Dial "M" for Musicology

Hello, World

Hello, Dial M. I hope, as a summer substitutes, Ralph and I entertain as well as Jonathan and Phil. No promises.

A little about myself: I consider myself a cook, composer, and musicologist—in that order. Course work often gets in the way of those first two things, so now that school is out and summer is here, I’m looking forward to much cooking and much composing.

At the top of my summer reading list is a book by the gonzo-gastronome Anthony Bourdain, “A Cook’s Tour.” The book follows Bourdain’s trip around the world to find the culinary Holy Grail—the “perfect meal.” I’ve read Bourdain’s other books (he also writes crime fiction!) and found that his culinary insight lends itself rather well to thinking about music. For example, in the introduction to our “Cook’s Tour,” Bourdain recognizes that a meal is not just a matter of ingredients and their preparation:

Of course, I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one. I knew how important factors other than technique or rare ingredients can be in the real business of making magic happen at a dinner table. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life. I mean, let’s face it: When you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel the sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the background, waves are lapping at the short a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re probably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.

Bourdain here gets at something I like. Rarely are food and music enjoyed and remembered outside their context. Two identically prepared dishes are not really the same, even though they are the same—they are eaten at different times in different places by different people. Likewise, a symphony is different for each member of the audience.

Every music experience I remember is remembered not as just an aural event, but as an event in a specific place and time. Chopin’s nocturnes are what I listened to as I fell asleep as an eleven-year old. New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band is what I fist heard when I started my love affair with Woody Allen’s movies. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is what played on the stereo of my family’s van as we drove cross country to camp at Yosemite National Park.

One memory is particularly special to me. This memory explains my obsession with Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. I had listened to the piece a few times throughout my college years, but it wasn’t until my the spring of my senior year that I really heard the piece. That term, Dartmouth College hosted a New Music Festival with Jim Tenney as guest of honor. I helped produce the festival in various quiet ways, including chauffeuring Tenney back and forth to the airport. The memory took place on that return trip to the Manchester airport.

We hummed along in the silver jeep, through cold roads past ancient pines which limped under the heavy ice as snowsmoke drifted across the highway—dawn on a typical New Hampshire spring day.  Tenney asked that I bring along some CDs for the car ride. After a few minutes of awkward silence, I slid the ECM recording into the CD player, the disc still cold from being left by the window in anticipation the night before.

None of us said a word as the chords rolled out and filled the vehicle. We sat and just listened. I was at once excited and reflective. The festival was a momentous occasion for me and over the nearly-hour long listening I tried to process all that had happened over the last few days. The chords rolled over us once again and the piece finished. We sat quiet, interrupted only by the whir of the CD player as it ejected the disc.

After some time, Tenney mused, "hmm—now whenever I listen to that I cannot help but think of the snowy hills of New Hampshire."

I was overjoyed. To think that I had made an impression on the man I respect so greatly was unfathomable. I silently thought to myself, "And now I will never listen to that piece without thinking of you."

And I haven’t. He died only a little while later. I am still young and still in silent awe. Awed that I managed to meet with Tenney before his passing and awed that somehow I changed the way he listened to a piece of music. And so when I listen to that work, I don’t just hear Reich’s composition. I hear the silent, snowy hills of New Hampshire, I heard the excitement of my last year in college, and I hear the glow in Tenney’s eyes as we drove towards our first and final goodbye.

And no one else hears this work the same way as I do. Or any work, for that matter. And no meal will taste the same to two people, while it is eaten or when it is remembered.

Summertime

Yeah, what Jonathan said. I'm done for a while. But I'll be back in a few weeks. In the meantime, Ralph Locke and Brent Reidy (the latter of Musikwissenbloggenschaft) will be holding it down. Welcome them! I might poke my head up from time to time, but for the next few weeks I'm on vacation in Canada and will try to be thinking about things other that music, musicology, and related matters. It's summertime!

INTERMISSION!!

…which is the very apposite final word of the first act of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In the interest of getting my mental lines blown out, my book manuscript finished and sent, and to take a family trip to look at Californian universities (relevant to A Certain Young Man) and after Californian family, I'm going to be checking out for a while—as currently planned, until after July 4 or so. Highly competent and trained professional guest bloggers will be here in my absence.

Catch you all on the flip side!

Quad guitar

One of the students in my graduate seminar did a research paper on 1980s hair metal, which is a pretty cool topic, but which is not the point of this post, except insofar as it gives me an excuse to post this clip of Michael Angelo Batio playing the "quad guitar":

Ha, you missed one.

