resoundingly!
Being heard is thankfully not the same thing as being seen.
— Paul Gilroy
Archive for the ‘Aural Culture’ Category
#441 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Monday, February 28th, 2011#317 – My Baby Don’t Care
Monday, June 8th, 2009when “i don’t care” is caring deeply: tom stoppard’s rock ‘n’ roll & the sixties.
If the genre of rock ‘n’ roll proposed that pop music could be theater, then Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll proposes that theater could be rock ‘n’ roll. At least in Charles Newell’s staging at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago this was the case. Featuring rows of stacked amplifier speakers and stage spotlights behind all the scenes, whether they took place in Cambridge, England cottage gardens or Communist-era Czech flats, the set hinted at how rock music suffused the most informal spaces of everyday life with an energy of the theatrical.
As the play conveyed quite well, rock circulated a pulsating dreamworld light that was at once semi-secretive, a glow concealed in the grooves of LPs and hidden within inner sleeves of record covers, and roaringly present, exploding the listener into an alternative universe of drama, comedy, and catharsis. Not unlike its precise opposite — state surveillance — rock was both always there, lurking in the shadows, and front and center, mesmerizing the citizenry.
Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard.
“I don’t care,” is the final line of the play. It is spoken by the middle-aged English daughter of a Cambridge Marxist philosopher to her father’s ex-student, a Czech lover of Western rock who stumbles into becoming an anti-Communist dissident. She declares “I don’t care” after she runs off with the student decades after they first met in the months after the 1968 Prague Spring. By play’s end, it’s 1990, the year after the fall of communism, and she says the line moments before she and her new lover witness the Rolling Stones performing in Prague.
In the immediate context of the scene, the line teeters between an admission of failure and a shout of astounding victory.
Most directly, “I don’t care” is about the daughter finally forgiving herself for her own sense of a wasted youth.
But it also sounds like Stoppard himself finally giving up on the conventional Marxist politics that guided key characters in the play, such as the daughter’s father, a stalwart Stalinist and CP member. At the same time, “I don’t care,” also sounds like a suspicion that, even when rock music kept the spirit of dissidence alive in the Eastern Bloc, the Rolling Stones’ performance feels surprisingly like a shallow victory over communism. Thrilling, yes, but anything more than that? Knowing that the fall of communism only presented the new, and deeply troubling, problems of global capitalism in Eastern Europe, we’re not sure.
As the play ends, the spotlights turn up and glare into the audience’s eyes. We’re blinded for a moment. We care deeply, and in a blast of bass, guitar, and drums, are swept up, carefree.
But there’s more.
“I don’t care.” This line is spoken, I think, in the spirit of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech rock band who haunt the play along with the ex-Pink Floyd singer and Cambridge, England, recluse Syd Barrett. Like so many counterculturalists, the Plastics just wanted to be free. They sought self-expression and group experimentation and a space for art-making. The Plastics merely wanted to play their music and thought of themselves as apolitical. They “didn’t care.” Yet they became dissidents, co-conspirators with Vaclav Havel, and a cause célèbre in the West, simply for not caring.
Not caring, when you get to thinking about it, actually turns out to be a complex idea. Stating that “I don’t care” is, oddly, a declaration of caring. In negating concern, it winds up communicating concern. Intentionally foregoing control, the speaker of this declaration asserts a strange kind of autonomy. Far from apathy, “I don’t care” comes across in Stoppard’s play as a carefully-wrought carefreeness rather than carelessness. The choice not to choose is to care enough not to care.
Okay, so it all starts to make sense, perhaps, the more stoned one gets. Fine, so be it. That does not make it any less intriguing as a speech act or the staking out of a position. To not care is to ask whether any of one’s past was worth it at all. To throw in the towel. To cease to matter. And yet, to not care is also the encapsulation of what Stoppard notices as the strange politics of the sixties counterculture: the refusal of “I don’t care” is what, in fancier language, the historian Julie Stephens has called, an “anti-disciplinary protest.”
“I don’t care” becomes a kind of paradoxical statement close to the heart of the sensibility that guided the sixties counterculture. If not exactly political, then the declaration “I don’t care” was certainly public.
