During my reading of Lessig’s Remix (a fantastic read), I thought it would be nice to take a moment about an interesting little musical duo called The Books.  They’ve recorded several albums that typically combine electronically-manipulated guitar, cello/violin, and bass with obscure, quirky “found sound”.  My guess is that no one’s getting on their case about the sound they use; I think most of it comes from such obscure sources (academic lectures, home videos, random street recordings) that the originators of the recordings probably don’t have any idea that their audio is being used; nor would they care if they did know.  So this doesn’t exactly pertain to Lessig’s discussion of copyright law, but I find their music fascinating for they way they create a touching semblance of “real life” from collages of bizarre, scattershot audio.  Sometimes these bits are funny and a little bit shocking, as in the case of the clip that begins their song “Motherless Bastard”.  This byte was allegedly captured accidentally by one of the musicians as he was trying to record ambient sounds of crowds and water at an aquarium.  What he got instead was this exchange (not staged) between a father and his child (gender unclear):

Child: Mommy, Daddy!  Mommy, Daddy.  Mom? Dad?

Father: You have no mother or father.

Child: Yeah I do!

Father: No, they left.  They went somewhere else.

Child: No, they didn’t, you are!  I do!

Father [seems to be on the verge of laughter]: I’m not, I don’t know you.

Child [downtrodden]: Dad…

Father: Don’t touch me, don’t call me that in public. [end of clip; music begins]

While this is certainly not normal fatherly behavior, and you could look at it as incredibly cruel, the sense I get is of an exasperated father acting a bit bizarre after a long day.  But regardless, I get this feeling from knowing that it’s just something that happened, recorded completely accidentally, and the worked into the fabric of this album (called Thought for Food, by the way.  Their second release is called The Lemon of Pink).

I think the feeling I get from these bits of found content, a feeling that is hard to pin down but certainly strong, is best captured when watching these two fantastic videos for their songs “Take Time” and “Classy Penguin”.  They are also composed entirely (or almost) of found footage.  “Classy Penguin” consists mostly of family home videos of kids at various stages of childhood, and towards the end they grow so brief and abstract (a blurry shot of icicles hanging off the roof; a closeup of a microwave’s LCD clock) that on their own, they would be meaningless.  But woven into this tapestry of random snippets from the lives of hundreds of families, they take on an astounding poignancy and truth–they even feel as if they could have come right out of my own childhood.  Do watch the videos, linked below:

–“Take Time”

–“Classy Penguin”

After publishing that last post, I realized that I’ve left this track, which I originally posted as a test during class, on my blog for a while.  At first I meant to delete it, but then Hunter commented on it, so I thought, what the hey, it’s fine where it is.  But the crazy (prophetic?) thing is that it’s by DJ Shadow, from his album Endtroducing, which received a lot of attention when it was released (in 1994, I believe) for being constructed ENTIRELY OF SAMPLES!  It’s also just really, really good, but now that it’s very much on topic, I suggest you give it a listen and see what you think.

I’m brimming with things to say after reading Jonathan Lethem’s engrossing article on the long history of “plagarism” in art; the problem is deciding how to concisely say what I want to say.  (And brevity is not my strong suit, if you all haven’t noticed.) I think what Lethem has done successfully here is transport us, for a moment, beyond our “THIS IS THE AGE OF CONVERGENCE” mania to show us that what we face today is merely a new (if profound) iteration of the issues in the lifetime of this thing we call “intellectual property”.  In taking this widescreen view of the topic, he’s bridged a lot of ideas that had existed separately in my mind, and reminded me of the importance of the issue by showing that it applies to many more artists than, say, Girl Talk.  As in, this idea of “collage” or “pastiche” or “co-optation” or “plagarism” or “influence” or whatever you want to call it–this is an issue of vital importance for any artist.