Anyway, my student said at one point that the challenge for her was going to be resisting the temptation to shoehorn a lot of quirky, funny, interesting-in-themselves details into an argument to which they were irrelevant. I know the feeling. Research (especially archival research) leads you to all kinds of odd little finds, small details that fill out your picture of the general subject you're researching and are really neat in themselves but which, let's face it, don't quite fit in the thing you're writing. One is always tempted to abuse writerly principles of economy and coherence and find some way to use them anyway. One is not always successful at resisting the temptation. And by "one" I mean "me." I'm pretty good at connecting distantly related points anyway, so I can usually gin up some semi-sorta-plausible rationale for stuffing one more amusing quote or peculiar historical detail into an argument. The thing is, you can always throw a couple of things that like into an article without hurting its structure too much, but past a certain point you run the risk of letting the details overwhelm the whole, of submerging the hard clean outlines of your conceptual structure in garlands of arabesque. And then you might find yourself playing the metaphorical quad guitar, captivated by the bright shiny gimmick but losing sight of the rock. (See what I did there, connecting the distantly related points?)

When I write, much of my revision process involves cutting back on the things I like but don't really need. But it hurts, HURTS, to leave those little gems on the cutting-room floor. I was looking through one of my morgue files this morning and found this little thing, a letter to the editor of Good Times (formerly the Express Times), a Bay area "undeground" (i.e., hippie) newspaper from the late 1960s. Some background: I had found (in the Hoover Institution archive of New Left/counterculture materials) an article by Greil Marcus that I'm using in my upcoming exotica article.* Marcus wrote it when he was quite young, either in or recently out of graduate school, and I've never seen it reprinted anywhere else, although it's an interesting piece and adumbrates some of the notions he would develop in The Old Weird America. But anyway, I also found a letter to the editor about it (titled "Intellectual Bullshit") in the next issue:

I really dig your paper, especially the good guy/bad guy slant, BUT please don’t print any more of that intellectual bullshit by what’s his name. You’re supposed to be hip, right? Well, just take the first sentence: "When we return to America remember there was no real innocence after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Endicott, the severest of Puritans destroyed Hawthorne’s Merry Mount, erasing the orgies and childish bachanale in favor of a darker religion." Now what the fuck does all that mean? Can you tell me—in English? I mean, I know you can’t since this is a letter, but don’t print any more college papers. What did he get on it, anyway—a B-plus?” Joe Usetit, letter to the editors, Good Times 2, no. 14 (April 9 1969), 12.

Given that "Joe Usetit" looks like a pseudonym, I can't discount the possibility that Marcus wrote this letter himself, but assuming it's not a prank, this is actually quite an interesting letter -- not so much the letter itself as what it says about the incongruous appearance of Marcus's writing in a grubby obscure underground paper, and, more generally, the uneasy place of intellectualism in the 1960s counterculture.** It's not that intellectuals had no place in underground newspapers, rock mags, etc.; it's that the job of the "intellectual" had been redefined while leaving its fundamental identity in place.*** (And as this happened it created new difficulties and opportunities for intellectuals like Marcus.) But really, that's not what my article is about, and exiling the whole thing to an endnote is really no solution, because then what's the note doing there? You sometimes see articles by academics where the average page has about ten lines of above-the-line main text and two-thirds of the page is taken up by kitchen-sink footnotes. It's usually a bad sign when your writing starts to look like that. So that letter from "Joe Usetit" got expunged, though I at least have the consolation of being able to put it up on my blog.

*Greil Marcus, “American Classical Music,” San Francisco Express Times 2, no. 12 (25 March 1969), 5.

**All due apologies for using such a blunt and inadequate term for such a complicated and multifaceted entity, but you have to call it something, and anyway you know what I mean when I say "counterculture," right? Close enough for rock and roll, as they say, or at least for a blog.

***It's probably worth quoting Stuart Hampshire's definition of the intellectual again:

First, an intellectual is someone who takes it for granted that a strenuously developed and articulate intelligence constitutes a claim to be recognized, and an independent status in society, even apart from any solid achievements in science or scholarship or literature. . . Second, an intellectual is someone who refuses to be confined to one specialized, or professional, application of his power; he will be ready to inquire into almost anything that is formulated in sufficiently strict intellectual terms, and will find delight in the process of inquiry, quite independently of the results. . . . Third, an intellectual is someone who never lowers his voice in piety, and who is not prepared to be solemn and restrained, in deference to anything other than the internal standards of the intellect and the imagination.

All Music is Soundtrack music

[Orig.: “Every Life is a Biography.” A & E network blurb for the TV show Biography.]

A week ago our friend Eric had a gathering at his house to watch the films made by his 16-year-old son Connor, who has already won a variety of film-making awards (film competitions often have high-school divisions). Connor’s special talent is silent films—he excels in a kind of off-center retro take on Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The event was a hoot, and I could well have been seeing the early works of the next Robert Rodriguez.