It was, after all, a declaration of independence — one with all the dangers of living in, and living out, the paradox of caring not to care.
Addendum: “Can theatre and rock music ever mix?”
Image: Goodman Theatre
#309 – It’ll Blow Your Mind
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009neuroscience is like Pink Floyd laser show night at the planetarium.
…You are trying to get at some true vision of the basic material, but there isn’t one. – Antonio Damasio
Rocking light show, for sure, but the most significant thing about Bruce Adolphe’s composition, “Self Comes to Mind” — which was inspired by Antonio Damasio’s neuroscientific research on emotions, creativity, and the brain — is that it is not reductionist.
This is your brain on music.
“I think the topic of neuroscience,” Adolphe told NPR, “is like nature has been in a more traditional way.” To Adolphe, science can serve “like the inspiration of mountains or looking at the sky full of stars.”
This is a better way to think about the relationship between the arts and sciences, which we often place in opposition when in fact they have much in common if we think of them as deepening our sense of wonder rather than solving questions once and for all.
In Adolphe’s composition, there is a sense of mystery, complexity, and celestial fullness to the music. As the brain lights up the screen behind the musicians, we see the brain as representation and the thing itself, all at once. It is simultaneously material and it is filled with abstraction. The music wanders, meanders, unsure of itself. With each note, you lose yourself and, at the same time, grow more mindful.
You can hear the composition on NPR’s website.
Image: Hanna Damasio / Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, USC
#283 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009Approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal. – Michel Foucault
#277 – Wherefore Art Thou?
Monday, January 26th, 2009should the u.s. government have a secretary of the arts?
What is most striking about the current push for — and backlash against — establishing a federal Department of the Arts is that debates about the state’s role in sponsoring art almost instantly become referenda on the nature of American democracy. Thinking about the funding of art seems to bring out divergent opinions of what exactly American democracy is.
On one side, proponents of establishing a European-style culture ministry contend that the U.S. needs to bring “coherence” to support for artistic endeavors in order to better protect and preserve the national cultural treasures of the country. They go so far as to argue that a more coherent arts policy could bring a stronger sense of unity to the polity at home and improve U.S. relations around the world.
On the other side, opponents of creating a federal level department of arts and culture think that government funding and organizing would inevitably bureaucratize what is the best quality of American arts (and by implication American democracy): its decentralized, anarchic, disorderly nature.
Albert M. Bender, Art Project in Chicago Illinois, 1940.
This is, in a new form, a replay of FDR’s New Deal vs. Republican opposition. It’s the 1930s all over again in more ways than one: economic crisis not only leads to political reevaluations, but also raises debates about what role culture should play in the fate of the republic.
The story runs deeper, too, as it always does. The current debate contains weird echoes from the struggles between federalists and republicans, circa 1800. The question returns again in America: which is the best way to foster a robust democracy? Hamiltonian centralization or Jeffersonian decentralization?
Centralization promises more opportunities for artists, and in doing so, it might also, somewhat contradictorily, better protect the diversity of American arts and culture. This is the “coherence” that supporters seek: a way to identify and rectify imbalances in artistic support in order to defend the pluralism of American culture.
Not so, opponents claim. Suspicious that “coherence” would inevitably narrow opportunities for the arts to palatable forms because of the political risks involved with supporting the marginal or edgy, they long to guard the arts against what they see as the tyranny — even the unintentional, well-intentioned tyranny — of centralization.
They would rather risk impoverishment. A Department of the Arts would, they believe, put us into the movie Culture Wars: The Sequel, in which Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms wannabes will win easy political points for once again pulling the crucifix out of the jar of urine.
Poster created by Federal Art Project in New York City, 1936-1941.
Both positions on state funding for the arts — and on American democracy as a whole — warrant more explication and a willingness to entertain uneasy questions.
The opponents, such as CultureGrrl, contend that a national arts department would turn culture into a “political football” as it has done in the past. But this seems rather like blaming the victim. Arts and culture are already politicized. After all, it is the fear of political manipulation that motivates CultureGrrl and others to petition against a Secretary of the Arts.
