bibliostructures

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.