What I could not help thinking about throughout was the music he chose. The silent films had generic honkytonk piano throughout (I came home and was gleefully playing some of it by ear much to Debbie’s and Ben’s…disgust; what does a guy have to do to get a little adulation at home? And don’t say “SOME HOUSEWORK,” ladies, it hasn’t worked so far), a kind of period-specific musical white noise that did not necessarily accompany, comment upon, or interact with the visual material in any way, but locked in the century-old context inside the first three notes. Other films had random cues stuck in—stuff from the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, I think, and from other soundtracks, musicals, whatever. Often these were used with ironic effect, and I found myself giggling much of the time. Sound cues that come under the categories of Epic and Momentous and Tragic and so on can be sidesplittingly funny when the actors are a high school student’s friends and the scripts are, y’know, by high schoolers. High school humor can miss a lot, but when it bull’s-eyes something, that something is forever skewered—film conventions, literary pretensions, whatever. It’s wonderful.

Was it Cadillac who advertised the “set your life to music” feature for their car CD players, where you program in tracks from your own CDs and work in the fades so that you can basically assemble your own soundtrack for the drive home from work? It’s like that moment in the Disney feature The Emperor’s New Groove where the narrator (David Spade, I think) snipes at another character for singing his own cheesy soundtrack music while skulking about on some comically fell errand. A camp Disney joke, sure, but how many of us haven’t, at some point or other…

All Common Practice music, including most soundtrack music, has ideas of reference. The vocabularies of film music—I’m saying nothing new here—are derived from virtually all music that came before: the symphonic and operatic repertories, orchestral Jazz, popular music of all kinds, everything. In this, composed soundtrack music is no different from the music a talented theater accompanist would provide for silent films. You could do generic white noise, or follow the drama, making musical references and providing sound effects and so on. So it was with some of the soundtracks we were hearing on Connor’s films: knock-offs of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” etc. That is not so different from famous cues that scream Epic or Momentous or whatever; in fact it’s precisely the same pattern: you need the music to say something that you either can’t, or that you feel would be crude if you just came out and said it. You need a strategy with more deftness.

Now, think of—let’s say—a young person in love with his or her favorite song. James Huneker has a cute, if dated and saccharine, image of the female Chopin fan: “Surely these Nocturnes are my whole life!” Is our attraction to the popular songs with which we have most closely identified in the past really all that different, though? Man, that one hits me right…there. Cosmic Truth, that one. That’s me surviving the hopelessness of work, that’s me wandering alone on dark streets, that’s me tormented nigh unto death by my memories. Oh, man, and that guitar solo says it all. ALL! I’ll just hit “play” again and turn it up…

My favorite quotation from Gustav Mahler is “There is no music, from Beethoven onwards, that is without its inner program.” In Mahler’s view, that makes The Great Masterworks Of The Repertoire…soundtrack music. They either narrate or accompany a story, most often unknown to the listener, with a coherence and continuity that establish them as real, lasting art. In no way does it mean, though, that they aren’t talking about something else: love or war or a hunt or a hopeless quest or whatever. The natural way of listening—letting your mind wander and allowing a story to be told—may be far closer to the “right” way than listening for structure and thematic coherences and the rest of the stuff people with training are supposed to be listening for. In some measure, all art is escapism, as all literature is: escape to the imagination, to idealization, to something that both entertains and teaches something deeper about this Real World. But as we negotiate this Real World, we need our soundtrack: inner conversations, inner music: favorite tunes we play in our heads or on our iPods, and it can be the most celebrated of masterworks or the most ephemeral of pop songs. The soundtrack spins on and on.

When I was just 18, I was given John Hale’s Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 to read in preparation for my first year of college (some catch-up for my year reading history at Portsmouth Polytechnic—Portsmouth, England—when my father was teaching there on exchange). One image that stuck with me was that of the constant presence, in the ear of the Early Modern European, of bells: bells for the many church services, for civic notices and signals, for marking the hours. The soundtrack, in other words. Other epochs have had street singers (often satirized iconographically), laborers and farmers who sang at their tasks, the huge repertory of folksong that is the human inheritance. A constant sounding, a constant accompaniment, a constant association of particular music and songs and gestures with particular emotions and activities.

Plus ça change, in other words. What I like about this is the image of us all singing our own soundtracks, so to speak, setting our lives to music, and that in key ways most western music functions the same way—accompanimentally, referentially, children’s rhymes up through symphonies. And, one suspects, it has been this way for a long, long time.

*I* own the sixties, dammit. Mine! MINE!!