But they do raise an intriguing point: is it the pluralistic disorder, the messy incongruences and lack of unity, that defines the arts in America (and by implication, democracy in America)? How would a centralized authority enrich and extend this distinctive quality of American culture through political means? How to bring “coherence” to what is, at its most ideal, something profoundly and beautifully incoherent? The problem is a real one.
And yet, as suggested above, it is indeed the very problem FDR faced with the American economy in the 1930s. You could not protect liberty anymore, FDR discovered, by constraining state power; in a complex industrial economy, individuals were too weak to claim hold of their freedom. Most would lose their liberty to the elite economic powers who stepped into the void left behind by limited state power.
This is essentially the position taken by supporters of a national-level Department of Arts and Culture. Former National Endowment for the Arts head Bill Ivey, for instance, argues that when the state does not step in to fund, monitor, and shape cultural life, the market commodifies and conquers the civic dimensions of art and culture. What should be our common heritage becomes at best watered down and at worst destroyed in the march of corporate consumerism. The mad, disorganized dash for profit from and funding for the arts leads to a profoundly undemocratic disorder, rather than a democratic one.
On balance, the supporters strike me as on the right track. However, they need to address more clearly the critique of CultureGrrl and others. The question is: How can the U.S. create a central authority whose purpose is not just to cohere the arts into a treasure of national heritage? This is a worthy project in of itself, but it should not be the only purpose of a Department of the Arts. If it is, the use of central power will ironically work against the desire of supporters to bring out the best in American aesthetic life. Daring, unexpected, and challenging art will fall by the wayside of consensus-affirming culture.
In the rush to support a Department of the Arts during what many supporters feel is a historic opening, proponents are not confronting the deeper challenges of such an agency. If a Department of the Arts could also find a way to unleash the unruly, pluralistic, and profoundly democratic republic of arts and culture in America, it would do a great service not only to American aesthetics, but also to American democracy.
Alexander Dux, WPA/Federal Art Project poster, 1939.
If the puzzle of centralization and disorder, coherence and incoherence, could be solved (or weirdly, not solved but rather transformed into a puzzle whose pieces keep spinning and never fall into place), then a Department of the Arts would be a fine thing. Politics and culture could come together in a robust, multi-roomed mansion of the people, a palace of the commons, a culture in motion, where arts and policy would dance together.
Sometimes they would dance in unison, sometimes they would step on each other’s feet. Sometimes the music would be an old Appalachian fiddle tune, sometimes it would be a John Cage composition. Sometimes they would be gazing up at Thomas Hart Benton murals and sometimes at obscene Maplethorpe photographs. Sometimes they would whisper back and forth about infrastructure appropriations, sometimes they would stop and fight about abortion and the death penalty. Sometime arts and policy would leave the party happy, and sometimes they would never want to speak to each other again. But the dance would go on.
I’d like to be at that party. If my tax dollars can go to what seem to be unjust and illegal wars overseas, why can’t they go to figuring out the right way to fund the arts and culture at home?
#266 – The Magic of Radios and Balloons
Monday, January 5th, 2009Sarro’s balloon aloft at radio dawn.
Early one Sunday morning, half awake, half asleep. It was the perfect state for listening to an episode from Sean Hurley’s absolutely magical radio program, the Sherwin Sleeves Show, which came on the radio alarm clock on WBEZ’s Re:sound (another radio show, assembled by the folks at the Third Coast Audio Festival, that also never ceases to amaze).
Sean Hurley/Sherwin Sleeves
Hurley’s radio character, Sherwin Sleeves, took me aboard a hot air balloon in the middle of the New Hampshire night. After a bout of insomnia, Sleeves goes for a walk in the fields behind his house. A hot air balloon lands, and he grabs hold. Lifting himself into the basket, he meets a drunken pilot who is simply drifting after having lost his daughter to cancer.
The journey became a kind of allegorical enactment of the necessary voyage that grief and mourning require: a drift across the unknown on which one bobs like a balloon on the breeze until one lands on the ground again.