But while keeping an eye on the universal, Lethem manages to speak very insightfully about the new tangles that arose with Modernism in the 20th century and, later, with our current digital age.  Of modernism and postmodernism, he says, “the notes [Eliot] so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?”  I could quote his little bits of wisdom all day, but what really resonates with me is that he expresses his feelings about our current copyright system (”Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted.”), but does so in a very even handed way, making sure not to stray towards the sort of anarchistic/idealistic “everything free, for everybody!” talk that often surfaces in this discussion.

Personally, I can be susceptible to that sort of talk, probably because I’m constantly looking for a way to justify my illegal media-consumption habits.  So when an artist I like makes some sort of “fuck the man! download our music for free” statement, I eat that right up, even if that means ignoring statements to the contrary by other artists that I like.  There are countless examples of this that I could talk about, but I’ll keep it brief.  The story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve, and the controversy with the legal arm of The Rolling Stones, Inc. surrounding that song is quite interesting, and can be read in brief on the wikipedia page for the song.

But perhaps the most widely-discussed case in recent memory is Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-want” digital self-release of their most recent album, In Rainbows.  The first wave of response was “yeah, screw the record companies, radiohead is leading the charge into the future of music distribution!”  Then the backlash: the vast majority of musical groups/artists can not make this model sustainable, and it was actually harmful for Radiohead to set this as the new, “ethical” way to distribute music.  This was probably not Radiohead’s intent–the reaction to their choice merely created this stigma.  Whether or not they went on record stating this, I do not know, but being the thoughtful, honest, all-around good guys that they are, I’m guessing they weren’t trying to put other artists in a dangerous position.

But I guess I’ll cap this off for now…I’m sure I’ll blog on this topic more in the next few days, because there really is quite a bit to talk about.  I’ll leave you with one of Lethem’s closing paragraphs which I particularly liked:

“Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.”

**So far, the key theme in this class seems to be that there’s WAY more gray area than you might think in all areas of media studies, if you take the time to consider all sides of an issue.  It can get overwhelming at times (how can I ever really understand any of these media if they’re all so friggin complicated?!?), but my eyes are open, and I’m just taking in as much as I can.

I thought that video was quite charming…and I’m glad he took the time to break down what would actually happen if he replaced himself with a cute girl.  I had those suspicions myself, even after my relatively limited experiences w/ CR these past few weeks (which have mostly occurred on weekend nights when my friend who discovers/enjoys things like Chat Roulette is around).

I’m not really sure how I feel about Chat Roulette at this point; all I have to go on is a strong feeling in my gut that says “NO”.  This is the instinctual aversion I have to Chat Roulette whenever it is flooding those myriad leering faces into the room for split-seconds at a time.  Perhaps I would feel differently if I saw any practical/productive use for the program.  But I don’t, and so I would hesitate to call it a “media tool”.  The maker of that video makes some cutesy point that Chat Roulette brings us all around the world in a matter of seconds, but it doesn’t, really; it brings us for a brief second into many bland, dimly-let rooms and gives us a momentary glimpse of some blurry face that we will never see again.  So in the end, I think it’s a fun thrill, but I assume it’s going to fade as quickly as it appeared.

If one were to examine my blog/twitter activity over the last, say, 24 hours, one would notice that all of it occured in the last, say, half an hour (except for one tweet of the amazing new OK Go video).  This is partially because I’ve been pretty busy all day and haven’t been near my computer.  But there’s something else going on…I’ve had time to check my email and my facebook and a couple of other sites at least once over the course of the day.  I had to hear about that music video somehow!

What’s going on here is that my time spent filling our online requirements for this class is still just that…time explicitly set aside for doing what I feel I should rightfully do to feel like I’m adequately participating in this class.  It’s set apart from other activities just like reading an article or writing a short essay is–and I don’t think is how this aspect of our class should work.  I was hoping that tweeting, blogging, and commenting would become part of my daily rhythm, and especially that my ideas for blog posts would flow rapidly and possess an casual air that my current attitude in writing this post certainly lacks.

