What Do We Make?

What do we make in America? It’s rather an urgent question, and maybe better is to ask what do we sell in America? Beyond the making and selling of cars and houses – not doing all that well right now – we make and sell culture. And I do mean make and sell, as in manufacturing. What America made and sold from 1942 to 1989 almost literally conquered the globe. It was arguably the “Deuce-and-a-half” truck, more than any other single thing, that won Word War II, and the Cold War was won by Levis, Coca-Cola and Michael Jackson – maybe you see what I’m getting at.

What we make now and can’t sell, what we are choking on to some extent, are things that cost too much and do too much, and are worthless in their overwhelming abundance. We didn’t really need them, but we could have them, so why not? And now we can’t get rid of them. Not unlike our relationship to China – on the one hand, the Chinese own much of our present and future, on the other, there’s a group of well-known ignorant crazies who want to have a war with them. That’s some kind of recession in political and strategic thinking.

This all comes together with “Chinese Democracy,” and no, I’m not just being glib. To get the music out of the way – since I’m not writing about notes and sounds just now – I will express no opinion on the record. I’m not a fan of Guns n’ Roses. They do what they do well, and it doesn’t interest me, in part because the commerce can’t be separated from the music. Guns n’ Roses is a band making hard rock music, and they are selling the commodity of rebellion and anti-social swagger, while their product is produced and distributed by a conglomerate that, ultimately, owns the recordings – record companies have been using a modern plantation system for decades, which makes the amazing variety of American musical culture that’s been preserved a mind-boggling and bittersweet ray of light in an otherwise slowly unfolding tragedy. It’s not American unless it can be bought and sold, and if it couldn’t be bought and sold, we would not have it.

And so “Chinese Democracy” is a package of some 77 minutes of recorded music. It’s also seemingly an exceedingly small, modest result of an investment of almost 20 years and perhaps $13 million – the astonishing figure I see quoted most frequently. The package itself – a disc, booklet and case – is available only at Best Buy, for $11.99, which means it will take 1,100,000 units sold to recoup that cost. It’s an odd concept – something that Rose and Geffen hope will be massively popular available at only one outlet. It has to be massively popular as well, there’s too much money at stake. How is it that an album can cost so much? With every Mac OS loaded with Garageband, and with wonderful and popular music essentially being made at home, it points to an archaic method of thinking and working. Music is made with sound, with the voice and instruments, and can be preserved and spread through the ear or with paper and pencil. It’s hard to conceive that a musician would absolutely require that many years, those many millions, and a dozen recording studios and associated engineers and producers to make a record, because those appurtenances have nothing to do with music. But for someone with a very limited imagination, someone who sees everything as a product to be put in a package, someone who’s idea of innovation is bigger, bigger, always bigger, well, I can see how someone like that would think that’s what it takes to manufacture a big name record – to the CEO of a record company, the package itself is the product, and music has noting to do with it. Just as the car is something that more and more products are put into. And so we choke on their products, and they inevitably choke as well.

No one needs to choke, because “Chinese Democracy” is also available at iTunes, which is essentially a music store that resides in the home, and also a distributor for anyone who makes music in their home, without the producers and engineers and studios and millions of dollars in costs. Geffen and Axl Rose seem to be backhandedly accepting the obvious, which is that digital media is not only the future of commercial music but a great business benefit as well. It’s a different business though, and if you lack imagination, you can’t possibly see that something that is different than what is in your mind can be of any benefit, if you can see it at all. It’s like color blindness – manufacturing and selling CDs in cases is green, digital media is blue, but it doesn’t have any color at all if you can’t see it, which you can’t. The intriguing and unsettling part of digital music is that is has no physical content; the player exists but the music is just information. It has taken us technology to get us to realize what music has always been, just ephemeral information. This is a good thing even if it takes some getting used to. Some companies are seeing it already, though. It’s interesting that the same week “Chinese Democracy” is finally released brings news that one of the world’s largest record companies is now selling more music digitally than physically. That’s a color that’s difficult not to see, if you have any interest in knowing other colors exist.

One fruit of digital culture, I hope, will be that imagination will force itself onto American commerce, will abrade the dullness and opacity of thought and imagination. A great number of us are suffering the result of this lack of imagination, the inability to conceive that oil may be a limited resources, that housing prices may drop, that risk still exists, that success has many, many handmaidens. The gap between how things could be and how they are is measured by the idea that things can only be how they’ve always been; American society has been run by Abe Simpsons for quite awhile. That has now changed in one huge and painless way, which bodes well for the future. The rest of that change, though, the change in just what we make and what we sell, and how we do it, is going to happen, but it’s going to be a lot more painful, at least until Abe Simpson stops running it. Or ruining it.

