biblioburro
LA GLORIA, Colombia – In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.
“I’m interested in boundaries where abstraction meets materiality” Ken Goldberg
Earthrise by Apollo 8 astronauts
The first sample bibliostructure I’m creating is a manifesto as much as an example of new binding techniques I’ve developed. It has at its heart an extension of the conversation on mythology between Joseph Campbell - who’d devoted his life to studying how myths connected up between cultures and across time - and the journalist Bill Moyers. Campbell died a few months after recording the final conversation and the series, The Power of Myth, was shown on public television in America in 1988. It caught at a public hunger for a sense of ballast in a time of great social and technological upheaval.
Joseph Campbell pointed out that the horizon for mythology had expanded with the photographs of the earth taken from the moon’s orbit by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. We were able to see how all life was interconnected and none of the things that divide us, on the planet’s surface, are visible. What we need now is a mythology for the whole planet, Campbell said. The details would be different in each region but the substance would be the same at a planetary level.
We now have, in our mobile phones, communications tools that emerged from these space missions. The satellite mapping and imaging systems, and voice and image telephony systems in mobile phones are descendants of the systems that were created to stay in touch with the equipment and astronauts on the Mercury and Apollo missions. The perspective of our age is being able to “zoom” between the image of our earth and the details of what we see around us in our daily lives, we fluidly shift between these “scales of experience” the writer Steven Johnson has observed. His publishing platform, Outside.in is a conceptually powerful site that geotags posts from individual bloggers all the way up to large media organisations like the New York Times. Readers gather information through a radar, first looking at the information just around them, then in their neighbourhood, their city, then everywhere else. If the Power of Myth were being made today it might be called “The Fifth Level of Zoom”, where the information has expanded out into the spiritual realm.
While humans were boldly going into space, Dr Robert Ballard was creating a great age of exploration in our planet’s oceans, finding life at the edge of the geothermal vents that might explain how life developed on our planet, geological evidence of a great flood that may have inspired the Noah’s ark story, and the wreck of the Titanic, which highlights the twentieth century’s doomed absolute faith in technology. He was also using remote imaging and communications to extend his reach into areas that humans physically can’t go in the ocean’s depths. He’s now widened the capacities of his exploration equipment so that schoolchildren can go on missions, from their classrooms.
Ken Goldberg is an engineer and artist whose projects were the first telerobotic art installations on the internet, using the concept of telepresence, to question knowledge and social interactions if they happen at a distance. He set the tone with his early Telegarden, which was a garden plot tended by a robot arm controlled by individuals all over the world that became a true community garden. He is now the Director of Berkeley’s New Media Centre. Its mission is: “To understand what is new about each new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest.”
We are in a new age philosophically, but more importantly, geologically. Scientists have found evidence that the activities of mankind are driving changes in nature, in the weather patterns, geological features and in the way animal populations develop. We are officially in the anthropocene era. My grand vision is to bring together Steven Johnson (in the Bill Moyers role of questioner) and Ken Goldberg and Robert Ballard, who frame their explorations with touchstones and references from all periods of mythology. (Robert Ballard explicitly sees his explorations as extensions of the heroes journeys mapped by Joseph Campbell). They would speak, over dinner, at the Australian Museum in Sydney, at a table near a model of the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger). Lately the Thylacine has become a symbol of the plight of vanishing species. It became extinct in the early part of the twentieth century but has caught the popular imagination: the model’s nose has been patted so much it’s denuded of the synthetic fur in the way that Cary Grant’s footprints at the Graumann’s Chinese Theatre have been worn away. The projects of Robert Ballard, Ken Goldberg and Steven Johnson catch at how something crucial is slipping away from us, and use their tools to allow us to synthesise many strands of information across cultures and disciplines and through time. The bibliostructure will be a snap-together hardcover transcript of the conversation (which I’m creating, as a draft, from interviews that all three have given that are available over the internet.)