A couple of weeks ago I did a paper at EMP, the experience of which was a drag -- tepid reaction and a tiny audience, which got a bit smaller when Robert Christgau, who walked in late, walked out again a few minutes later. But he saw enough, I guess, to style it the worst paper presentation he saw. Now, I dunno, maybe it really did suck. I have no objectivity about my own stuff. But the reason Christgau gives for his rough grading gives me something to think about, though not what he presumably would want me to think about.

His [i.e. my] problem: indicated no knowledge of any difference in historical importance or political acuity between the Weathermen (dead wrong but smart and momentous), Timothy Leary (never a political figure even when he claimed to be), and the Manhattan pseudo-anarchists who briefly gathered under the rubric Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (marginal publicity seekers without even minimal follow-through).

I actually don't disagree with what he's saying about these figures. Well, most of it. Christgau seems pretty confident in saying what is and isn't political when the boundary was never clear at the time and hasn't gotten a whole lot clearer since -- blurring that boundary was, after all, the point. But the basics seem sound enough: the Weatherman had more detailed critiques and a more intellectual style, grounded in canons of Marxist thought, than the others; Leary was either a fraud or a trickster (maybe both?) who became "political" when it suited him; and the UATWM talked big but didn't really do much more than throw some trash into the Lincoln Center fountain.

But this doesn't change my argument. Not that Christgau would have known what that was, since he left long before I was done.* Though to be charitable, I suspect that Christgau and I are after different things. On this point, he's a splitter, and I'm a lumper. What Christgau seems to want is to understand the revolutionary imagination of each groupuscule separately: if each one proceeded from a slightly different notion of "revolution," and if each differed in the effectiveness and authenticity of its political commitment, then it doesn't make sense to lump them together. On the other hand, I think that you learn something from tracing the strands of revolutionary thought and (more to the point) sentiment that bind different groups and different ideologies -- hard-political and countercultural, in various mixtures -- into a single (albeit loose) historical entity.

Now, I guess I could say "let's agree to disagree" and leave it at that, but it seems to me that there's something else going on here that has less to do with historiography in the abstract and more to do with personal investment in history. The terms by which Christgau wants to separate these groups from one another (being "smart and momentous" versus being "marginal publicity seekers," etc.) show nothing so much as an unreflective acceptance of the same stale categories by which veterans of the 1960s have always tried (and usually failed)** to write a convincing analysis of their fondly-remembered youth. Christgau wants to say that some radicals were realer than others—but what does it mean to be real when the ruling notion that underwrites all these different groups, the idea of sudden, total, and irrevocable Revolution, is itself a kind of fiction? The assertion that Weatherman was "momentous" and others were just poseurs hides the familiar metaphysics of authenticity, or doesn't hide it at all, actually, it's right there on the surface. But as I've said a couple of times, we're all at a point where we all know that "authenticity" is just an ideological mystification and yet lack any way of understanding ourselves and our music without it.

And Christgau's difficulty in answering Joshua Clover's question after his own paper was a symptom of that. Christgau had spoken knowingly of the pop-crit habit of finding transgression in the music we happen to like, but Clover afterward suggested that Christgau was doing the same sort of thing, finding a voter instead of a revolutionary at the end of every song. (Can't quite remember how Clover put it, it was better than that.) For a while Christgau affected not to understand what Clover was talking about, but after an uncomfortable silence he offered that what he really meant was that he "misses the monoculture." Now, that's a whole separate issue that I won't get into, except to say that I sure don't miss it, and when I hear Christgau saying he does, I'm guessing that part of what he misses is the power that comes of being its arbiter. 

But what the exchange showed is that while Christgau reviews a million new records each year—he keeps busy, say that for him—the basic shape of his thought, the way he views things, hasn't changed much since the 1970s. And it's a way of thinking that, for all the bourgeois meliorism it's picked up in the years since, still sentimentalizes the "ideals of the sixties," as they're always called, honoring the knucklehead Maoist-Debrayist adventurism of Weatherman as a real pushback against a real oppressor and defending the purity of their revolt against usurpers -- much the way rock critics of the old monoculture days, back when rock was hegemon, would praise some bands as unco-opted agents of cultural resistance and damn others as sellouts to the Man, or (for those who picked up a little Adorno), the "culture industry."

