told myself at the outset I would not do: I ended up at the Whole Foods downtown, where I shop for (a few) groceries most weeks.

When you live in LA, surrounded by culinary excellence and excess in equal measure, the idea of landing at the Hot Food Bar on a day like this feels so pointless and deflating. The abstract reality is that it is the best thing ever. I got to eat a pile of roasted vegetables out of a cardboard box, sip a stiff local IPA, and gorge on sports. I walked in with a backpack and a Scrabble bag and nobody looked at me sideways. The volume level in the room was reasonable. I'm not sure where else you can have all of these things together. I feel much better about this decision now than I did two hours ago.

Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno, Debord, among others, would have a discursive field day unpacking the Amazon phenomenon. Among the corporate powers which threaten to overtake and supersede state power, this is the only one I am truly ambivalent about. I would love to read these theorists attempting to predict the shape of the incremental drift from seeming benevolence to pure evil that we all expect. Until then, repressive desublimation sure feels good.

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.

Lewis Mumford -- Art and Technics (i)

Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon hailed the advancement of scientific learning and mechanical invention as the surest means of relieving man's estate: with a few expiatory gestures of piety, he turned his back upon religion and philosophy and art and pinned every hope for human improvement on the development of mechanical invention. ... Neither Bacon nor his eager followers in science and technics...had any anticipation of the fact that all our hard-won mastery of the physical world might, in the twentieth century, threaten the very existence of the human race. If by some clairvoyance Bacon could have followed to their ultimate conclusions the developments he forecast with such unqualified optimism, he might easily have decided, instead of continuing his speculations in science, to write Shakespeare's plays, as at least a more innocent occupation.

(pp. 4-5)

Already by adolescence music had seduced me away from cultivating a latent interest in science which had always existed more in word than deed. The disparity in earning potential between the two tracks leads unavoidably to grass-is-always-greener moments for those of us who followed our muse, but I must confess that current technological events have thoroughly eliminated any purely altruistic regrets. I'm not sure there's anything we can do to slow down the forces that have already been set in motion, and I'm not sure we should; but I am very glad, for the sake of my own conscience, that I haven't invented any of it myself.

My paternal grandfather the scientist is said to have remarked that he would have rather lived in the nineteenth century with penicillin. I find myself leaning that way nowadays.

In Defense of the Echo Chamber

When differences of political opinion arise from differences in either (a) basic underlying facts, or (b) bedrock ethical principles, there is little good (and much bad) that can come of even the most level-headed, "rational" debate between the parties in question.

Put another way: much which is labeled "irrational" is actually just proceeding rationally from differences in either (a) basic underlying facts, or (b) bedrock ethical principles.

-----
If you want to be challenged to maintain your composure, just talk politics with someone who is proceeding from different facts and principles than you are. If you want to be challenged intellectually, talk politics with someone who is proceeding from the same facts and principles as you are yet has been led by them to draw different conclusions about some pressing political matter.

The first option above is only worthwhile if one or both of you thereby reach the conclusion that your position on a political issue is not actually consistent with fact or principle; in other words, that you had not yet thought sufficiently long or hard enough about the issue to know what you think about it. Consider how insulting it is to your opponent to simply assume this about them from the outset.

To blame the "echo chamber" for breeding political polarization is to make a panoply of false assumptions. Foremost among them is to schematize the polarities monolithically, when in reality they represent exceedingly broad (therefore also fragile) coalitions which are nonetheless not quite broad enough to include everybody. But it is also to deny the necessity of grounding any dialogue in common facts and principles. Whatever else the echo chamber does, it performs this grounding very well.

The question of how facts and principles get made in the first place should by no means be off limits. I rather enjoy asking it myself. But it is, admittedly, quite an indulgence to occupy ourselves with that question while concrete policy and legislation is being hammered out via much less intellectually stimulating capital-P Political processes; and if this preoccupation springs merely from a desire to wrest control of the influence machine for the purpose of deploying it against political opponents, then it would more profitably be ignored altogether.

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.

Consensual Art (ii)

Consent is a hot, fraught topic. One particular application of the concept tends to command most of the attention, trailed at a distance by a panoply of more esoteric concerns and abstract legal theories. Consent is subject to willing, knowing violation, and it is subject to unwitting misreading based on differences of culture, irrational desire, and so on. Positively establishing consent is usually possible but often cumbersome. In most arenas it is thought better to abandon or postpone the undertaking in question if consent cannot be positively established. It is in this latter respect which artists are constantly tempted to depart from ideal social practice. Thus it is easier to dodge a subpoena than a flash mob. But are the stakes of consent really as high in art as they are elsewhere? If not, then on what basis can access to art be called a necessity of life or a basic human right?

For the TSA, the blunt legal question of consenting to screening is resolved via "implied consent." A sign informs travelers that by entering the screening area they are consenting to screening; if you don't want to be screened, you have the perfect freedom to stay out, and presumably to find other means of transportation. Of course this is a coercive, agenda-laden version of consent, but it has managed to survive and prevail for a good long while now. Having been in the belly of the beast myself, there is nothing checkpoint screeners can do to me that would in and of itself affect my decision whether or not to fly; but nor do I think, based on this same experience, that there aren't good reasons that a minority of travelers would have to think twice about flying for reasons having nothing to do with criminality. So, here is yet another blunt majoritarian compromise, a little white violation of consent rather than an outright repressive one. Travelers' choices are neither totally free nor totally dictated. A gob of security is paid for with a pinch of liberty. Is there any other realistic option under the circumstances?