But I don’t think this is completely my fault, nor can it be blamed on any individual in the class.  I think the…blooming, if you will, of our blog community into somewhere that we flock to and check up on regularly would be an organic process that’s a bit hard to explain.  Shirky discusses, early in his book, the widely-acknowledged phenomenon that group behaviors are complex and cannot be explained as the sum of the behaviors of many individuals.  And I’m trying to find some explanation in Shirky why blogging still feels (to all nine of us, I think it’s safe to assume) like an obligation (blogligation?).  I mean, it is an obligation.  But still.  I have this vision of a class blog filled with all sorts of impassioned conversation; I think I remember Jason mentioning that the Wire class’ blog came the closest to this, because the Wire is so %&*~@($ing good that it inspires that kind of passion.  In our little blogborhood (ugh…though maybe a better term for our little community), I’ve been trying to comment on people’s posts, but it feels like a bit of a fruitless task, and I feel like I’ve been dragging my feet every time because: 1. there is little chance of that comment inspiring further discussion, and 2. my posts have been commented on twice, both times by prof. Mittell.

I think Shirky’s “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production” chapter–which mostly focuses on Wikipedia and how it functions quite differently from a traditional, capitalist and/or hierarchical organization–holds maybe the closest thing to an answer.  And I think it has something to do with the way people contributing to any given website are a small percentage of those even visiting that site, and that group is in turn a tiny fraction of all web traffic, and they go where they go on the web because those are places catering to their very specific interests.  Shirky mentions the fact that in order to voluntarily make time for a new activity, one must find that new activity more interesting or fulfilling than something else that already occupies a portion of their waking hours.  And media studies interests me quite a bit, so I’ve tried to absorb information on the topic in the past, but I didn’t, say, visit any blogs focused explicitly on media criticism.  So perhaps, as a group, we simply all haven’t made that shift in priorities that would allow our blogmunity (blogdom? blogitory?) to truly flourish.  It’s not something you can force……but I think we’re getting incrementally better at it.

So, I guess the best way to close (if you’ve read this whole thing, or at least skipped to the last paragraph) would be to say, please comment!  Let’s have our first real online conversation right here!  Tell me if you think I’m talking out of my ass, if you think you’ve thought of a better tie to Shirky than I have, or if you have an idea for some way to more thoroughly blend, right here in our blogship (these get worse and worse…), the personal/fun with the academic.

I intend to keep looking around for entertaining new podcasts to look at as models as we move into our next project, but this week, I took our prompt as an excuse to look into a podcast I’ve been meaning to check out for a while: “The Hater”, produced by AV Club contributor Amelie Gilette and posted on the AV Club website. The Hater also consists of a blog fed through avclub.com, and it’s quite hilarious; in the snarky world of AV Club’s culture reporting, Gilette seems to be the snarkiest of all.

This certainly extended to her podcast, which were almost too snarky for my taste.  Each week, she invites a guest (usually another AV/Onion staffer) and they basically shit on celebrities and silly symptoms of commercialism for 15 minutes.  It’s quite funny, but it doesn’t amount to much…it’s not really so different from conversations I might have with my friends, except these people are very practiced at having these sorts of conversations and are therefore extra good at making fun of silly things that come out of Hollywood.  Nevertheless, it was a pleasant diversion, with a lot of lines that got me LOLING, so to speak (e.g. Amelie on the Comedy Central roast of Joan Rivers: “Basically every joke was a variation on one of three themes: 1. Joan Rivers is old.  2. Her vagina: also old.  3. She has had lots of surgery that makes her crazy in the face.”)  Quite funny, but I think I’ll post about a more substantive podcast in the future.

I think that last post is a bit skimpy, so I wanted to talk a bit about the culture-related websites that I do follow, as well as something about one of those websites that appeared semi-formed in my mind a while ago, and which I think I would do well to write down.