The problem with presenting conference papers is that, in order to stay within the 20-minute time limit, you can talk about what you think about, say, Weatherman and Timothy Leary, but you can't really say much about why you think that way. The warrant of my interpretations is a notion that the various manifestations of political protest in the late 1960s/early 1970s share a certain sensibility that grows from a belief in a cultural hegemony that must be resisted by aesthetic creation, either of art or the self. (This goes even for the most political types, like Weatherman, which veered towards a cultural-hegemony critique shortly after going underground.) But from my point of view, there's no oppressive cultural dominant, no "Man," just a shared belief in there being one, and a range of aesthetic self-stylings available to those who do believe. And this warrant is necessarily going to remain in the background for a 20-minute paper, but it was still obvious from the tenor of the talk, which I think explains Christgau's indignation. You can't expect someone like that to enjoy a point of view from which there are no distinctions of authentic and co-opted, radical and poseur -- a point of view from which the distinctions between Weatherman and UATWM and Timothy Leary pale beside their shared investment in a fantasy. (Or, in rather more diplomatic cultural-studies terms,  a "political imaginary.")

But people like Christgau won't go away any time soon, and they always have one advantage: I was there, and you weren't. Of course, one could as easily reply that the people who were there are the worst authorities for their own experience, because the issues of the 1960s refuse to die***, and those with an investment in those times, something from the past they have to defend in the present, are not going to proceed in the spirit of disinterested inquiry. But we've been having this historiographic argument for a long time, and we'll keep having it until the boomers are gone. And maybe even still after that. Now this is why I want to write about this kind of stuff: it's fascinating in itself, and it's so obviously relevant to things that matter now. And yet for young American scholars, writing about the 1960s is always going to be a minefield, for the same reason that French scholars are always going to have problems dealing with their own signal moment of modernity, the French Revolution. (Revolutions, again.) Francois Furet, a revisionist French historian whose work on the French Revolution stirred up the same sorts of passions as revisionist work on the 1960s does now, wrote about this phenomenon:

Historians engaged in the study of the Merovingian Kings or the Hundred Years War are not asked at every turn to present their research permits. . . .

The historian of the French Revolution, on the other hand, must produce more than proof of competence. He must show his colors. He must state from the outset where he comes from, what he thinks and what he is looking for; what he writes about the French Revolution is assigned a meaning and label even before he starts working: the writing is taken as his opinion, a form of judgment that is not required when dealing with the Merovingians but indispensable when it comes to treating 1789 or 1793. As soon as the historian states that opinion, the matter is settled; he is labeled a royalist, a liberal or a Jacobin. Once he has given the password his history has a specific meaning, a determined place and a claim to legitimacy.” (François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster, p. 1)

Those scholars my age or younger who find themselves working on America in the first three decades after WW II: get ready. Have your research permit handy. You will be asked for it. In many ways nothing has changed in the 12 years since Rick Perlstein wrote his Lingua Franca essay Who Owns the Sixties?, which dealt with the "possessive memory" of sixties veterans and the resulting turf wars between Gitlin's generation of scholars and younger writers like David Farber and Doug Rossinow. The excellent 2002 Routledge essay anthology Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s includes a weary note in the acknowledgments section:

The gestation of this project witnessed a whole set of obstacles, setbacks, and quirky or menacing characters that would not have been out of place in your average sixties flashback. Over the past four years we were confronted by faux Hopi curses; the "possessive memory" of certain veterans of the era who took umbrage at anyone outside their ranks writing "their" history; photographers who sold us vintage photos for the volume, but insisted we meet them at 11 p.m. in Washington Square Park and bring cash; and peer-reviewers who treated us like a neo-Stalinist cell that had fatally deviated from the party line. (p. v)

I've had to deal with a certain amount of that, and so have other friends of mine -- especially the "possessive memory" part. (Not as much the Hopi curses.) Eric Drott (one of the most brilliant scholars working on the postwar avant-garde) ran the 1968 evening panel at the AMS national meeting in Los Angeles a couple of years ago and encountered a number of people pulling the old what-the-hell-do-you-know-sonny routine as well. It can't be helped; it can only be borne. But we're not going away either.****

*And with the ostentatious rudeness of someone who sticks around at a concert until the Boulez and then leaves moments after the piece starts: the thing had an air of Making A Point, that Some Things Are Not To Be Tolerated.   

**All exceptions duly noted, of course -- for ex., they don't come more archetypally 1960s-veteranish than Todd Gitlin, whose Years of Hope, Days of Rage is, for all its unavoidable biases, an astonishing, wonderful book.

***As we've seen again and again in the present Obama-Clinton campaign -- the Weatherman even put in an appearance! -- with Clinton doggedly dragging us back into the cultural-war issues that got seeded in the 1960s and 1970s and Obama trying to get past them. There is, with Clinton and her supporters, the same habit of thinking of everybody in terms of demography, as if the only thing that matters is that she would be a woman president, or as if the choice between her and Obama is really only a choice between a woman and a black guy. Obama's not free of this kind of thinking either, and as Carl Wilson has pointed out, it's an ideological inheritance that no-one, left or right, seems able to shake. The relevance to this particular blog post is probably pretty obvious: I don't think that the social position of various actors in the 1960s radical left determines their cultural position, but it's hard for people to imagine there's any other way to see it.

