Fenwick writes, “I had the tremendous opportunity to have a public talk with William Gibson when my university asked if I’d would to do a public talk with a public figure. I had no idea I’d be so lucky as to talk with William Gibson when I agreed. I thought you might be a kick out of our wide-ranging, fun discussion about science fiction and the future.”
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Tag: Culture
Indie rock, class, race, and culture in America
Martin Douglas’s “The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show” is a fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of Douglas’s life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing project who loved indie rock; partly a critique of the way we think about what blackness, whiteness and culture are.
The black kids of my generation and the ones before it were raised with the notion that it’s essential to hold onto one’s “blackness,” and that venturing outside of those boundaries meant you were trying to assimilate to white society, to “be more like one of them.” But essentially every African-American child growing up has an intimate knowledge of some version of the black experience, and the way we dress or the music we listen to still won’t hide the color of our skin. I never saw my interest in alternative culture as a way to obfuscate my racial identity. Aside from the annoyance of being typecast as a fan of a band purely based on superficial concerns, that conversation overlooked the one substantial reason why there are a lot of black people who relate to TV on the Radio’s music: They are a band primarily consisting of African-American men who often explore what it means to be African-American. For a generation of alternative music fans made to believe we were betraying “what it means” to be black, a band had finally come along that made that very idea a theme in its music.
But as TV on the Radio started to grow in notoriety, it still created a schism in my initial attraction to rock music; here was a band that was, for all intents and purposes, “socially acceptable” for black people to like. This falls into my earlier point about young children emulating people who look like them. I imagine if the band were around when I was younger — with their overtures to shoegaze, incisive and smart lyrics, steadfast commitment to experimentalism, and Kyp Malone’s beard — they probably would have been my favorite band throughout my entire childhood. At the very least, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outsider for loving alternative music.
The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show
(via Andre’s Notes)
David Byrne’s How Music Works
Former Talking Heads frontman and all-round happy mutant David Byrne has written several good books, but his latest, How Music Works, is unquestionably the best of the very good bunch, possibly the book he was born to write. I could made good case for calling this How Art Works or even How Everything Works.
Though there is plenty of autobiographical material How Music Works that will delight avid fans (like me) — inside dope on the creative, commercial and personal pressures that led to each of Byrne’s projects — this isn’t merely the story of how Byrne made it, or what he does to turn out such great and varied art. Rather, this is an insightful, thorough, and convincing account of the way that creativity, culture, biology and economics interact to prefigure, constrain and uplift art. It’s a compelling story about the way that art comes out of technology, and as such, it’s widely applicable beyond music.
Byrne lived through an important transition in the music industry: having gotten his start in the analog recording world, he skilfully managed a transition to an artist in the digital era (though not always a digital artist). As such, he has real gut-feel for the things that technology gives to artists and the things that technology takes away. He’s like the kids who got their Apple ][+s in 1979, and keenly remember the time before computers were available to kids at all, the time when they were the exclusive domain of obsessive geeks, and the point at which they became widely exciting, and finally, ubiquitous — a breadth of experience that offers visceral perspective.
There were so many times in this book when I felt like Byrne’s observations extended beyond music and dance and into other forms of digital creativity. For example, when Byrne recounted his first experiments with cellular automata exercise for dance choreography, from his collaboration with Noemie Lafrance:
1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase (in dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated).
2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
4. When everyone is doing the same phrase, the exercise is over.
It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had already begun, albeit in just one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate.
Why we still fight about music and copyright on the Internet
My latest Locus colum, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” asks why music copyright is such a hot potato on the Internet, even in the post-DRM age, when most tunes are $0.99 on Amazon in MP3. The short answer: music’s ancient compact is not entirely compatible with contemporary commerce, and the industry has tried to “fix” this by just telling us that everything we know about the legitimate way to enjoy, produce and share music is wrong.
Let’s start with music’s age. Movies are still in their infancy. Books are in their middle age. Stories themselves are ancient. But music is primal. Books may predate commerce, but music predates language. Our relationship with music, and our social contracts around it, are woven into many other parts of our culture, parts that are considered more important than mere laws or businesses. The idea that music is something that you hear and then sing may even be inherent to our biology. I know that when I hear a catchy tune, I find myself humming it or singing it, and it takes a serious effort of will to stop myself. It doesn’t really matter what the law says about whether I am ‘‘authorized’’ to ‘‘perform’’ a song. Once it’s in my head, I’m singing it, and often singing it with my friends. If my friends and I sing together by means of video-sharing on YouTube, well, you’re going to have a hard time convincing us that this is somehow wrong.