Ken Goldberg gave a lecture recently at MIT’s Media Lab, whose research projects in the 1970’s gave us some of the important features that now allow us to use computers and the internet easily and intuitively. Ken’s lecture focuses on how thinking about humans use technology leads back to having a better understanding and connection to the natural world. “Ken Goldberg will present the manifesto of the Berkeley Center for new media and propose a controversial definition of ‘media.’” MIT said. “He’ll then report on experiments and questions raised by robots and social networks, ranging from ouija boards to human “tele-actors,” and tell a true story about how invasions of privacy led him and his students to study how robots can assist in monitoring the natural environment. He will describe a robotic system they have deployed to assist the search for the ivory billed woodpecker, a bird of extreme interest to birdwatchers, ornithologists, and conservationists whose last confirmed sighting was in 1944.”
Right now we’re dreaming of ways to use our technology to focus back on life, to heal the planet and save its creatures along with ourselves. That we have the curiosity and will to explore and the intellectual rigour to appreciate what we’re finding, is crucial. “I was a graduate student and K. O. Emery, my mentor, had me present to this august body. Very scary. My knees were knocking”, Robert Ballard has said. “These were all the big gods of the earth. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Princeton, but they have the old classrooms that are just like an operating pit. You stand there and you look up, and it’s sort of intimidating. I got done and a very preeminent scientist — I won’t say who he is, because he is still very preeminent — stood up and said, “That’s cute, but tell me one significant thing a manned submersible has ever done.” We hadn’t. I didn’t have an answer. I was standing there frozen, and another colleague stood up, and he said “That isn’t the problem. The technology is not at fault; we haven’t dreamed of a way of using them.” Out of that came Project Famous, and the first manned expedition.”
It might seem like a crazy time for me to re-launch a company making physical books that exist in the boundary where abstraction meets materiality, but many of the great social inflections of innovations in the technologies and companies that are successful today were created at the end of the dot.com boom. And now, as venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham have noted recently, the flow of innovation has reversed, from the consumer up to corporations. “At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed,” Brad Burnham said. “It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.”
I can now make small projects that include technology that are practical and usable immediately rather than theoretical case studies. And an individual like me now has access to the way venture capitalists are assessing what went wrong with today’s market and how strong companies can be created in these bleak times. Fred Wilson inserted this presentation from Sequoia Capital on his blog.
This bibliostructure also has a soundtrack, the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Nocturama.These are powerful love songs concerned with the enduring value of family and strengthening love by facing mistakes and old demons and celebrating flaws. The song Nocturama raises the question about the natural world but it remains a question. The song was left off the album and appears on the Bad Seeds B Sides and Rareties set. The album concludes with a song that features all the humans and creatures in the world walking together, aflame with the love of God in their hearts. It was recorded in 2002 and when Cormac McCarthy's The Road was released a couple of years later its message of humanity being carried forward through acts of love and self-sacrifice in extremely bleak times, brought Nocturama to mind for me. Nick and Warren Ellis are writing the soundtrack for John Hillcoat's movie adaptation of The Road.
"There's an interesting thing happening in films," Nick said recently in an interview in San Francisco. "There's a whole rash of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and with each one they seem to be less science fiction and more just a kind of numb reality. And this particular film, The Road, is incredibly moving and it's moving because it's showing what happened afterwards, it's a father and son walking through this blasted landscape, and the boy was born after the apocalypse and he's never seen anything else, and occasionally, very occasionally, through the film the man remembers life before this thing - you don't even know what it was - and you see the world the way it is now, in all its color, and everything's just covered in ash in the film, and it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to know what we actually have and how we really are prepared to just fritter it away. It's a most beautiful film not only because of this relationship between the father and the son, but because the power this film has to say what we're actually sacrificing, in the different things we're pursuing in this world, we're sacrificing color."
I'm writing a small appreciation of Nocturama for the sample bibliostructure but the music will also be available in the book. A radio tag, an infrared tag, perhaps even a simple scratch off redemption code for i-Tunes will be pasted into the text. But when these bibliostructures are in production the tag will be able to be detected by an iphone/ipod which will launch itunes and the playlist that goes with the book.
Joseph Campbell's conversations were peppered with quotations from the writers who shaped his age: T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and also the writings of Freud, Jung and Schopenhauer. He made reference to the music of Beatles and the "Star Wars" movies by George Lucas. It's artists who keep the great human stories alive by retelling them in their time, in a context that brings them alive in way that's newly relevant, Campbell said. Nick Cave's extensive projects are vessels for mythology in our time, and Nocturama is a sweet celebration of the enduring power of love and compassion. It's undervalued and unappreciated but its calmness and hard-won peace-of-mind are a tonic for these uncertain times. We face problems honestly and triumph by joining together to solve them. When Astor Piazzolla released an album that critics found difficult to appreciate he said that he was proud of it, that this was the album that he'd give to his grandchildren to explain to them what he creates. Nocturama, similarly, is something Nick might consider an heirloom.