The TSA's well-known flaws notwithstanding, their merely symbolic role ("security theater") is actually quite functional in precisely the ways it is intended to be by its architects. To keep people flying, we make flying look as safe as possible while the gory details of actually making it safe are hashed out at glacial pace behind the scenes. The checkpoint is a sort of didactic theater production staged where its target audience literally cannot avoid it; and to be sure, there are few such productions issuing from the institution of theater proper which can claim anywhere near this level of didactic success, as evidenced by the quick recovery of the industry and the ongoing massive demand for their services. Not even the architects of this recovery, however, can dispute that it represents a messy compromise imposed by force majeure rather than by mature legislative deliberation.

At atomic social scale, meanwhile, it is far easier for us to nip such difficulties in the bud, at least where we are aware of the potential for them. If disasters reliably bring out the worst in our institutions, it has nonetheless become pop-axiomatic that they bring out the best in us, and we then wonder why it takes a disaster to reimpose common decency. Every artist thinks they have a message to deliver which is of paramount importance, but we ought to more carefully consider the difference in meta-messaging between the concert hall and the checkpoint. The pitfalls of museumization have been discussed to death, yet museums are just about as consensual as the artistic transaction ever gets. That is one thing we can learn from them even now.

Consensual Art (i)

The question of gaining access to art for those who don't have it is much discussed. This series considers one species of the obverse scenario: those so exposed who don't necessarily want to be.

It is one thing to lament barriers to access from the perspective of the self-centered, self-interested practitioner/specialist and quite another to frame the access question more broadly as a social justice issue. The latter is by far the more socially graceful position, but it strains credulity in a few important ways. Practitioners have the rhetorical advantage of building their case on a specific metier with recogizable markers, whereas extracting the salient features of The Arts broadly often results in language so vague as to be ill-suited to any aim so fraught as social justice. Similarly, there is an inescapable tension between the absolute conception of access to art as a basic human need/right and the concurrent difficulties in defining boundaries and quality quite so absolutely. What does it mean to guarantee access to such an ephemeral resource? What does it mean to assert that all people need something without being able to define what exactly that something is?

The time-honored maneuver here, rhetorically as well as materially, is to escape into firmer boundaries and more objective standards. A unified Arts front can earn broad political currency this way, but only at the expense of reproducing formerly external barriers as internecine meta-politics within the coalition itself, where the staggering diversity of practices inevitably fit unequally into the framework.¹ The Way Things Are becomes ensconced in rubrics and syllabi simply because it is tractable enough to lend itself to the task, whereas The Way Things Might Be has to win acceptance the old-fashioned way in a marketplace of ideas that is overregulated and gerontocratic.

No such abstract ideals as social justice are realized any other way than through particular people and actions, and so in the end art and artists must proactively make good on the lofty rhetoric of access rather than merely clinging to a blind faith in it. Here I want to draw attention to the old saw about "freedom to..." and "freedom from...", to the question of whether a right to do something is also a right not to do it. Can political processes be both compulsory and democratic? Your answer might be different regarding large-scale, top-down processes like federal elections than it is regarding the smaller-scale, bottom-up, day-to-day goings on of the neighborhood or the subway. Impositions which are expensive, fraught, visible, and issuing from centralized authority have a way of sucking up all the discursive air on this point; yet big-city dwellers pass through myriad subtler gradients of latent/potential power every day. We can allow other drivers to merge or we can stubbornly hang them out to dry; we can use headphones on the bus or we can treat the entire ridership to our latest virtual mixtape. This is the Long Tail of decentralized power which in absence of broadly-shared standards of comportment can easily add up to a mosaic of repression and discontent. It is the type of thing that led Lewis Mumford to compare us to lab rats in psychological experiments on overcrowding. Those of us firmly inclined towards city living so as to be undeterred by such alarmism have many good counter-rationalizations at our disposal: the case is overstated; humans are not rats; dispersion, like density, can be maddening; good design can redeem or doom either modality; the rat race can be invigorating in both its best and worst moments. We can thereby problematize the master narrative of Garden Cityism, but we can't deny that there are bound to be moments in every city dweller's life when the walls indeed close in and latent potentials for conflict are actualized in an instant. If this is not quite as serious as living under an authoritarian regime (or in a rat cage), neither is it quite as good as democracy can be; and if artists more so than almost any others must accept this baseline level of social friction as an unavoidable tradeoff for gaining a foothold in our native habitat, then we are also social actors in real-life cities who have a role to play in the habitability of those cities. How our work fits (or doesn't) into this balancing act says more about us than aesthetics or poetics ever could.

I insist on treating the issue of art in public space as an "obverse" of the access issue (Art in Political space, if you will) not because that is the best or only way to approach it but because of this particular connection between democracy and abstention, between centralized and dispersed repression. The right to impose artistic standards and boundaries inheres at the individual level; projected to the institutional level it becomes disenfranchising. And even before the individual judges, s/he must consent to the experience. Art which is less-than-fully consensual in any of these respects is less-than-fully democratic. This is as true of street-level transactions as it is of Ivory Tower ones.

