Filed under: politics
At Ghost Island, we are engaging in an argument regarding gay marriage (strictly speaking, we are engaging with some other guy’s blog, but we are doing it together!) Check it out? I think it’s pretty good.
Weigh in, if you are so inclined.
This is a truly fascinating bit of music: Angil and Hiddntracks, during a post-gig discussion, thought about writing a bunch of songs for almost only woodwinds for want of focusing on that woodwind sound, also stipulating that all songs should avoid a grouping of chords particularly difficult for alto saxophonists to play. Angil runs with this–going two jumps out (changing (for this album only?) to “Angil,” and his supporting band to “Hiddn Tracks”), and shying from (mostly, ignoring his (frankly, sad) slipping on six or so grammatically-hard-to-avoid words) lyrics in violation of his organizing standards. So, this fun, this passing thought, quickly turns into a spry OuLiPo constraint, involving gaming both musical and linguistic. Lastly, as if this wouldn’t satisfy his compulsion to play, Angil bought a piano from a closing clothing shop (a liquidation) and, thinking that tuning it would probably ruin his fun, built all his songs on and around this bizarro-carnival thing (though his piano is commonly (and annoyingly) said to ring out with a “Tim Burton” sound), his band following suit, strictly and assiduously avoiding all violations.
So, in summary: a skillful dodging of constraint violations both musically and lyrically. Additional constraint and difficulty coming with his thrift shop bizarro-piano. A fascinating album, AND, might I add, a joy to own. Dazzling. A charming work of art with a sound of its own. Music for sad birds, an aviary symphony.
Worth looking into, I would say.
Angil and Hiddntracks – Oulipo Saliva
Filed under: biology, human, technology | Tags: dawkins, mcluhan, slate, technology
Slate Magazine has done what maybe some of us wished we could have done – tracked down some real information about that “25 Random Things About Me” meme. It makes for an interesting study in the nature of internet memes, since this one is slightly more trackable than most by nature of the way that the Facebook notes. What interests me the most is the framework used to examine this meme: biology. Important side note from the article: the term “meme” was evidently coined by the world’s favorite petulant child, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who is infinitely more tolerable when he is focusing on evolutionary biology than throwing a hissy fit about religion.
Slate funneled the data gathered through a system meant to model infectious diseases, attempting to discover the “patient zero” of this “epidemic.” They treat the “25 random things” phenomenon as both an organism and as a virus.
This is not new, exactly. Memes have been described as “viral” for about as long as I can remember memes. The important issue at play here is the meme as an evolving organism, not the meme as a thing that spreads. Now, we begin to discuss the robustness of the meme, the ways in which a meme mutates in order to fall on the happy side of the long odds of their survival. This discussion of Facebook memes is an examination of a techno-biological microsystem.
Which reminds me of another thing (I won’t call it a “meme”) you begin to see a lot: articles about technology and biology. This is actually why I started to study new media: the discussion of technology and biology (or, to put it simplistically, nature) seems to suffuse a great number of publications. We see this evidenced in articles about designer drugs, designer babies, biopolitics, bioethics, social networking, etc. We’ve been on this track for a while, since we really started to consider media post-printing-press. After all, McCluhan famously titled a book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and cybernetics, quantum physics, and poststructuralism have all but fully broken down the barrier between who we are and what we create by implicating the observer in every system.
Technology, you could say, has always been in the process of getting out of hand.
It each day seems less and less like something we have created and more like just another part of an open, dynamic system (call that system “nature” if you’d like). We attempt to leverage the system, but then our lever also needs to mutate and evolve to survive the long odds of retaining its usefulness as such a lever. It seems that what we create to help us get away from nature starts to show emergent properties, to get away from us, to show organic, emergent, dynamic, unpredictable behaviors. It simply refuses to stay put, and so we finally, belatedly, learn that our lever, technology, isn’t quite a lever separating man from his world but really just another part of that world we pretended to separate ourselves from.
Technology, assumed once to be the absolute opposite of nature and the apotheosis of “culture,” is really just a part of nature again, though admittedly an interesting and multifaceted one. It is tempting, but it would possibly be a mistake to say that technology is becoming a new nature as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and our ability to manufacture becomes more and more complicated, that being surrounded and “infiltrated” by technology will usher in a new state of nature. Technology always was nature, just as everything is. It’s not going to change, really, but it just might become more and more obvious to us.