Mysterious banner on George Street, Sydney
I’ve found a quiet spot in a mostly deserted bar of the unhip Grace Hotel in the part of Sydney’s CBD that reminds me of midtown Manhattan. The 1930’s building has barely any of its deco charm left. In the second world war it was the headquarters for the American military. It only became a hotel in the 1990’s but has a frumpy deco appearance, like something pulled together in the 1950’s. I’m writing my business plan here, listening to the Duke Ellington / John Coltrane album on my iPhone. I’m also writing the plan on my phone! On my way here tonight I saw this mysterious banner lining George Street. It made me think of a line from Nick Cave’s song, “More News From Nowhere”, about Lena, who had two black eyes from a transfusion she’d had done to replace her blood with a panda’s. This banner has a zen bearish face emerging out of darkness.
Posted from my iPhone.
advice from Luc Sante
Anselm Keifer lead books
“A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street,” Luc Sante.
Bold Bibliostructures
This folio with a book and looseleaf plans and photographs of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt’s projects is on display at one of the public libraries I use. It’s the most exquisite piece of traditional, archival bookbinding I’ve ever been able to hold.
“Linen-covered solander box with hardcover book, eight folders with eight individual photographic essays, over seventy plans and drawings at full size….book and photo essays:148gsm Mohawk Superfine,an uncoated, archival paper from the USA. Loose-leaf drawings and sketches: printed on Kaskad, an acid-free paper from Sweden.”
01 Editions
Rare books make me nervous. I usually prefer to gaze at them through the protective glass of a display case. But I noticed this Glenn Murcutt book on display at the library so I casually pulled open some of the folios, turned over the box and whistled, admiringly, at the quality of the stitching and gluing. Then I looked up the publisher’s website on my iPhone and saw the price: $A1,600!!! And there’s only 1,000 in the edition. What if I’d bent a corner of the one of the folios as I shuffled them? What if there was a mark on the shelf when I put the book down again and now there’s stain on the rabbit grey linen that’s made the dollar value of the book spin backwards at a dizzying rate? The exquisite, expensive things that I feel comfortable with have a sturdy, industrial quality: a Barcelona chair rather than a Baccarat Crystal wine glass. I’m clumsy. Not goofy and endearingly clumsy. I’m nightmarishly unco-ordinated every now and then. Mostly I’m careful and over-compensate but now and then things slip through my fingers (and I’m constantly polka-dotted with bruises from walking into walls and furniture). Rare books are treasures I shouldn’t be trusted with. My bibliostructures are for klutzes. Even Wile E. Coyote couldn’t put a dent in one of my books. (The spiral bound ones have spines of zinc plated steel compression springs.)
YANN MARTEL’S FLIP BOOK
Theatre production of "Life of Pi"
Last Sunday I went to hear Yann Martel speak at GleeBooks in Sydney. Most of the conversation was about Life of Pi because his new book won’t be published until 2010. He’s a warm and generous speaker and it seems like he’s read every book in the world (and seen most of the movies made, too).
He mentioned his new novel briefly and talked about it in an interview with a local journalist.
“A 20th-Century Shirt is two books in one: read the novel then flip the book over and read a related essay, or vice versa.
The novel is “a non-literal representation of the Holocaust”, a conversation between a talking monkey and donkey that live like termites on a man’s shirt, which is also a country with provinces such as Left Pocket. The essay argues that the Holocaust is unusual among historical events because the stories we tell about it are all factual. World War II has inspired novels and movies that are comedies, romances and horrors. But reverence for the Holocaust has constrained writing to historical accounts and personal memoirs.
Victims of any tragedy naturally want the truth told, Martel says. “But we really absorb history when we can play with it; it becomes more digestible. My wish is to serve the victims. Most of us have to translate bulky history into more portable stories. We have to allow Holocaust comedies, Holocaust thrillers … Otherwise it becomes sacrosanct and eventually we would stop telling stories about the Holocaust and it would become hoary history covered in dust.”