I hope this makes clearer that the differences among The Arts matter as much as do the similarities; that getting more art into public space is not the same as more music, more sculpture, more theater, etc.; that getting "good" art into public space is a task which confounds democratic processes, since democracy requires some bedrock of objectivity on which to build a consensus; and that such grounding in soft-scientific objectivity is deeply at odds with how the artistic ecosystems of free societies sustain themselves. When art enters public space it does so as a byproduct of blunt majoritarian compromise, be that process formal or informal, macro or micro. I see this bluntness as very much at odds with the professed altruism of so many art and artists, and I see potential resolutions of this tension hiding in plain sight.

1. For a prosaic instance of said meta-politicking, see section heading "Defining The Arts" here. For a rather chilling effort at total quanitification, see here. Of course music can come out ahead by virtue of its technical complexity, or it can be summarily dispensed with for its weakness as a vessel for the delivery of narrative. As Marv Albert said, "You fake the call."

December Is Blog Month/Twenty-teens We Hardly Knew Ya/I Have Plenty To Say and Will Get Around To Saying It Eventually/Bandwagon Packer Fans and Other Signs of the Apocalypse

To borrow something a friend said to me recently, things have never been better and never been harder.

Doors have opened for me in California that I never could have anticipated when I moved here. (The one that remains closed was wholly predictable.) I get to work at playing, mostly with musicians who are as good or better than I am. I've been able to graduate from Valley Boy to Gentrifier. After years of uneasy compromise I've been able to return to my roots and ditch my car. I've replaced basketball with Scrabble, to the great benefit of my knees and ankles and who knows what other body parts I might have ruined.

Things couldn't be much better, but they could get much worse at any time. It is not pessimistic to say that, just realistic. There's no meritocracy to be found here, just chaotic systems and revolving doors. Uncertainty and insecurity reign even among very successful people. This mirrors the concurrent inability to establish and agree upon basic facts in the political arena. If it once was hip and new-agey to Live In The Moment, this choice has since become a stifling imposition which precludes setting goals or even knowing what realistic goals would be. Radical empiricism and anomic strain carry the day. I think often of the role that trust plays in behavioral economics and wonder how we are managing to have an economy here at all. I am being conditioned to treat successful people with more suspicion than respect and to accept that reaction in others as I've moved up the food chain.

Things could be worse, but they could also be better. Just in the last six months there have been two appalling train-vehicle collisions along the line that I take to work. A local LA Scrabble player whom no one would suspect of such a thing was accused of cheating and kicked out of the Nationals. The vaunted diversity of Southern California increasingly seems only skin deep. US life expectancy has declined three years in a row. There are rear-guard hipsters and bandwagon Packer fans everywhere. Something is very wrong.

The freelance life may be supremely insecure, but the cycling between frenetic overcommitment and chilly underemployment is ideal for creative artists who are anything less than robotic in their work habits. I understood this in the moment and I understand it even better now. Working at playing has intensified my extra-musical interests, dulled my musical ones, and left less time for both. It has helped me understand why so many doctors and techies seem to have listened to so many more records than I have. When work is scarce it never feels like an imposition; as I write this, meanwhile, I am less confident than ever before that I can run the gauntlet of Blog Month given the slivers of time I'll have to piece together in order to make it happen. Stay tuned for the pretty much meaningless conclusion?

Once a Writer, Twice...??

An older friend who has earned the authority to say so tells me (paraphrasing here) that my writing is tantalizing but unpolished. Given the surfeit of mindless positivity in circulation today, I certainly appreciate the frankness and take no personal offense. I also think it is the proper assessment. In the end, though, I don't anticipate bending towards journalistic accessibility as her critique suggests, or at least not with any particular alacrity.

The task of giving concrete voice to inner thoughts must count as an abiding passion of mine by now, actions speaking loudest of all as the saying would have it. Even so, it is not and never will be an identity; definitely not a personal one, and most likely not a professional one either. For better or worse the tuba seems destined to continue in both roles until further notice. Identity being a far heavier burden than passion, the process of making peace with the externally imposed demands of professional instrumentalism¹ has been long, slow, and often tumultuous. Not too much has changed since my mother first diagnosed her 4 year-old only child as "stubborn," and so it is that the intervening three decades of psychosocial development have seen the formation and refinement of many elaborate rationalizations for this trait's oft-neglected social utility (and a few half-hearted efforts at personal reform). Tuba playing has nonetheless been the site of my most extensive and compulsory mediation with a society which lets no good deed goes unpunished; and so, having thus given over one life-consuming endeavor to such protracted mediation in exchange for an identity, the mere thought of giving over other parts of myself to this miasma is a bridge too far. Given both where this society has been it has been and where it is going, any mediation with it is destined to be an ongoing, dialectical process rather than a cleaner teleological one, heroic in a Promethean sense rather than the Spartan one that I, like most other professional brass players, would much prefer to known for. (At least I have that in common with my colleagues in the brass world. This has not always always been obvious.)

I should add that relocating to a place where I can actually make a living playing my horn has allowed me to further compartmentalize this uncompromising streak, which to say also to consolidate it. In hindsight, it's clear enough that in my twenties I was conditioned by failure on this front. The material payoff for compromise was then so meager as to not be worth the trouble, and I became less and less sure that professional instrumentalism suited me at all even as my commitment to instrumentalism more broadly construed never wavered. Nonetheless, as I type this I have turned down a grand total of two paying tuba gigs simply because I didn't want to endure them, and needless to say I've accepted dozens which I would rather not have. I remain weary of those self-styled musicians-in-the-trenches who would make such amenability into the single criterion of a classically capitalist musical meritocracy; and yet in my gut I am indeed strangely proud of my record in this department even as intellectually I will always look at such pride as irredeemably perverse and have no less trouble than ever conjuring some pretty good abstract arguments and real-life anecdotes alike to support that assessment.