The loss doesn’t ever vanish, but the memory of it gets altered by the lostness of grief. And when one hits the surface again, memories new and old get reintegrated. If we’re lucky, we rediscover notes from before a tragedy, saturate them in tears, and go on. We have to.
There is no better medium in which to experience this voyage than through sound, in a balloon, on the air, where the dreamlike and the actual can merge for a moment in the secret dawns of Sunday mornings.
Listen to “The Sean Hurley/Sherwin Sleeves Show” on Episode #106 of Re:sound. Or hear a slightly different version on Hurley’s own website.
Image: Atoms, Motion, and the Void
#233 – Live and On the Air
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008modou dieng gets his groove on.
“Are You Experience,” Modou Dieng’s assemblage of phonograph records, neckties, paint, and glitter is up to many things, but one of them is evoking the thin groove between what we hear, who we were, and what we might become.
Modou Dieng, “Are You Experience” (2008)
Image: Modou Dieng via the New York Times
#224 – More Songs About Buildings
Thursday, August 7th, 2008on david bryne’s playing the building.
David Byrne’s project, Playing the Building, available for viewing, playing, and listening at New York’s renovated Battery Maritime Terminal, explores a number of questions, among them:
- What is a musical instrument?
- What does it mean to be able to “play” a musical instrument?
- How do people interact around musical instruments?
- What is the relationship between music and architecture?
David Byrne, Playing the Building, Battery Maritime Building, New York City, Summer 2008
Most of all, to me, the project does something odd. It starts out complex, an art piece that seems to pose as many lines of inquiry and questioning as the bundles of pneumatic tubes, wires, and coils tumbling out of the old pump organ at the center of the exhibition. You could write a dissertation about each one.
But then, the more I think about Byrne’s piece, the more simple it is. All that the project seems to really want to do is to ask “wouldn’t it be cool to be able to play a building?”
As Byrne puts it in a Pitchfork TV interview (see below), the point of the project is the pleasure of touching parts of the building one would never imagine being able to affect…and, to boot, touching them through sound.
The play’s the thing.
Image: Creative Time
#217 – Echolocation #11: Lift Every Voice and Sing
Sunday, May 18th, 2008of field recordings, microphone placement, the individual, and the collective.
Sometimes, in a field recording, the microphone is serendipitously placed so as to create a whole new aesthetic of listening. Such is the case with Art and Margo Rosenbaum’s recording of “Let Me Fly,” by the gospel quartet of Sister Fleeta Mitchell, Rev. Nathaniel Mitchell, and Lucy Barnes.
The song, which appears on the wondrous Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1, features a marvelous trio singing the old gospel song. The performance is stellar, but what defines the recording is the way in which the microphone picks up the backup singers — Rev. Nathaniel Mitchell and Lucy Barnes — singing along with lead singer Sister Fleeta Mitchell.
We hear them listening to her. They pick up on this phrase and that, moving from replication to embellishment and back again. They are singing together and on their own; all at the same time and with different timings.
The microphone not only catches this, but accentuates this marvelous sense of simultaneous togetherness and separation. It’s a certain dynamic of singing together, which is that it also consists of singing apart.
And in the tension between the two, which the microphone absorbs and relays, captures and suspends, the musical sounds suggest a powerful way of living, a style of being both individuals and a collective.
The track is a testament both to the musicians and the recorders.
Image: Dust-to-Digital Recordings
#209 – Sound Materials
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008american music as metal ‘n’ wood.
Metal and Wood: The Electromatic Bo Diddley Guitar
Crackpot theory #316: Anglo-American popular music in the twentieth century can be divided into two elements: wood and metal. This music has either sounded like wood, earthy, thuddy, full of grain, bark, and veiny leaves. Or it has sounded like metal: clanging, gonging, thundering, absorbing lightning strikes, conducting electrical currents, shocking those who touch the sound. One end of the continuum: Woody Guthrie. The other end: Lou Reed’s Metal Music.
The most interesting pop music has combined wood and metal in varying formulations, splitting the wood with muscle and force; getting the metal to breathe and grow rings.