JACK KEROUAC’S SCROLL
I walked through Borders to get to the library and there was a new edition of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road on display. It’s a regular paperback but publishes the text exactly as it’s typed on the scroll. It’s a sober and eggheadish paperback, with three scholarly essays. When I first picked it up I thought it might have been a collection of thoughts about The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Luc Sante talked about the scroll in The New York Times a couple of months ago:
“In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions – Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example. It also stands alongside the image of Jackson Pollock – in the series of photographs taken of him by Hans Namuth just a few months before Kerouac’s siege of the typewriter – dripping and flinging and flecking paint on a horizontal canvas, fighting and dancing his work into being. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical, which is why some writers feel the need to compensate by racing bulls or whatever, but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter seems like a feat of strength. Most writers merely produce effete works on paper, you might say, but Kerouac went and wrestled with the tree itself. Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated – merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel – the great novel of the Beat Generation – the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.”
New Type of Electronic Paper
The new approach, developed by researchers in Germany–at Sony Deutschland Gmb, in Stuttgart, and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, in Mainz–avoids the complications caused by flexible electronics. Their device consists of a chemical layer sealed between plastic sheets. Under normal light, the screen is transparent. But when exposed to infrared light, the chemicals in the screen fluoresce.
To create images, the researchers used a red or infrared laser to quickly scan across the screen, from either in front or behind, causing different parts to fluoresce in sequence to produce a fast-moving image. This is similar to the way that a cathode-ray tube uses an electron beam to make images. In a demonstration, the researchers made a cartoon image move around on their screen.
Tzenka Miteva, a researcher at Sony who coauthored a paper on the technology, published today in the New Journal of Physics, says that the screens use specially-matched combinations of chemicals to “upconvert” light–that is, absorb light of longer wavelengths and emit light at shorter wavelengths. This means that the researchers were able to use a red or infrared laser to generate colors in the visible spectrum. “Red or infrared lasers are cheap and very much available on the market,” Miteva says. “And because it works at very low intensities, we can use them without problems with the viewers.”
Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed
The Addams Family and their customised hi-fi
Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.
Designing a system that does that is not an electrical engineering problem. It is a social engineering problem. The best social engineers are working today on consumer facing web services. They understand that there is enormous potential leverage in those services. The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service.
So that, it seems to me, is one more reason the flow of innovation has reversed.”
Yohji Yamamoto’s soulfulness
Photograph by August Sander
When I was writing for Blueprint magazine in New York in the early 1990’s, I talked to Yohji Yamamoto when he was opening his store in Soho. He showed me a well-worn book of photographs by August Sander and said that he was moved by the way that people would have one suit, or coat, that they would wear with pride and look after carefully for many years. The small mends and replaced buttons would tell the stories of its life. “I want to design something that’s already ten years old,” he said.
He was saddened by the rapacious novelty that goes with the fashion system, of things being instantly outdated. I think he was putting in place the idea of a “classics” collection, classic staples — white shirts, coats, etc. that people would want to replace with something exactly the same when theirs wore out.
The story about Muji in the New York Times mentions that Yohji Yamamoto’s business partner is an adviser to the company, and brings these ethics of Yohji’s into their clothing line:
Goichi Hayashi, who is Yohji Yamamoto’s business partner and advises Muji on its fashion collection on Yamamoto’s behalf, takes a similar position. His mission, he says, is to make clothing that ‘‘someone will wear until it falls apart, and then buy the same thing again” – like a gauzy white shirt or a basic blazer. He feels that Muji’s home items offer the same kind of integrity. ‘‘They look like they are not 100 percent finished, and that is very attractive to the design community. A wooden coffee table, for example, has the screws showing – even though it would be easy to hide them – but it looks good like that. It’s honest.”