As for other accounts, my lifetime earnings as a composer are not enough to buy a tank of gas, and my earnings as a writer of words are literally zero. If either state of affairs bothered me intensely enough, I would have done more about it; I've certainly been party to enough facile huckstering over the years that appropriating a few tactics here and there wouldn't be all that hard. For now I have no such inclinations. I have long suspected and now truly believe that relative to the competition I have much more to offer in these two areas than I do as a tuba player. In college I used to ponder this question as one of choosing the right career; now I'm thankful that I made the "wrong" choice back then. As long as I can survive as a tuba player, I can listen, study, and write strictly on my own terms, and I'll be at peace with this balance in a way that I never could be were the polarity reversed.

Of course in my capacity as uncompromising, rationalistic grown-up-only-child, I'm not content to stop there: I have often been left with the impression that others need me to compromise on their behalf more than they really care about bringing me along for whatever world-conquering careerist ride they have plotted out. It is invariably a ride which requires, let's say, a band of other sentient human beings, each one spontaneously grabbing a paddle and commencing to row in proper synchrony as if by magic. (This will certainly be the narrative spun later, whether or not it is the least bit true.)

Having thus gone "further," there remains the "deeper:" I sensed in the discussion which prompted this post (which was offline and one-to-one) as well as in many prior mediations something akin to so many canonical art-historical polemics: form as against content; art as against entertainment; writing for oneself as against writing for the audience; and not insignificantly, refined as against unrefined modes of expression. To wit, I decided years ago that my posture here and anywhere else I might publish my "writings" is most definitely not as a writer per se but rather as a thinker presenting thoughts via the least wretched of the many wretched avenues one has for doing so.

I'm just seasoned enough to acknowledge the puerile aspects of this sentiment, and likewise to stand by it unapologetically even so. Scholar, critic, theorist, analyst...these are at least fit to be personal identities, if not in every case professional ones. "Writer" is, besides being tainted with the stench of Hollywood pretension, too vague in one sense and too specific in another. "Prophet" meanwhile is a rather absurd and value-laden term which is used and abused in much the same vein as is "genius," but one which is thus applied quite often to people whose writerly (and musical) achievements I most admire. Rather than indicating privileged communion with an all powerful creator, it could simply mean one who speaks The Word of a given discipline from a place of great knowledge; who mediates with a body of knowledge in service of society, as opposed to the messier, joyless task of mediating with society in service of a body of knowledge as so-called professionals do. If we can ever agree upon less loaded terminology to indicate that distinction, I will happily put it into service.



1. Spell-check/autocorrect flags this word, hence it's worth clarifying that I mean it to encompass both performing and teaching. To omit the latter would implicitly deny the role it has played in sustaining me both financially and, for lack of a better word, spiritually.

The Sneakernet of Everyday Life

A couple of years after college I commenced sporadic production of a half-humorous zine as an outlet for various petty frustrations with the world of music and musicians. The focus was more personal and quotidian than on this blog, which I started around the same time. Blogging being public and more or less permanent, I have always maintained that the more personal the content the more interesting and unique it ought to be. Ditto regarding any imperative towards expression as that word is broadly and colloquially construed across The Arts. Seems to me that any such imperative is necessarily colored by several more general features of the society or social group in question, e.g. the degree of shared experience, conformity to norms, obedience to authority, and so on. In other words, most of us are not quite different enough from each other for the public airing of even the most intimate details to be the least bit interesting to our various constituencies. (And if a public airing is to be deemed necessary on purely therapeutic grounds, then the offending malaise must be a particularly virulent and contagious one indeed; on which point I must thereby beg your indulgence in suspending judgment of this meta-airing until its purpose has become clear.)

In any case, as the blog has skewed speculative, the zine has become an archive of the personal, and this dovetailed with the fact of the latter's strictly private and offline circulation. I have recently resumed production after a long hiatus and am finding it quite useful in exactly this way. The reason, however, for writing at length on all of this now is to relate a very practical use, perhaps even a necessary one, which has recently emerged and which never would have occurred to me the day I brought out the first installment.

Employers are demanding to moderate what their employees say about them online, and not even a jazz tuba player can avoid falling under surveillance. This was ostensibly the case with a certain car opera recently staged in and around LA by a company you probably haven't heard of, and it is ostensibly the case regarding my current employment with an entertainment franchise you’ve most certainly heard of. Neither of the organizations in question will ever be mentioned by name here, not by me at least, and not by you either if you happen to know me well enough to put all of this together and would like me to be able to address any new developments to the already limited extent possible under the circumstances. They will not be mentioned because as a condition of employment both demand authority to moderate online content pertaining to them, and because one is known to devote significant resources to this. (And really, what quantity of resources is not "significant" when you consider the implications of such policies and the time-is-money realities of running a business?)