Frank Rich Has The Day Off

Which is too bad, because I needed him today, considering the disconnect between facts and history and contributors to the New York Times Op-Ed page.

I’m not interested in claims of liberal or conservative media bias – they are essentially meaningless score keeping and disconnected from much of reality. The Times is a good example – it has a bias in favor of The Establishment. It’s the national news organ of The Establishment, and has been for decades. And while that can be frustrating to experience, it’s valuable to know what The Establishment is thinking, or as is frequently the case, not-thinking. In fact, it’s amazing how deeply lost The Establishment is in a clotted, solipsistic set of ‘ideas.’ Because they don’t have any ideas, they only have personalities.

One example of this are the stories about how Obama is abandoning his ideas of change, proven by his prospective cabinet appointments. This is true of the only unit of measure is personalities. Of course that’s an incredibly shallow and intellectually bankrupt way of seeing things. After eight years in which the dominant political idea about government is that it should be used to enrich a tiny segment of the population, it’s a profound change that the new President may feel that government can perform constructive and strategic tasks, which will require people with knowledge, experience and abilities. Also, a government that might actually pursue strategic diplomacy rather than being held hostage to AIPAC and the American Enterprise Institute would be an enormous change.

And speaking of the AEI, it’s amazing that some of the co-authors and leaders of an incredibly wrong-headed strategic policy are still being asked to present their opinions to the American public. With the global failures of Donald Rumsfeld writ large, and the moral evil of his torture policies having destroyed the soul of the American republic, why in any way should his opinions be NOT scorned and mocked? And how is it that international con-man and likely Iranian intelligence agent Ahmed Chalabi also gets space in my newspaper? These people have done tremendous harm to our country. Let me be clear about this – waging war against Iraq was never a worthy idea that was bungled by the smug idiocy or Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. It was, morally and strategically, wrong, ignorant, idiotic and just plain crazy (in that special magical thinking way that Conservatives so love) and, necessarily and inevitably, doomed to the exact failure it has become. Invading a country, occupying it and forcing it to have the government you wish it to have has never and will never work in human history, and it is foolish to think otherwise. And the narcissistic moral certainty of this crew also meant torture was inevitable, because when you are right and good, and someone opposes you, than everything you do to crush that opposition is right and good. While Chalabi is smarter than Kagan and Rumsfeld combined and squared, he is an amoral con-artist who amazingly managed to set our country to war against his, although without gaining his ultimate prize, which was to be installed as authoritarian political leader of Iraq. That’s where he made the same mistake, never picking up Sun Tzu or Clausewitz.

But these assholes are members of The Establishment, and are speaking to their fellows, and their fellow know pretty much nothing other than what the received opinion of their tribe is, and for them we are in Iraq simply because we are there, and we should stay because we are staying. It’s all inertia, all context-free. One refreshing and powerful fundamental change Obama brought to his campaign was to essentially ignore what The Establishment media thought of him, and opined and whined over. He had his plan, he stuck with it and now has enormous political power in the shape of what is essentially his own party and fund-raising means. He doesn’t need The Establishment, and clearly they can’t comprehend this. So not listening to their grave, smug nonsense would be an enormous change.

I May Be Unemployed . . .

But at least I’m a professional, dammit!

The catalog for this exhibit has an essay, co-authored by yours truly. Our 1200 words or so are about Detroit turning into a farming city, and what that means for myths of American identity. No biggie . . .

Scary Good

Andrew Sullivan’s blog directed me to this site, which gave this analysis of my own blog:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

And it did it for free! Impressive!

Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles

While reading John Lanchester’s article on recent books about finance, I was brought up short by this:

… finance, like other forms of human behavior, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality, and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English … In classical music, it was, perhaps, the premiere of “The Rite of Spring.”

No, no, no, no, no – and again no! It’s a measure of my eccentricity that this view continues to bedevil me. I don’t disagree with Lanchester’s point, but his example is all wrong. Self-referentiality in music beings with Schoenberg, with the creation of a system that is only about its own structure (Schoenberg, I don’t think, ever considered the ramifications of his process, which was meant to preserve the past). The Rite of Spring, for all it’s dissonance and discord, is about something, it is narrative in structure and derived directly from folk music, it is echt-Romanticism.

Cultural critics need to know about culture, and although they can’t be expert in all media, they need to be literate. Music is the area where critics tend to consistently fail, half-hearing pieces, lacking knowledge of history and certainly lacking technical knowledge. I blame editors, too, who let this kind of thing by – why is musical knowledge unimportant?