Ultimately, Muji’s goal is to let customers relate to their surroundings through the products they use. ‘‘I think people are questioning whether special design is really necessary,” says Fukasawa. ‘‘Muji’s approach is to eliminate designed-ness from all products and provide reliable choices, so labeling the brand becomes unnecessary. Simple is not a style – it is a state of harmony.”
thoughtful consumption
Muji foldable cardboard speakers
A story in the New York Times Style magazine about the Japanese store Muji:
Muji rebelled against the more-is-more credo that Western luxury houses were greedily promoting in Asia, and made a name for itself by recycling and curtailing waste: a 1981 ad for canned salmon flakes, which utilized parts of the fish that tend to be discarded, urged foodies to ‘‘enjoy every edible part of the salmon, from head to tail!” (Take that, Fergus Henderson.)
In Japan, Muji currently sells Bread Crust Snacks – packets of chips made from what you trim off sandwiches – and Pie With Eggshells, which apparently has a lot of calcium and is good for you. Colorful socks and tank tops are made from excess yarn discarded during production of other garments; a cool, crinkly T-shirt is folded upon itself to create a perfect cube, eliminating the need for superfluous packaging. Even the more upscale items, like bicycles, home furnishings and an award-winning, wall-mounted CD player, flaunt a proudly minimalist aesthetic.
Muji’s frill-free philosophy seems particularly on-target now that the design world is veering toward understatement and familiar shapes instead of the ‘‘forward-thinking” (read: overdesigned) gizmos and doodads that we have gotten so used to lately. …
‘‘People tend to look for something new or radical,” says Naoto Fukasawa, who has been Muji’s design adviser since 2002. ‘‘But I don’t think these new items can replace others with history. The fact that things last through time is their strength and value.”
To prove his point, Fukasawa recently curated an exhibition titled ‘‘Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary” in collaboration with the designer Jasper Morrison. They displayed 210 everyday objects (a Seiko watch, a plain plastic bucket, a Bic lighter) whose main appeal, according to the supernormal, sensationally ordinary paperback that accompanied the show, is ‘‘the capacity to conceal its features until they become virtually invisible.” In other words, products whose design is so instinctive that it’s as if they had never been designed at all. Not surprising, several Muji classics (a calculator, an air filter and a kettle, among others) made the cut.
A New Poetry of Praise
When I’m in meetings with people from my bank, or real estate agents, or fabricators who might make components for my bibliostructures I use the 60 Page Book and 1 Track CD package of the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! to provide a frame of reference. Now imagine this with a superior book-structure and no clumsy pocket with a cd tucked inside the back page, I say. There will be some kind of tag that a wireless mobile phone / music player recognises, that will be where the music will be.
The Lazarus package is a small wonder. There are Nick’s doodles of the words DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! that were the beginning point for the electric lightbulb sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The transcript of a charming dialogue between Nick and the artists, the song’s lyrics reprinted from Nick’s notebook, a couple of photographs of Harry Houdini, doodles by Tim Noble and photographs of the circuitry for the light sculpture being bolted onto the backing board by Sue Webster. And in a coincidence that demonstrates our age’s passion for magic, Nick’s initial notes were scribbled on an envelope that is franked with a postmark that advertises the imminent release of Harry Potter stamps.
Nick’s musical works have quietly been helping to create the new ecological niche – the book / record hybrid – that I‘m working within. I think his first one was a book of tour photographs by Peter Milne packaged with the first Bad Seeds Live album about fourteen years ago. The European edition of the Murder Ballads album was something I played around with in Los Angeles in 1996, the year I started the bibliostructures business. The booklet had illustrations from a German children’s book, something like the Grimms Tales, and I blew the lyric booklet up to children’s picture book size, hand-coloured the illustrations and covered the book in a midnight blue cloth and embroidered the title on the spine. At the time it was just a doodle. I only ever made two copies, one for Nick and one for me. And mine got pulled apart to re-work some of its structural deficiencies.
I’m having to make up for lost ground, now, as I followed electronic paper onto a maddeningly slow evolutionary path. Last week at the library I browsed through the two volumes of Don Martin’s collected works for MAD Magazine. If he’d drawn the history of my bibliostructures business I would have been the caveman with his back turned to the road, slaving over a book with electrified parts that didn’t gather momentum because I’d designed square wheels for it, who, in the last frame, is drenched with mud and turns around to see an iphone racing along the muddy road on round wheels, while reading a book.