For what it’s worth, I don’t have to start a limited-run, privately-circulated, dead-tree social commentary franchise with which to digest, explore, archive and (usually) exorcise the vicissitudes of such personal experience: I already have one as an existential matter if not much of a material one. What I didn’t have before was real necessity for such an outlet ("real" in this case meaning "beyond the personal")¹. Thanks to the new thought police, which, like so many other rhetorical constructions of modernist dystopian thought, has coalesced fragmentarily and incrementally rather than all at once, now I do.

For anyone just devoted enough to my personal concerns to be an earnest and comprehensive reader of both publications, it might be useful to think of the zine as a sort of annotated bibliography in support of the more sweeping generalizations I make here about the professional circles I inhabit, and perhaps also as a way of “blogging” on topics and experiences which would be socially ungraceful and/or professionally damaging to address publicly online. I suppose this betrays my rather cynical view of prevailing norms of social and professional comportment, but unfortunately there is almost always something arising from artists' relationships with employers and/or with each other which really ought to be addressed and brought to wider attention, i.e. for the specific purpose of giving the community a chance to look itself in the mirror. Social grace and professional viability are quite flimsy excuses for forgoing such opportunities: first, because together they amount to very little when compared to the potential chilling effect of the new reality; and second, because, as I am attempting to outline here, it is not impossible to have it both ways given the variety of media and social settings presently at our collective disposal. In any case, there won't be much worldly grace or prestige left to preserve if transparency is ritually sacrificed to branding in this arena as it already has been in so many others. Unfortunately the seemingly ideal online platforms which emerged in the 1990s are in the 2010s now equally ideal for surveillance. Hence the ongoing need for a Sneakernet of Everyday Life.


1. Again, is “personal” necessity ever better than oxymoronic vis-a-vis the act of telling others about yourself? And does the therapeutic value of artistic "expression" really hinge on the act of public presentation over and beyond private creation? Even if the answer is simply, "It depends," these two questions are always worth pondering before hitting the Send button. Ask me how I know.

Preliminary/Residual Thoughts on Descaling

(1) When even the most specialized of academic specialists cannot hope to keep up with the deluge of publication in their narrow specialty, the result is a new and distinctive kind of social volatility borne of something like information overpopulation. Research findings would then resist synthesis into social action, operating only in fragments scattered far and wide throughout the social system. Many collective advances would remain mere potentialities whose likelihood of manifesting plummets as the system continues to grow in scale. No matter the gross quantity of raw information such gains in scale might beget, the basic unit of social agency (the individual human being) stays pretty much the same. Ditto the system gain from pooling such units into networks (e.g. research teams, political action committees, musical ensembles) which show diminishing returns at scales proportionate to today's information overload. Even the effect of introducing better information into the system is mitigated by diffusion given such vast scale as the current global village (not to mention its Virtual shadow-world) has attained. The tortu(r)ously slow burn of incremental progress seems pleasurable in comparison to the fracturing and anomie which the present situation promises to engender.

(2) The above assumes that an increase in the gross quantity of overall knowledge production begets a corresponding and proportionate increase in the (smaller) gross quantity of competent and constructive knowledge production; this as opposed to merely spreading ever thinner a fixed quantity of collective intellectual potential. This is a very large assumption which may not be warranted; but if not, then we are left with an older, simpler problem: the haystacks grow while the needles and the metal detectors pretty much stay the same. As for the sentient pieces of throbbing flesh wielding the latter device, one can only hope that their dignity is not too closely cherished.

(3) Perhaps then there is something to be said for periodically turning one's back on the great data diffusion and carving out a little extra time to cherrypick the choicest nuggets from the twilight of pre-computerized thought, e.g. in the same vein as Debord but with a dash more childlike curiosity and a tad less puerile obstinacy. Whatever strictly perspectival shortcomings individual thinkers of the recent past might now be understood to have had, at least the economy of ideas within which they were subsumed was of a more just and optimal scale. Even the choicest of today's intellectual nourishment is grown in depleted soil, meanwhile, and thus perspective has become a problem of abundance rather than one of scarcity. If this is not quite a fatal blow to progress, it just as surely has not been adequately accounted for by progressives who merely consider the ostensible quality of information but not the system-level prospects for making any use of it whatsoever. In any event, it promises to be a very long time indeed before ideas are again permitted to circulate in an optimally-scaled intellectual environment; optimally-scaled, that is, not merely for progress but also for dignity.

(4) A recent 30 second junket on Google produces one intriguing and one utterly demoralizing revelation: (a) the term/concept "descaling" has found at least cursory usage in the heavy economics literature; (b) in absence of companion terms to narrow the field, any such Google search is badly confounded by the far more pressing and widely discussed issue of how to clean a coffeemaker.

First Reflections Occasioned By the Long-Awaited Digital Matriculation of the ECM Catalog

(1) A lot of new stuff suddenly sounds a lot less new.

(2) It is a unique pleasure (not to say an essential one) to encounter severely "dated" music which nonetheless remains compelling.

(3) Only now is it obvious to me that my musically formative years (the late 1990s and early 2000s) had a unique and identifiable sound (the playing, the writing, and yes kids, even the production) which has undoubtedly left its mark. Even ECM's distinctive and consistent house production leaves room for this impression.