I read Pitchfork Media and The A.V. Club (the not-fake culture branch of The Onion) pretty regularly, and another site called PopMatters with semi-regularity.  They are not blogs.  I guess one would call them “Internet publications”: they combine some blog-ish, feature type writing with lots of reviews and news updates (as well as podcasts for A.V. Club and a variety of video content on Pitchfork).  I enjoy the A.V. Club’s snarky approach to things (their coverage, for instance, of the just-when-you-thought-it-could-get-no-worsening of Heroes has been consistently hilarious).  And PopMatters just generates a ridiculous amount of writing, due to its more open submission policy; this leads to a greater range in the quality of the writing, but it also has sort of a nice democratic feel and it often offers a different perspective on things.

This brings me to Pitchfork.  I am tired of feeling ashamed when I say that I read Pitchfork, or make a reference to one of their pieces in conversation.  So I want to talk about that a little bit, and lay down my theory.  Pitchfork is often criticized on several counts.  One of these is that their reviews often focus too much on the personal experiences of the reviewer (which I view as creative license and not necessarily a bad thing), or are just generally…unobjective, or bitchy or obnoxious or something.  I think this was often true in their earlier days (as with this shameful review of Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides or their choice to embed a video of a monkey peeing in its mouth rather than review Jet’s Shine On).  But I think the publication has matured a great deal, especially with their reformatting of the website and the launching of pitchfork.tv, which I think is just the bee’s knees.  Some very strong features and reviews often come out of the site now, and despite the inherent problems with our criticism industry’s obsession with lists, I find their list of, say, the 500 Best Songs of the Decade about as good as one of those lists can be.  Furthermore, I find their news postings extremely useful for keeping up with tour/release announcements for the majority of the bands I like, and that sort of thing.

Another qualm people have about Pitchfork is that they purport to be the end-all-be-all tastemakers of what music currently being recorded is “good” and “important”.  I don’t think this is true; or, at least, I don’t think it’s any more true for Pitchfork than for ANY OTHER criticism-producing entity, ever.  They post a review and that is the opinion of that one critic, or occasionally a group of critics (as with the lists), take it or leave it.  And here’s what I think happens next.

In my opinion, Pitchfork’s review for a given album more often resonates with me as insightful and on-point than any other publication that I read, and while this has in part to do with my personal tastes, I think it’s also because Pitchfork is just a good publication (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stone, which often feels like many of the reviews are written with some agenda other than pure criticism in mind–probably trying to sell magazines in a dying print market, a problem that does not hinder Pitchfork).  Then, because Pitchfork very often makes a number of good points about an album, people who are susceptible to being molded by criticism (a group that sometimes includes me, though less and less as time goes on) say “Look!  Pitchfork must be right all the time!  They are the definitive account of independent music today.”  This creates a backlash in which a whole other group of people say “Pitchfork is purporting the be the definitive account of independent music today”; but I think their core ideology is hardly different from any other major publication in the history of pop music.  Then you have a lot of people who are just upset because Pitchfork wasn’t very nice to poor widdle Coldplay or Kings of Leon, who apparently need mounds of glowing praise in addition to selling assloads upon assloads of records.  In the end, this whole complicated stigma arises in which Pitchfork is viewed as snobbish or elitist (which I think is one of the worst words EVER and a major problem in politics and news media, as well–that’s certainly fodder for a future post), and I, a loyal reader, become a snob by association.

*(More possible future blog fodder: my status as an alleged “culture snob”.  I thought maybe this would stop being a bad thing in college, but apparently it is still Not Okay.  I like to think I’m just honest about my opinion, and I don’t know why it has to taint someone else’s experience of, say, Lady Gaga, when I point out some of the things about her that I think are really silly.  For the record, I think Gaga has many redeeming or at least interesting qualities, and I just want to continue that discussion of her pros and cons somewhere outside of the internet/my small circle of friends who understand where I’m coming from.)

Anyway, I just wanted to take this chance to lay out my Big Theory of Pitchfork, and it seemed sort of appropriate and class related, so I hope it makes sense.  Please comment!