****Of course, if I live long enough, there's a special hell waiting for me in like 2050: some young jerk is going to come up with boldly revisionist reading of the current decade, and I will find myself asking "how can someone who wasn't even born then talk about the Bush years?" 

When It All Goes Wrong

Is this from The Onion? A Dartmouth teacher sues the university over student behavior in her class.

There is a man-bites-dog flavor to this story. Usually people (parents, faculty, right-wing talk show propaganda ministers) harangue their righteous listeners about litigious students, the pervasive sense of entitlement, the breakdown of authority, O Tempus O Mores. In the present case, what is the faculty member, one Priya Venkatesan, unhappy about?

It’s worth reading the article. She was teaching there on a grant, and is now going to Northwestern. She has a wonderfully varied background, which includes both scientific research and literary theory. She alleges a wide variety of personal affronts, both from colleagues (disrespect in the lab, etc.) and students: systematic disruptions of class, patterns of disrespect (one young woman who routinely coughed in a certain way, etc.). Predictably, the comments to be found on the web (a sampling may be found at the bottom of this article from the NY Daily News) reflect the usual hobbyhorses: concerns about left-wing propaganda, right-wing backlash, right-wing anti-intellectualism, cultural insensitivity (more respect for teachers is shown in India…but wait, she was raised in the U.S.!), miserable behavior of the rich kids at Dartmouth (there had to be an anti-elitism component to this—those kids probably eat arugula and Belgian Endive too), etc. etc. So we have a bunch of unhappy, finger-pointing people, and yet another pop-culture guffaw-fest about those wacky college profs. And higher education costs what??

A heavy sigh for all concerned. I do know how a class can go bad; the one Gen-Ed I taught at my institution in Spring 1994, a disastrous mismatch of teacher and course assignment, went down. I had taught similar classes elsewhere with real success, but the combination of my new-faculty-member’s expectations + extant student culture + a bad text + 140 people simply = disaster. There was something close to open rebellion, vicious student evaluations (my favorite, which I’ve probably shared already: “If he thinks he’s so great, he should probably get a job in a school for music”), a tiny minority of furtive supporters (a note slipped under my door: “Dr. Bellman, you don’t know me; I’m in MUS XXX, and am not getting a very good grade, but I know what you’ve been trying to do and I wanted to say thanks”). I do understand how such things can happen, and how the teacher feels when anything resembling teaching or learning is sabotaged by student resentment.

What is being left out of the Dartmouth discussion is humanity. Before students are left-wing or right-wing they’re students, almost exclusively young people, and young people (for which God is to be fervently praised) have the most sensitive shit-detectors (if you’ll excuse me; this is a WWII-era term I learned from my father) on the planet. Authority must be earned, and if it is perceived to be undeserved, watch out. If you throw around postmodernist concepts without explaining them (indeed, without even adequately explaining the word), watch out. If you treat students like small children who are to have your wisdom stuffed into them like little sleepingbag-sacks, watch out. If you show no evidence of having even the slightest sense of humor, about yourself or others or even your material, watch out. I don’t mean to trivialize anything or anyone, I mean a simple sense of humor. This is life; it’s a funny business after all, and nothing is funnier than kamikazes who sit in rooms and labs trying to learn stuff, poring over books and so on. Learning and self-improvement are noble and glorious and second to nothing as endeavors…and for all that, the whole education equation is still funny.

My outsider’s take on this is that the disrespect was bi-directional, but that the teacher started with some good, old-fashioned I’m-so-learned, eat-your-spinach-you-little-snots pretentiousness. This was followed by a sense of her victimization, and (ahem—given a certain Critical training) she immediately concluded that it had to do with her Indian background and gender. Nothing will enrage students the way that will (“You’re mistreating me because I’m a girl!”—the female students probably took the lead), and so nature took its course. It seems as if this misguided teacher, who truly is bright and accomplished and apparently maintains a cluelessness of epic proportions, listened to all the praise she got over the years for being bright. It’s like a mama's-pet bright kid who feels entitled to be “special,” favored, a know-it-all, etc.…addicted to praise, in other words. You’re expecting this to be tolerated and enabled by college kids? At Dartmouth?

Watch out for that tree!

Trolls

Since we're starting to get people posting things solely to insult and start fights -- trolls, in other words -- I should probably make it clear that I have absolutely no problem with deleting their comments. As Scott McLemee has written, the internet is a "cultural affirmative-action program for the bellicose, the ignorant, and the deranged," and while I suppose a bellicose deranged ignoramus has a right to say what she thinks, she can start her own damn blog and say it there. I don't owe trolls anything, and I'm sure not going to let them stink up my own site.