Automation and Autonomy

A friend suggests that live musical performance by human beings could become a species of Vintage Aesthetic when seen against the impending advance of computers and computer-brained robots. No doubt this dynamic has already manifested itself here and there vis-a-vis existing technological leviathans (e.g. "canned" music), and no doubt it will eventually take its place in the canon of anti-aesthetic prescriptivisms alongside moral uplift, the literary imperative, political activism, cultural preservation, and pediatric neural calisthenics. All of which is to say that it promises to have the same chilling effect that such historically contingent prescriptions have always had even as it keeps a lucky few human artists gainfully employed.

To take such a sea change and make it generative rather than prescriptive requires a retreat into the absolute. Indeed, I don't think it is a coincidence that as we perceive the general pace of change to have quickened artistic autonomy has become ever less fashionable, i.e. that feelings of anomie or "normlessness" would beget various desperate attempts to contrive new norms. The word "perceive" is important here, for do we not also see a strong correlation between the more-is-more phenomenon and a certain constitutional fixation on change as against stasis? Change-in-the-air is the supreme rationalization for scorched-earth modernism, whose manifestations range from puerile self-importance to the burning of libraries; hence there is always an important balancing role here for the attempt to step outside the parochial concerns of the moment. I would certainly not place the aesthetic sphere at or near the center of such concerns, but nor does banishing it to the compost heap of history do it justice. Everything is aesthetic, much as everything is political.

We must take the Vintage issue seriously, and certainly the larger one of automation/computerization as well, but only on our (and our art forms') own terms. That is, it behooves any contemporary musician to face directly the formal, technical, and aesthetic questions that automation raises, or raises in the negative, as it were. Fruitful cross-pollenation is inevitable, healthy coexistence is not, and prescriptions are always already constraints, no matter how urgent they might seem to be. Indeed, is it not merely by accidents of history that such urgency ebbs and flows? And is that not a powerful argument for artistic autonomy rather than against it?

Against The Literary Imperative

literature/the novel: "a lie that tells the truth"

so...

=pre-industrial infotainment?!
e.g. when the latest trove of freshly leaked government records is not nearly entertaining enough to hold the attention of an audience whose record keeping is not quite so thorough. instead, storytime! ergo the collective appointment of mandarin technocrats to digest the proverbial federalist papers on our collective behalf. ergo the offense taken to such appointees, drawing as they do equal attention to our own deficiencies as to any justly-sounded alarms. down with the mandarins! unless they entertain us! (and unless we may continue to reason anecdotally! especially if we are 'oppressed'!) thus is the political colonized by the aesthetic and the aesthetic colonized by the political; thus are the minds and souls of the people conquered, in their own names, so as to preserve psychic domicile over a dead land mass; thus the suddenly-old saying about 'letting the terrorists win' metamorphoses from talk-radio zinger to supremely useful figure of speech to the master narrative of our time; etc., etc. so no more art for art's sake k? cuz that is a lie that just plain lies. and we won't stand for that any longer.


...perhaps more specifically...

=victorian infotainment?!
i.e. for those tough household spills wherein The Truth in its unadulterated form is simply unspeakable. in its place, a little white lie! just this once! for your own good! hence a privileged position for literature among The Arts, the lesser castes aspiring half-heartedly to do what literature does vis-a-vis Great Big Truths and Little White Lies. all hail literary thought, the bounty paper towel of the left, soaking up spilled grape juice a whole glass at a time while the leading national brand just turns to grapy pudding. don't make grapy pudding, kids! make art!


...but...!

this place of literature in The Arts and in Society can (and should) (and must) be deconstructed in the best sense of that term. perhaps owing to the impenetrable language in which this has been undertaken by academics, word seems not to have reached the (wo)man on the street that sometimes (or, uh...perhaps most of the time??) a lie is just a lie. less excusable yet is the effect of such "privileged positions" on the internal political dynamics of the professional art world: as in the wider political and social world, a subclass of Limousine Liberals emerges, an art-ontological Bourgeoisie who not only wield the greatest explanatory power but know it too. hence more is more: more narrative, more amplitude, more ethnicity, more mixing of media, more shouting over each other just to be heard; and yes, ever more consequentialist mendacity in purported service of deferred truthtelling. whew!! damned if you don't have to deconstruct just to get through the day!! damned if a profusion of Little White Lies isn't the most effective concealment of one Great Big One!!


hence the guiding rejoinder to the given truism:

"If truth-telling is so important, why not just do that? What are all these indirect paths we keep hearing about and what is lost/gained by way of each one?"

the aestheticist 99% demand answers.


...to wit...

=an aesthetically nihilist (or at least agnostic) social imperative for literature (and its imitators, all the other Arts)

that is, an imperative to address itself (themselves) to social matters which demand corrective Truth-Telling on account of a prevailing Lie which is presently doing more harm than good. (this is nothing like the Little White Lies that literature tells! those we are proud of!)

but of course there are *other* socially valuable functions for art and literature, and there are *other* aesthetics which have prospective value/potential but which necessarily are at odds with this narrow social imperative. further, wider social imperatives necessarily beget value systems, and any value system grown up around such concerns is bound to reinscribe itself on the narrow internal value systems of artists and artmaking. this, then, becomes the opposite of the liberationist gesture which activist artists would like to posit for it; rather, it clutters the social world of critical and popular reception with arbitrary proscriptions and inhibitions, above all a deep distrust of the ineffable which is anathema to so many extraliterary artistic traditions in so many ways.