Since there’s no blog I really consistently keep up with, I’ve been rooting around the nets for one the past few days.  The Tumblr blog of cultural critic Nitsuh Abebe, called “a grammar”, definitely leans towards the “meta” side of things, so Abebe often ends up discussing a lot of the same thematic material as our class, with much writing on the nature of media and on criticism itself.  (I just haven’t been sure whether this is the type of blog I should be looking at–one that falls under the same “meta” umbrella as our class, or one that I can study as an example of a “normal” blog…um.)

In any case, I’ve really enjoyed his writing on Vampire Weekend and the incestuous, backlash-feedback cycle of criticism surrounding that remarkably polarizing band (as far as I’m concerned, they’re just a band that makes some damn good pop songs, and I don’t really give a shit that they wear madras onstage and sing about oxford commas).  Here is the link to all his posts tagged w/ Vampire Weekend.  Mostly, Abebe discusses the rampant bandying-about of racial/ethnic/class signifiers that has occurred in much of the criticism of that band (i.e. they are commonly called out for their “WASPiness”, despite the fact that frontman Ezra Koenig is Jewish and co-songwriter Rostam Batmanglij is Persian).  I quite enjoy his writing, enough so that I hope to continue to read his blog, and maybe then I’ll have a better idea of how to describe it in the context of our class.  At this point, the main thing I notice about its grammar/form is what I mentioned before: as a decidedly “meta” blog, a great many of the posts are based around some pre-existing piece of culture-related writing, building on that web of intertextuality that characterizes the blogosphere.

(*also: doesn’t it speak to the current state of things that, for some reason, I already feel kind of lame and outdated using the word “blogosphere”?  I cringed a little bit, typing it in.  Strange.)

I’m tempted to say that my relationship with technology has always been, to some degree, conflicted.  Perhaps it’s my upbringing–my parent’s are no luddites, but they certainly possess that former-flower-child distrust of attempts by ______ to “control” us, or at least somehow tie us down with new media (though McLuhan would credit television itself as the source of this attitude…curious).  I distinctly remember a period of perhaps a year, maybe more, in my early childhood, when my parents stopped paying for television, informing us that it was simply “broken” (and our set had no rabbit ears, so no freebies either), and I remember yearning for Sesame Street something fierce during this period.  And my father was a big get for the cell phone industry when he finally bought a phone after resisting for years, though he still feigns total ignorance when it comes to ridiculously simple operations like entering contacts or, say, answering a call.

So while I don’t have a hard time adopting, and even embracing, new technologies, I still have some level of skepticism or contrarianism seemingly hardwired into my brain (e.g.: maybe this isn’t the best example, but when I first bought an mp3 player, I made sure not to buy an iPod, and the two mp3 players I have owned have both been the Creative brand).  And from this half-hearted attempt to be discerning springs my total lack of interest in owning a smart phone, or the distaste for Twitter which I expressed in class…but I’m sure I’ll be something of a convert to the potential powers of Twitter by the end of the semester, and I’ll be preaching those wonders to my parents the next time I go home.

Most recently, my inner conflictedness has manifested in my desire for my life not to be shackled to my laptop, which I mentioned in class.  I was especially frustrated during this past break, which I spent at home, and found myself having to turn to my computer to accomplish any of the things I wanted to: doing taxes, earning credit for an internship, searching for future internships, writing a review of a new album, working on an electronic music piece, skyping with friends abroad, etc.  Perhaps it was the signs of age my computer started to exhibit: several keys stick, the battery is nearing the end of its days, there is a loose connection that causes the monitor to flicker occasionally, my audio jack has seen better days, and the fan sometimes wheezes like a lifetime smoker.  Perhaps these kinks implicitly led me to comprehend this machine’s fallibility, its imperfection, its mortality.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to do so much from my laptop, but it’s just a friggin machine, and I felt a little weary of it being the brain center for my life.