Have a problem with this? Think I'm crushing dissent? Don't care. As Joe Bob Briggs used to say, I am not the United Way.

Saturday nutty song

And now for something friggin' nuts. Bert Lahr, best known for stealing the show as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, here performs the unhinged "Woof Song" with a big band. It appears in this anthology of old Fox movies and was apparently deleted from the film for which it was shot (something called Love and Hisses) because the studio executives were baffled by it. It's a sort of mash-up of Cab Calloway and Lahl's old honkytonk monkeyshines (he started out as a vaudeville performer).

Friday happy song

My graduate students are handing in their seminar papers today, and are no doubt suffering. And it's the last week of class for a lot of schools (Indiana ends a little early), so there's a whole lot of end-of-term suffering to go around. It's a good time to spread a little cheer, in the form of a song.

I defy you not to love this. (Via American Elf)

Also: check out the cartoonist's homepage, which has a lot of her artwork. She's really good!

Anarcho-primitivism for the win

To continue from the other day, re. Gould, McLuhan, and their shared vision of a world retribalized with the help of electronic media:

What's interesting about McLuhan isn't whether he's right or not. His notion that an electronic "global village" would bring back tribal society throughout the technologized West seems crazy now, but as I like to say, cultural theory, McLuhan’s especially, is often best read as if it were a kind of speculative fiction. The collisions of different and incommensurable frames of time and space that both Gould and McLuhan are here imagining -- the ancient and the modern, the tribe and the nation --  are also everywhere in science fiction, or, for that matter, in the anarcho-primitivist political imagination. Or some combination of both.

Did you watch Fight Club? Perhaps you remember this passage, part of which appears in one of Tyler Durden's monologues:

We wanted to blast the world free of history.

We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.

You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. . . . ”

“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.

This is a vision of the primitive breaking out within the modern world, bursting out of it and tearing it apart in the process. The special pleasure it offers comes from putting the modern and the primitive in the same mental frame; the resulting collisions of time and space (the ancient jungle in the concrete city, etc.) allow our ordinary workaday world to become newly mysterious and exotic. As I argue in my forthcoming Representations essay, exotica entertainments, including the music of Les Baxter, are structured by this trope of temporal disjuncture.

But what's interesting about this trope of representation is that it's never entirely clear whether the picture of the world it paints is for entertainment purposes only or whether it is meant to offer a serious theory. McLuhan's notion of technologized retribalization was certainly intended as a theory, which is to say, as a comprehensive understanding of how the world works and what direction its operations are leading it. But inasmuch as this theory has turned out to be spectacularly wrong, perhaps it's now more interesting to think about its late-1960s vogue the way we might understand the 1950s vogue for exotica pop—as a collective fantasy, a way of viewing the world that that was less about finding enlightenment than finding pleasure. In short, we could read cultural theory as a fiction -- that is, as a notion entertained not because it might be true, but because it is fun to imagine. 

Fight Club is entertainment, right? It had Brad Pitt and Meat Loaf and everything. But the passage I quoted is also basically a blueprint for the anarcho-primitivist conception of revolution. The idea is, at some point we'll stop being passive consumers, we'll stop allowing ourselves to be penned like veal calves in fluorescent-lit cubicles, we'll wake up: suddenly aware of our alienation, we will erupt in a sudden and spontaneous paroxysm of smashing and burning (the necessary and inevitable moment of creative destruction), and then a tribal, archaic, peaceful anarchy will be born from the broken shards of the old consumerist technocracy. This is, I think, as wildly unpersuasive a theory as McLuhan's retribalization thesis. It has the same underpants gnome business structure as other theories of revolution with a counterculture/left flavor—Step 1: develop revolutionary consciousness. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Revolution! But as a theory it is no less seriously meant than McLuhan's (with which it shares some obvious similarities). This wordless series of comics panels (done in the style of those instructional laminated cards that show you how to use the safety equipment on an airplane) lays out the anrcho-primitivist theory of revolution in graphic form. (Warning -- some sex and nudity, not safe for work. Actually, even without the sex and nudity it would  unsafe for work anyway, inasmuch as it promotes the violent destruction of the corporate workplace. "Unsafe for work" gets a new meaning here.)

I found these images here, but it originated in a West Coast anarchist group's project to put Fight Club's Project Mayhem into practice: this flier was produced to be mailed to corporations in their business reply mail envelopes.