Career Designs: Relative and Absolute Privilege, and the Even Keel

I seldom go long between social encounters with laypeople bent on idealizing my career choice on my behalf, the customary remark being something about "following your passion." Needless to say that my peers and colleagues are rarely quite so saccharine when discussing music as a vocation. The combined effect of these contradictory expressions can be disorienting, though to be sure they both betoken a familiar grass-is-always-greener outlook as well as the facility with which we can put either face on things, not just in our various interfaces with outsiders but also in our own minds. That is, we may reason relatively, as the layperson tends to (think Symphony Tubist vs. Ice Road Trucker), or we may present our real situation (statistically speaking, probably not anything like Symphony Tubist nor anything approaching it) in absolute terms.

There are good reasons for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to keep sight of the relative sense, if not merely to avoid saying something that they might later regret. But if The Arts so broadly construed are thought to have even the slightest objective social utility, then there is, dare I say, a reciprocal imperative on the extra-artistic world to keep sight of the absolute sense in which the vast majority of artists one can expect to meet face-to-face are dealing with much the same mixed bag of joys and sorrows that any committed professional does.

For me, music certainly has proven a potent avenue through which to learn that sources of great joy are uniquely suited to pile on great heaps of sorrow, and are typically also quite happy to oblige. This is a Life Lesson with implications beyond the narrow concerns of any one profession, yet I doubt that someone who has never truly devoted themselves to a calling can meaningfully understand it, particularly because it is a profoundly dualistic statement whose reverse does not hold: sources of great sorrow, as a group, are not particularly likely to also be sources of great joy. There is something in there about the wretchedness of the human condition, I think, but that is another topic for another time. More to the point is that the irreversibility of this fundamental vocational principle is what causes so much of our dialogue with outsiders to remain rhetorically anchored in the notion of relative privilege. To posit this relative privilege as a defining characteristic of artisthood, however, is to commit three related errors: first, by obfuscating its non-exclusivity to The Arts; second, by defining The Arts via what they are not; and third, by failing to account for the fact that this roller-coaster ride of privilege and obligation is quite a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, this latter reality is why so many of us academy-trained creatives were at some point told by an institutionally-sanctioned mentor not to get "too high or too low." If we were in fact told this, then we were, for one thing, fortunate to have fished out of the academic miasma at least one person who knew what they were talking about, and this in spite of their own relatively privileged position in the selfsame anti-meritocracy which we ourselves ostensibly aspired to enter. This much we may even have realized at the time. Less apparent back then, in all likelihood (and ever more so with "privilege" in seemingly perpetual ascendance as a watchword) was that we were being asked to withdraw from the relative into the absolute, to set our own standards for success rather than triangulating based on the messages being sent to us by the external social world; all of which is to say that every degree of failure to meet these internally-generated standards which is occasioned by an external factor makes it that much harder to swallow the more strident critiques of bourgeois art currently in circulation.

I am certain that my musical mentors were also correct in advising that "You get out of it what you out into it," and I expect that this is a less controversial statement than the one immediately preceding it. Precisely because this is such good advice in all areas of human endeavor, non-initiates of virtually any stripe getting a rare window in on the artist's habitus are bound to fixate on what appears to them as a conspicuous lack of either putting-in or getting-out. In fact you can't even admit to other musicians that you're not available for any reason other than that you already have a gig, and especially not if the real reason is that you've blocked out time to get out of public view and hone your craft. Suffice it to say that I speak from experience on this point. It is a phenomenon which, again, speaks to many larger human concerns which ought not be dredged up in too much detail right this minute. Even if you're not a professional artist, you can probably relate an analogous situation that you've faced, and if so, then perhaps you've also caught yourself thinking that privilege is a more complicated concept than the lowest common denominator of armchair theorists is capable of giving it credit for.

---
Time has a strong existential claim to being the most valuable personal resource, but I for one, millenial that I am, find focus per se to be the scarcest of all, which conventionally and practically speaking makes it the most valuable too. Hence the focus here on what I am calling the even keel. The advent of leisure time has an unimpeachable place in the study of history whereas the subset focused time remains incomprehensibly decadent even to some career academics. Hence the external social pressure to self-flagellate at the altars of myriad political interest groups is thrown into higher relief by the question of focus than by that of time even though the latter speaks to more basic political issues.

For the artist, this pressure creates palpable tension with an outside world which in spite of its boggling diversity of political orientation and worldview is seemingly quite unified in its intent to define art and artists relatively rather than absolutely. I have to think that anyone reading this can readily conjure the vastly different versions of infinite regress that, say, Bernie People and Trump People can be counted upon to summon in this respect. The region along this spectrum where inhabitants risk being accused of harboring an unseemly "relativism" is rather small and remote, yet there is, at the minimum, relativistic thinking in evidence both in the soft-Marxist critique of bourgeois art and in the contemporary red-state contempt for Artsy-Fartsies as against red-blooded, mammal-eating Americans. Both rhetorics cherrypick small differences and explode them into full-blown deviance. There is as well a characteristic distrust of the abstract and the unmeasurable which is a defining feature of the era of sclerotic institutions. (Hey arts non-profit people, can you say "measurable outcomes?") I would love to convince myself that these are essential mechanisms of social accountability upon which artists can profitably draw both in the content of their work and the living of their lives. What I actually stand convinced of is that this relativistic streak is merely a low-stakes commission of several deadly sins with which we are all familiar no matter what we do for a living.