Music is the secret history of Western culture, certainly since the advent of recording technology. It is the plain where the forces of culture, race, racism, colonialism, class, revolution and reaction meet, where identity is born on an individual basis, where the past is examined and the future imagined. I am far from the first to point this out, and it’s no secret to anyone willing to both listen and think at the same time, but somehow it’s outside the moderately learned edges of intellectual culture.

The Music of the Spheres

I collect sound files for digital music, and lately that has meant a lot of sounds of satellites, rockets, ’sferics for an electronic music project. So this, courtesy of an EMF email, is very exciting to me. It’s not the sound of the atmosphere, but of space, the seismology of stars translated into sound! It’s courtesy of the Corot Space Telescope. Go here for more astronomy and sound, and listen to a sample.

How Composers Learn, Part 2

[updated with video, "Batter My Heart," Peter Seller's production] They read, and they write, and not music. They read books about all sorts of things other than music. They gather material, experience, knowledge, ideas. They react to these things. And they write.

Composers are, generally, excellent prose writers. This isn’t a surprise when one considers that the way to learn to write well is to read and write – read good writing, and write and rewrite your own. Composers already work towards clarity and precision in a difficult and abstract language, so writing in their own vernacular usually comes fluidly. The goal in both music and prose is clarity and precision of expression, exactitude. Composers get a lot of practice at that, moving slowly from incoherence to coherence, which is both a short-term and a long-term project. The latter covers a career, and former projects such as this, where I write in main part to bring out and stitch together some coherent voices from the riot going on in my mind.

And that’s the fundamental issue; how are ideas made to cohere, particularly complex ideas, because music, even at its seeming simplest, is a language of complexity. And nothing is more complex, not a novel, not computer code, not a credit default swap, than an opera. So John Adams has produced a great opera and a great book.

The striving for coherence also means exploring the way get from here to there, no matter how short the journey may be. For myself, and this post, the journey begins during the live HD broadcast of Dr. Atomic, last Saturday. After seeing the premiere in San Francisco, a dress rehearsal last month and now this broadcast, I am confident of my knowledge and memory of the work (this was also the first Met HD broadcast I’ve seen, and it was a great experience – excellent sound, interesting and intimate backstage views, documentary material added for the movie theater audiences. While I don’t know how well a spectacle like Aida would come across, the ability to experience Dr. Atomic close-up gave emphasis to how fine the production was, and also the overall excellence of the cast).

I was impressed with many things during this performance, beyond the almost overwhelming emotional impact the opera has. There is something powerfully exciting in being a living witness to a work that will last in the literature, and to seeing true, long-term greatness develop in an artist. Adams has gone from being an interesting associate of the American Minimalist style, to a developing Neo-Romantic composer, to a fine American contemporary composer, to a truly great national and international artist who has subtly but effectively pioneered ways to make music fresh in the 21st century. How this all happens is a mystery in some ways, but clear too. While his memoir cannot describe how his craft improves through work, it can describe how his ideas and style change, both serendipitously and willfully. He is asking important, coherent questions about the American experience, as he alluded to in a backstage interview with Susan Graham; he sees the important questions of today as being about politics, terrorism and science. I don’t think he’s wrong.

Like learning to write by reading great writers, Adams has also learned to make a new style by synthesizing those of other composers. It’s not copying or stealing, it’s more like reverse-engineering, taking something apart to see how it works and putting it back together to see if you can make your own version. This is one of the features of Dr. Atomic, which creates the musical drama through standard means – particular phrases that are matched to characters and dramatic moments – and by conveying different styles for different dramatic purposes, very much in the Romantic operatic style and especially taking after the methods of Berg. All this synthesis mates the means of other composers with Adams himself to produce something new; the bustle of activity around the Trinity project comes by way of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, intimate moments between Oppenheimer and Kitty are in the manner of Ravel’s Daphnis et Cloe, while a great deal of the slow rise in tension in the second act comes from lessons Adams has learned from his own music, especially Shaker Loops and his underrated El Dorado.

If composers learn by reading and writing, and writing conveys a sense of thought and knowledge, what to make of the contrast with people who are, astonishingly, paid to write? What to make of this:

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.