A side note about anarchism in general: I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to anarchism, being anti-statist myself, but I acknowledge that as a political philosophy it doesn't yield many feasible plans for alternatives to the various kinds of statism currently on offer. That's kind of the point, I guess. But anyone who's spent any time in a place that's experiencing real anarchy -- for example, Haiti in 1993, where I was working for the summer -- isn't going to recognize the peaceful, creative society of panels 10-16. Indeed, a lot of anarchists don't seem to have much in mind beyond panels 1-9. I sometimes wonder if "anarchism" isn't usually a way of dressing up a general desire to break things in the clothes of serious-sounding political critique. Even pacifist anarchists seem to place just a little too much faith in purgative violence -- putting off the personal responsibility for peaceful action onto the idea that revolutionary violence is a necessary and unavoidable historical stage. (This trick of putting things off onto History -- what I want is irrelevant, the logic of history dictates that heads must roll, etc., is a bad habit borrowed from Marxism, about which a lot of self-described anarchists really should be a bit less credulous.) The comic V for Vendetta, probably the most remarkable single anarchist piece of pop culture, plays the standard line on violent revolution:

. . .  then meet with them no more, he continues in the next panel. But they never seem to want to leave on their own, you know? That's always the problem.

It's all about meme

The dead body of the old meme has hardly cooled before another follows quickly to take its place. (Oh, and by the way, from Kim Schafer here's another one, which gets extra points for sort of looking like her, only in a Lichtenstein-esque way.)

Scott has tagged me with this:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Since I've just sent a couple of dozen books back to the library in my biennial half-hearted-desk-clearing, there was actually only one book near at hand -- Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner. Which, by the way, I recommend warmly, since it neatly anthologizes a great many invaluable pieces of writing that lie at the intersection between music, sound, technology, and the listening body. A few of my favorite pieces in it include Simon Reynolds's "Noise," Frederic Rzewski "Little Bangs," Brian Eno's "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" and "Ambient Music," and Glenn Gould's "The Prospects of Recording." Most of these essays have been abridged, but intelligently, and Gould's essay (the full-length version of which can be read here) is actually improved by the editing. (Gould's prose style was pretty undisciplined -- he would have made a good blogger.) As it happens, this is the essay that's on page 123. And here are the relevant sentences:

When we find that the expression of that culture represents what seem to us archaic ideologies, we condemn it as old-fashioned or sterile, or puritanical, or as possessed of any other limitation from which we consider ourselves emancipated. With simultaneous transmission we set aside our touristlike fascination with distant and exotic places and give vent to impatience at the chronological tardiness the natives display.  To this extent, Professor McLuhan's concept of the "global village" -- the simultaneity of response from McMurdo Sound to Murmansk, from Taiwan to Tacoma -- is alarming.

Funny that it should be this particular passage, given that I've written so many times about both Gould and McLuhan (though not at the same time). Gould here is thinking about what kinds of impact recording technology might have on people generally, and he's thinking about McLuhan's insistence on the simultaneity/instantaneity of electronic media. McLuhan defined a medium as anything that extends human senses and capacities -- a book, in his thinking, was an extension of the eye, the gramophone an extension of the ear, and so on. So In McLuhan's way of thinking, the worldwide network of electronic media made each individual like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, feeling the vibrations transmitted from the periphery, instantly aware of movements in a vast space beyond the limits of the body. For McLuhan, this new interconnection and receptivity would lead to the renewal of archaic tribal forms of social organization within which "the individual," an invention of modern literate man, would vanish. Though Gould didn't mention McLuhan by name very often, it's often been remarked that his ideas about technology and society were rather McLuhanesque. There's a passage in his eccentric self-interview "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould" where he lays out his "neomedieval anonymity quest on behalf of the artist," a vision of ancient social forms (nonhierarchical, nonindividualistic) coming into new existence through the paradoxical mediation of modern technology:

I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public -- and let me get on record right now the fact that I'm not at all happy with words like "public" and "artist"; I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology -- that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with -- or better still, unaware of -- the presumed demands of the marketplace -- which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of "public" responsibility, and his "public" will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

But in my randomly-selected passage Gould shows some ambivalence about the "global village," too. Gould is disturbed by the thought that a "global village" might simply lead to a kind of large-scale rationalizing of the multiple and overlapping temporalities that exist throughout the world. McLuhan himself was often asked about whether his vision of a new tribalism implied a new mass conformity. In the Playboy interview (probably the best place to start for anyone wanting a quick introduction to his thought -- or at least that part of his thought that made him an intellectual celebrity in the 1960s), McLuhan responded to a similar objection in this way:

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony — the customary life mode of any tribal people.

There's more to say about this, though . . . actually a lot more, because this gets into some of the stuff I write about in an article on exotica that I have coming out in Representations later in the summer.

Oh, and by the way, Brent, Phil, Rebecca,  Gabriel, and the dudes at amusicology  . . . tag, you're it.