The earliest scrapbooks I made were very literal interpretations of the comb-bound documents that I used to have made up at Kinkos. I was mesmerised by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’s conversations (in the television series, The Power of Myth) and carried around a pocket paperback book of transcripts. It remains a vade mecun for me. I discovered the term a few days ago in the introduction that the paleontologist Niles Eldgridge wrote for the musings about the future paths human evolution might take, in the book Future Evolution by the geological scientist Peter Ward and the painter Alexis Rockman. It’s latin for “go with me” and refers to a guidebook or manual designed to be carried around and constantly referred to. The Everyman Library publishes poetry as vade mecun’s: the motto inside the compendiums of poetry is “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.” I followed up references and wrote quotes from books into the scrapbooks, and pasted in New Yorker cartoons, and then suddenly realised one day, hearing Nick’s Let Love In album on public radio in Los Angeles, that his songs were populated with the same symbols Moyers and Campbell were talking about. He was making reference to mythology in the same way that they were, not to define a meaning for life but to enrich the experience of life. The value of mythology is in the nourishment these old stories continue to provide for us.
One of our most powerful new symbolic works is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Nick and Warren Ellis have been writing the music for John Hillcoat’s movie adaptation of the novel. It takes place in a world whose environment and most animal species and humans have been destroyed by what seems to have been a series of nuclear blasts. But it’s also consistent with the description of the effects of the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs that Peter Ward writes about in Future Evolution. In the introduction Niles Eldridge writes: “I wonder if past cultural extinctions, where technologically advanced and complexly organized societies have disappeared even while their descendants have persisted, living simpler lives, might not also be a source of predicting the future. The current wave of human planetary disruption might cause, not our physical extinction so much as a loss of the “high culture,” – our knowledge – if we do overrun our Malthusian limits. Loss of topsoil, lack of access to fresh water, loss of fisheries, spread of famine, warfare and disease – all the usual apocalyptic visions, all duly acknowledged in these pages – may not drive our bodies extinct, but could very well play hob with our minds, our cultural memories, our knowledge.”
From the John Hillcoat movie, The Road
In an interview in San Francisco last week Nick talked about The Road: “There’s an interesting thing happening in films. There’s a whole rash of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and with each one they seem to be less science fiction and more just a kind of numb reality. And this particular film, The Road, is incredibly moving and it’s moving because it’s showing what happened afterwards, it’s a father and his son walking through this blasted landscape, and the man remembers life before this thing – you don’t even know what it was – and you see the world the way it is now, in all its colour, and everything’s just covered in ash in the film, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to know what we actually have and how we really are prepared to just fritter it away. It’s a most beautiful film not only because of this relationship between the father and the son but because the power this film has to say what we’re actually sacrificing, in the different things we’re pursuing in this world, we’re sacrificing colour.”
The boy is sweet and spiritual. In the face of this bleakness he fashions toys out of detritus and creates his own stories around them and longs for a wider experience of love and a community. The beauty and touching qualities of WALL-E the robot come from the traits he has in common with the boy from The Road. There is also an absence of colour in WALL-E. The earth is covered in rusted garbage WALL-E has compacted, and when we see the earth, as WALL-E and Eve are flying away from it, the once bright blue marble is completely brown. It’s a myth whose beauty doesn’t come from anything visual, it’s the deep inner beauty of an open heart.
But this week there was also a vote for deep, expansive music criticism with the awarding of a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ grant to Alex Ross. The MacArthur Foundation wrote: “With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and feeling in the present.”
Alex Ross is a grade school friend of the writer (and Outside.in founder) Steven Johnson, whose “long zoom” concept of moving between scales of experience from the universal down to local, microscopic detail (as when we zoom in and out with Google maps) is the conceptual tool I apply to everything now. In admiring Alex Ross’s book The Rest is Noise, a sudy of the twentieth century through its music, Steven Johnson wrote on his blog:
It’s the history of a certain related set of sounds — atonal, twelve-tonal, serial, dissonant, random — that were more or less nonexistent in Western musical culture circa 1900 that became, if not dominant, then at least ubiquitous by the end of the century — in classical compositions, Hollywood scores, indie rock, and countless other venues. In other words, it’s the story of the rise of a certain sonic appetite for noise that would have been unimaginable to the ears of the late 1800s but that is commonplace today, in both low and high culture and all the middlebrow realms between.