I make it out as someone who knows nothing about music, and can’t think or write coherently. So, no surprise that it’s by Camille Paglia. I read Sexual Personae oh those many years ago, and was struck immediately then, as now, by how she knows nothing at all about music. I don’t mean facts and figures, I mean she can’t listen, she can’t hear it. In that book, she belabored her point by claiming that jazz musicians didn’t dig Debussy because it’s too feminine, which means she’s never heard La Mer or Maiden Voyage. And now this latest drivel. I would say there is a fundamental difference between Sarah Palin and Charlie Parker, and it has to do with intelligence. Parker’s “jumps, breaks and rippling momentum” are impeccably clear and coherent, even at the superhuman speed of his thoughts, even when he was fucked up, which was frequently. My partisan dogma is that I work with language, and like to see it used coherently to convey meaning. Sarah Palin speaks in gibberish, almost randomly tossing out words. She literally makes no sense – I have no idea what she thinks because she cannot say anything that has meaning, so she practically is not thinking anything at all. But that’s okay with political writers like Paglia, or Palin’s sponsor Bill Kristol, another example of how lack of ideas and convictions leads to incoherence. I usually cannot understand what he is trying to say, although it frequently appears to be completely wrong. How’s that new century going, Bill? Strange how this incoherence leads to professional gigs, especially now that I’m unemployed again, and still trying to write whatever I write – essays, music, code – better and better. But then I come from the arts where, like science, bad ideas are left to die, while in politics, we are cursed with them seemingly forever.

Victory in the Culture Wars

Now that the World Series is over, an important part of America goes to sleep for the winter. While I do love the ritual of Sunday football as the bittersweet elision between play and work (I’m fortunately employed again, so less frequent postings), especially my beloved Giants, I still need to reach for a book now and then to put me in touch with the past and the future. Specifically, the American past and future.

Baseball is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle of American culture. We have a few more intense, thrilling days to contemplate another one – it’s not the Presidential election per se, because elections are not unique to America, it’s how this election may mean, and I do so fervently hope it does, a triumph in the culture wars, with America winning.

The culture wars are superficially about things like school prayer, abortion, Christmas displays and flag-burning, but what they are fundamentally about is a battle of American culture against anti-modern, authoritarian culture. They are a fight over accepting reality, the reality that America has been a multi-cultural, pluralistic society since it was first colonized, and the reality that what makes this country different and special is that it is an experiment in modern political thinking, one that values and requires dissent against authority. If Obama wins, American culture wins.

Obama clearly has a huge advantage among young and first-time voters, and if they vote in the same numbers they have registered, it’s a landslide. These voters will also constitute some kind of third party, identified as Democrats but drawn into the political system because of one man. They will be Obama’s party, and they will not have the racial obstacles that have afflicted all previous generations of America. And that itself is a triumph for American culture over atavism. This is because American culture is impossible without African-American culture. The first African slaves arrived in this land in the 16th century, and have had as much, or more, to do with building the nation as European whites. The genealogical roots of blacks in America go back centuries, and touch on the most important people and events in this country’s history – without them there would be no America. And without them there would be no American culture. To paraphrase Duke Ellington, it is fortunate for us that the unfortunate slaves were brought to this shore.

I’m not discounting Thomas Paine, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman and of course Charles Ives. They make America. So do Raymond Chandler, John Ford and Francis Ford Coppolla. And pace Joseph O’Neill – whose book I am enjoying – it’s baseball, not cricket, that makes America. Baseball really becomes America when Jackie Robinson makes his appearance, joining together all the people who built this country in this country’s great game. And America would really become America if Obama is elected president, joining all those who have built this country into its leadership. The voters will make that choice, of course, but this country would not even be in the position to elect the first African-American (truly African-American) president, if it hadn’t been for the blessing and long, pervasive influence of African-American culture, especially musical culture.

African-Amercan musical culture begins sometime in the 19th century, with a mixture of Protestant hymns and spiritual songs, the field songs slaves sang to make it through each hard day, and of course the flavors of French and Spanish songs and dance music percolating through and out of New Orleans. Out of that comes the blues, and jazz. Mix in recording technology, and America starts to hear the other, hidden parts of the country, hear the other people who live here (this is beautifully described in Geoffrey O’Briens Sonata for Jukebox), and they like what they hear. In between the wars, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are stars, and keep revealing the other America to white audiences – one of the great moments from Ken Burns’ “Jazz” is hearing a quote from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who unintentionally saw Armstrong perform and realized that black people had souls. Elvis becomes the great white ‘black’ singer, and makes black music relatively safe for a whole new generation of young whites. British rock bands return their own versions of black singers and blues to these shores. Eventually the dam would break completely, first with Michael Jackson – who did more to win the Cold War than Ronald Reagan – and Hip Hop, which makes black popular music the dominant popular music across the country. So why would young voters have any problems voting for Obama? They have black people in their lives in one way or another every day.

Old, angry white men and their courtiers have been fighting a losing battle for a century now. It was inevitable that the would eventually lose their hold on the levers of power, but until this year I never imagined it would happen in my lifetime. So thank you jazz – my first love – and blues. We wouldn’t be here without you, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Patton, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Personally, that’s what I would prefer the kids to be listening to nowadays, but if it’s Jay-Z who puts Obama over the top, then thank you too sir. Thank you very much.