That is to say that those who would accuse me of "following my passion" seem to be saying as much about themselves as about me. If they were merely expressing support or admiration, I suspect the wording of choice would be rather different; and of course if they knew what I actually have done for money over the years and how much of it has had nothing to do with music, they might have bitten their tongues altogether. It is just as easy for me to lapse into idealizing the many other fields I could have gone into; but alas, whereas enabling a select group of artists to live as solid middle-class earners has been an enduring project of the actual institutional bourgeoisie, the rise of the gig economy perversely relegates a great many others to live as only artists used to. Here as always, then, the term "professional" is used literally, reluctantly, and advisedly. Nihilism is the ultimate even keel, especially as human suffering becomes ever more visible; hence no "professional" milieu will ever lack for nihilists. As in most every other respect, The Arts are neither immune from nor especially exemplary of this reality.

On The Seasons Needing Me More Than I Need Them

If Southern California is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition for newcomers, it is hated-until-proven-loved for those who have never actually been here, the latter condition being both cause and effect of some curious and uniquely wayward folk wisdom. To wit, both immediately before and immediately after my relocation, a few ostensibly thoughtful Minneapolitans raised the possibility that I would “miss the seasons” living in a place which, as far as they were concerned, didn't have any.

Given that the only Minnesota season anyone could miss is the fall (and that Minnesotans spend pretty much the entire year missing it), I was not particularly strongly inclined to heed this warning. In fact it was unclear whether it was indeed to be parsed as a warning or just a theory; ergo, I parse it as a projection. The implication that seasons give requisite shape to life and that the quadripartite structure peculiar to the North is somehow inherently salutary in this way certainly betokens a degree of exceptionalism worthy of a much larger city.

Since moving to California I have given thought to the season question every year around this time; that is, when the weather changes. If we are lucky enough to be rained on in any significant amount over the next several months, that will likely cue more of the same thoughts. And certainly whenever the next bonafide heat wave strikes, exaggerating as it surely will the endtimes vibe one often detects here during times of duress and sometimes just because, I will surely be given yet further occasion to ponder the contour that these changes in the weather do give to my year, subtle as that contour is to the point being undetectable by the freshly uprooted Midwestern soma. Because I am imperfect and petty, I will probably also have a private chuckle vis-a-vis the combination of clouded judgment and reliance on outsider mythmaking through which projected jealousy is most facilely projected. But above all, I will most definitely give thanks for the way a subtler seasonal profile works it’s magic without being so damn disruptive.

In cold-weather locales of the post-Christian world, the disruptions tend to come in waves this time of year, so much so that their long-awaited clearing up itself becomes disruptive whenever it finally takes hold. As perhaps you could have guessed from the tone here, this is a roller coaster ride that I never tolerated well or willingly. The just-noticeable contours of Southern California living are far better suited to the purposes of those of us who prefer (nay, require) the open-endedness of slow, steady, incremental, but always-ongoing progress in our life’s work. Think gentle undulations rather than jagged, disorienting tremors, the climatological analog of the work profile you've never stopped thanking your music teachers for instilling in you.

Among those slower-idling Midwesterners who have ventured far enough afield to speak with some empirical authority, terms like "intense," "incessant," and "rat race" are customarily applied to the bigger fish bowls. Somehow I have still never been to New York City and hence know it only the way so many outsiders know Los Angeles, but through many friends' anecdotes communicated to me over the years I have indeed formed an image of it not only as the music capital of the world but also as the world capital of disruptions. As the folk wisdom would have it, some people thrive in such an environment and others wilt, and this is part and parcel of that famous New York exceptionalism that both Midwesterners and Californians know well whether or not they've visited: The City as crucible. Of course New York also has both its cold weather and its holidays, and more (in)famous conflagrations of the two than most anywhere else, but the master narrative I've been lead to construct would simply fold those more parochial concerns into one giant disruption, the proverbial jackhammer at 3am that I might literally have heard about a dozen times at this point.

A hundred years ago Southern California was declared "enervating" by faster-idling newcomers from the east. Out here, that which is incessant is thought to have quite the opposite effect of an early morning construction crew: sunshine, warmth, beaches, scantily clad young things, and so on, a panoply of luxuries thought perfectly designed to numb even the most ambitious among us into complacency. Hence a former colleague of my father's is said to have once turned down a job offer from an institution in San Diego on the grounds that he would never get anything done there. One can only hope, for his sake, that this gentleman was speaking from a place of great self-knowledge and not from the same place of ignorance that so many other outsiders do. For my part I must confess skepticism that the particular diversions San Diego of all places offers up could keep someone who is just that committed to scholarship entertained for more than a day or two. In any case, that is about the longest I ever need to be entertained before going back down the rabbit hole; hence all such questions of how to take a vacation when you already live in a vacation spot, of the ongoing temptation of such amenities on a day-to-day basis, all those questions are moot to me. More importantly, the longer, more comprehensive interruptions occasioned by Seasonal Affective Disorder, Spring Fever, and the like are no longer acceptable to me simply as the cost of doing business.

I for one have found Los Angeles to provide a healthy balance of ass-kicking mishaps and creature comforts. It periodically reminds you that you're alive while actually permitting you to enjoy it on occasion. If there is indeed some hard-wired need for seasonal contour, I have to think that we acclimate to the scale of change just as we acclimate to more obvious swings in temperature. Taken together, those two things solve the imagined problem quite parsimoniously indeed.