Proposal: Indie-rock musicians, the new rockstars, are being paid for putting their music into commercials not only monetarily, but also in units of irony. Following “The New Slang” being used in a McD’s commercial (graciously pointed out to me by Ben Segal), we now have m83 in a car commercial.
m83 – Don’t Save Us from the Flames (Pontiac Commercial?)
This leads me to believe that the ad agency handling Pontiac’s ads have a better sense of humor than one could have expected. Or, Pontiac themselves have a better sense of humor. Either way, someone has a sense of humor, and m83 is most certainly in on the joke: “Yes, I’m selling my music for a commercial, but I’m also subtly undermining the commercial. Or making cars seem cooler by allowing a song about melting wheels and brains in your hair into a car commercial. Either way, I am being quite clever.”
There is some sort of subtle and only partially apparent machine at work here.
Lastly: the video for the m83 song is incredibly charming. In a noteworthy turn, it features a bicycle.
Filed under: politics
To those of us who once considered themselves to be apolitical, it is a slow and often surprising process to find yourself interested in the lives and politics of that vast unknown population of your own country, nevermind the lives and struggles of those who live halfway around the world. Which brings me to my topic, a topic that I am finding myself surprisingly more and more concerned with, nearly against my natural inclinations toward political apathy: the [...] in Gaza.
Granted, my concern with it is still not exactly the concern of an activist. However, I suppose any concern is a start. Reading Naomi Klein’s article in the latest issue of The Nation, I was actually very shocked to find such a well-considered and convincing piece of journalism. Furthermore, I find her approach to be, if not revolutionary, then just the sort of tough-love, lets-do-what-we-can-with-what-we-have-to-do-it-with solution that people seem to avoid. It reminds me of what the irresponsible some day learn about their own finances: you have to trick yourself in order to save money. Set up direct deposit into a savings account and then stop counting the money. Once we accept that we have flaws, ie, that we are not quite capable of living up to the ideals that we set for ourselves, we can start putting safeguards in place that allow us to move closer to that ideal.
This is the ideal as the propulsive fiction, eg, democracy as that which may not necessarily be achieved, but the ideal that makes us better simply because we are attempting to reach it. Peace seems to, or should, operate under a similar logic. True peace, full agreement, the infinite grace of love and understanding, these things useful to us as goals that will improve us in the striving for them, but are also goals that are fundamentally unreachable. Perfection, in other words, is useful when used as a carrot. Appropriately, if you remember the source of this aphorism, the carrot hangs, tantalizingly, just out of reach.
Accepting that we live in a largely capitalist society (for better and worse) and that businesses and economy are thus the strongest political sticks we have available, it seems infinitely wise to me to boycott, divest, sanction. Regardless of where one stands on the larger issue behind the curtain, it is important to realize that trade should be used as a tool. We are not perfect, we have flaws, this system may not be the most ideal, but the waiting for an ideal system often delays action. This is not to say that action should not be considered, but to say that we’ve had plenty of time to consider. I stand firmly in the corner of Klein on this one: like it or not, the economic stick is simply the most pragmatic way to get a little bit closer to the carrot.
Filed under: literature, media, technology | Tags: human skull, phonograph, rilke, synesthesia
In his 1919 essay “Primal Sound,” Rainer Maria Rilke details his fascination with the human skull en route to a discussion of the phonograph. “The coronal structure of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus.” Ignoring all the implications to the connections between the unconscious and media, it is fascinating to see what Rilke suggest we do with this, to run a phonograph needle across these ridges on the skull, producing “a series of sounds, music…” This is his Primal Sound.
Not long after, and in partial reference to his earlier idea, he speaks of the experience of Arabic poems, “which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five sense…” as nothing short of “presence of mind and grace of love.”
What strikes me most about this essay are his consistent nods in the direction of synesthesia. Media, it seems, is both synaesthesia and metaphor. Whereas a metaphor draws it’s power from the traversal of linguistic boundaries, media draws its power from the traversal of sensual boundaries, or to grossly oversimplify a neurological phenomenon, synesthesia. The phonograph takes something we can touch and turns it into something we can hear, or vice versa using the very same needle. Media is a synesthetic metaphor, translating the stuff of one sense into another.
Digital media is the logical conclusion of this synesthetic trajectory, placing all mediated sensory experience on the same plane in that they are all derived from and reduced to ones and zeroes. Now we have programs that will make music from a picture, or programs that will create a visual from a song. You can take an essay you wrote and put it in to a program and come out with a sound, or a video. The possibilities are endless. With a little bit of imagination, we can all be now synaesthetes. We can, as Rilke wanted to do with the phonograph needle and the human skull, “experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.”
Media, as always, shows both the capacity to equalize (now Nabokov isn’t the only one that can see alphabets in color), but also the capacity to rob us of our own natural imaginative and cognitive abilities through overdependence.