But now this class, paperless as it is, is tethering me to my computer for nearly every one of its components.  It’s not that I resent having to use my computer for some aspects of a class, but our syllabus is online, our readings are online, our blogs are (obviously) online, and my notes will probably be on my computer, just to keep things centralized.  There will be little proof of my having taken this class that is non-digital.  When I was filling out my college applications, the option to apply electronically for a reduced fee was being introduced, but I needed to be able to lay out all my application materials in front of me in order to properly think about my applications in a macro way.  Similarly, I am wholly uninterested in the advent of Kindle-type technologies.

Obviously, no physical format is indestructible, and that is a drawback (I rented Three Kings over break but the DVD was hopelessly scratched at some places–and don’t even get me started on those eminently fragile things known as “CDs” and their nefarious plastic jewel cases).  Digital formats certainly have many drawbacks as well, though.  But I suppose, at least when it comes to this class, my laptop and I are hardily stuck together again, so I’d better get used to it.

I’m tempted to say that my relationship with technology has always been, to some degree, conflicted.  Perhaps it’s my upbringing–my parent’s are no luddites, but they certainly possess that former-flower-child distrust of attempts by ______ to “control” us, or at least somehow tie us down with new media (though McLuhan would credit television itself as the source of this attitude…curious).  I distinctly remember a period of perhaps a year, maybe more, in my early childhood, when my parents stopped paying for television, informing us that it was simply “broken” (and our set had no rabbit ears, so no freebies either), and I remember yearning for Sesame Street something fierce during this period.  And my father was a big get for the cell phone industry when he finally bought a phone after resisting for years, though he still feigns total ignorance when it comes to ridiculously simple operations like entering contacts or, say, answering a call.

So while I don’t have a hard time adopting, and even embracing, new technologies, I still have some level of skepticism or contrarianism seemingly hardwired into my brain (e.g.: maybe this isn’t the best example, but when I first bought an mp3 player, I made sure not to buy an iPod, and the two mp3 players I have owned have both been the Creative brand).  And from this half-hearted attempt to be discerning springs my total lack of interest in owning a smart phone, or the distaste for Twitter which I expressed in class…but I’m sure I’ll be something of a convert to the potential powers of Twitter by the end of the semester, and I’ll be preaching those wonders to my parents the next time I go home.

Most recently, my inner conflictedness has manifested in my desire for my life not to be shackled to my laptop, which I mentioned in class.  I was especially frustrated during this past break, which I spent at home, and found myself having to turn to my computer to accomplish any of the things I wanted to: doing taxes, earning credit for an internship, searching for future internships, writing a review of a new album, working on an electronic music piece, skyping with friends abroad, etc.  Perhaps it was the signs of age my computer started to exhibit: several keys stick, the battery is nearing the end of its days, there is a loose connection that causes the monitor to flicker occasionally, my audio jack has seen better days, and the fan sometimes wheezes like a lifetime smoker.  Perhaps these kinks implicitly led me to comprehend this machine’s fallibility, its imperfection, its mortality.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to do so much from my laptop, but it’s just a friggin machine, and I felt a little weary of it being the brain center for my life.

But now this class, paperless as it is, is tethering me to my computer for nearly every one of its components.  It’s not that I resent having to use my computer for some aspects of a class, but our syllabus is online, our readings are online, our blogs are (obviously) online, and my notes will probably be on my computer, just to keep things centralized.  There will be little proof of my having taken this class that is non-digital.  When I was filling out my college applications, the option to apply electronically for a reduced fee was being introduced, but I needed to be able to lay out all my application materials in front of me in order to properly think about my applications in a macro way.  Similarly, I am wholly uninterested in the advent of Kindle-type technologies.

Obviously, no physical format is indestructible, and that is a drawback (I rented Three Kings over break but the DVD was hopelessly scratched at some places–and don’t even get me started on those eminently fragile things known as “CDs” and their nefarious plastic jewel cases).  Digital formats certainly have many drawbacks as well, though.  But I suppose, at least when it comes to this class, my laptop and I are hardily stuck together again, so I’d better get used to it.

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