What I find so fascinating here is the way Alex tries to explain how those sounds came into being — by reaching out beyond the usual biographical explanations about rogue geniuses and rivalries between them, though he has plenty of great stories along those lines as well. In reaching for that explanation, Alex does in fact pull in much of the twentieth century: political upheaval, technological developments like the tape recorder, the tragicomic Hollywood migrations of the World War II era European intellectuals. He also dives down in several arresting passages into the neuropsychology of noise and harmony, explaining how the brain translates acoustic waveforms into such emotionally charged events.
About a third into the book, Alex has a telling line where he says: “The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.” I think of The Rest Is Noise as an attempt to bright that force to light, and in bringing it to light, explain the way in which the force is actually composed of multiple intersecting elements, many of them working on different scales of cultural experience: from neurons to individual biographies to technological innovations to World Wars. This approach is one about which Alex and I — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — have been sharing ideas over the past decade. It’s the approach I used in explaining (with much less erudition) the forces behind the Sleeper Curve in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I’ve called it various things, including systemic criticism or “long zoom” thinking, but to really understand the model in action, your best bet is reading Alex’s book.
The New York Times quoted the president of the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan F. Fanton, characterising this year’s grant winners as “people working on the very edge of discovery and people at the edge of a new synthesis.”
Nick Cave is in tune with the creative spirit of his age. The vital insight that comes from Toby Creswell’s examination of Nick’s Murder Ballads album in his Great Australian Albums television series is how it shows Nick’s process of synthesis, bringing together his scholarly perspective and value of tradition and his appetite for change and deep curiosity that’s shown in the way that the Bad Seeds often includes musicians who are at the leading edge of experimenting with the ideas and theories emerging in science, altering the concept of what instruments are, and how music functions in culture. There’s a section in The Rest Is Noise where Alex Ross talks about the outgoing head of the Los Angeles Symphony, Esa Pekka Salonen, being inspired by the German group, Einsturzende Neubaten, which is led by former Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld. I once saw a majestic concert by Einsturzende Neubauten in a Los Angeles club, where the band was dressed in black trousers and black turtlenecks, and played their ‘instruments’ – pulled out of city junkyards – with an elegance that gave the concert the gravity of a performance by a classical orchestra. Current Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos is drawn from the experimental New York scene that included Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth and DNA, which Alex Ross relatesto the sonic experiments of different generations of musicians mostly in the classical world, from John Cage to Philip Glass. “When I was a young boy I worked in my father’s store where he sold records,” Philip Glass told the Sydney Morning Herald last week:
“I listened to a lot of music and liked nearly all of it.” He was exposed to Mozart and Schubert, but also to Hindemith and Bartok. There was jazz, popular dance music and later folk and rock. “So when I started playing the flute and classical music, you could also tell that I liked popular music. I never saw it as slumming.”
In a story in the New Yorker in 2004 Alex Ross prefaced a story about a conference connecting academics making popular music their area of study and writers drawn from the music press with an anecdote about Duke Ellington:
“Duke Ellington once had to field a barrage of questions from an Icelandic music student who was determined to penetrate to the heart of the genius of jazz. At one point, Ellington was asked whether he ever felt an affinity for the music of Bach, and, before answering, he made a show of unwrapping a pork chop that he had stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he said, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” Richard O. Boyer captured the moment in a Profile entitled “The Hot Bach,” which appeared in this magazine in 1944. You can sense in that exquisitely timed pork-chop manoeuvre Ellington’s bemused response to the European notions of genius that were constantly being foisted on him. He said on another occasion, “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.” Jazz was a new language, and the critic would have to respond to it with a new poetry of praise.” Alex Ross’s essays are setting the foundations for a new poetry of praise.
While I’ve drawn intellectual inspiration from Steven Johnson’s writing what’s almost more valuable has been the example he’s shown that “a new poetry of praise” needs new publishing platforms and formats, too, that are in tune with the age. His early publishing experiments on the web anticipated the rich conversational format growing out of technological developments in taking comments on blogs and making them article streams in their own right, and now, with Outside.in, to turn the “long zoom” concept into a publishing platform guided by Google maps.
And I think my contribution to music journalism is through formats and platforms as well, creating better bibliostructures and more liquid and simpler digital additions to organic books.