Poland’s future of copyright
The Modern Poland Foundation held a future of copyright contest, which invited short stories about copyright’s future. They’ve published the winners in a free ebook.
China Mieville’s London: the (authentic) city and the (banks and surveillance) city
Writing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, China Mieville blazingly describes two Londons: an exuberant, organic place that has been lived and built over and remade, bursting with energy and vitality; and a fearful, banker-driven collection of megaprojects and guard labour, where billions of pounds can be found to surround the Olympics with snipers and legions of police, but nothing can be found for the library on the corner, where the center of town is being purged of anyone but the super-rich, and where rioting has nothing to do with stop-and-search powers and poverty, and is the result of mere “pure criminality.”
The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the math. “Because you want to host the Olympics, yeah,” one participant told researchers, “so your country can look better and be there, we should suffer.”
This is a city where buoyed-up audiences yell advice to young boxers in Bethnal Green’s York Hall, where tidal crowds of football fans commune in raucous rude chants, where fans adopt local heroes to receive Olympic cheers. It’s not sport that troubles those troubled by the city’s priorities.
Mike Marqusee, writer and activist, has been an East London local and a sports fan for decades. American by birth, he nonetheless not only understands and loves cricket, of all things, but even wrote a book about it. He’s excited to see the track and field when it arrives up the road from him in July. Still, he was, and remains, opposed to the coming of the Olympics. “For the reasons that’ve all been confirmed,” he says. “These mega-events in general are bad for the communities where they take place, they do not provide long-term employment, they are very exploitative of the area.”
Stratford sightseers are funneled into prescribed walkways; going off-piste is vigorously discouraged. The “access routes,” the enormous structures are neurotically planned and policed. For the area to be other than a charnel ground of Ozymandian skeletons in 30 years, it will have to develop like a living thing. That means beyond the planners’, beyond any, preparations.
(via Making Light)
The Everything is a Remix theory of creativity
Kirby Ferguson, creator of the absolutely outstanding Everything is a Remix series, explains his theory of creative inspiration, remix, and cultural commons, citing some of history’s best-loved “individual” creators and explaining how what they did was a remix, an extension and a part of the work that came before them.
(Thanks, Avi!)
Goodbye letter from Borders employee(s) (?) spills secrets of bookselling trade
A large handwritten poster (purportedly) from a laid-off employee of the defunct bookselling chain Borders entitled “Things we never told you: Ode to a bookstore death,” reveals several key truths of bookselling (and some cranky griping):
Things we never told you: Ode to a bookstore death
• We hate when a book becomes popular simply because it was turned into a movie.
• We greatly dislike the phrase “Quick Question.” It’s never true. And everyone seems to have one.
• We always knew when you were intently reading Better Homes and Gardens, it was really a hidden Playboy.
• It NEVER bothered us when you threatened to shop at Barnes & Noble. We’d rather you do if you’re putting up a stink.
• “I was just here last week and saw this book there” meant nothing to us. The store changed once a week.
• Oprah was not the “final say” on what is awesome. We really didn’t care what was on her show or what her latest book club book was. Really.
NYC Folk Art Musueum threatened with closure
Nicole sez, “The American Folk Art Museum, one of the best museums in NYC, is on the verge of deaccessioning its amazing collection and shutting it doors forever. If you haven’t been, the folk art museum introduced Henry Darger (he is the celebrated ‘outsider artist’ who wrote/illustrated: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion) to thousands of viewers who would never have known about him otherwise. Please get the word out about the downfall of this amazing institution, it would be a massive loss to NYC, and the rest of the world if it closes its doors forever.”
Getting people’s names right in software design: a LOT harder than it looks
Charlie Stross weighs in on the Nym Wars and Google Plus’s braindead “real names” policy. He reprints Patrick McKenzie’s prescient list of problems with name-handling in software design, a must-must-must-read for anyone thinking about the subject, and then ruminates further.
People have exactly one canonical full name.
*People have exactly one full name which they go by.
*People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
*People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
*People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
*People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
*People’s names do not change.
*People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
*People’s names are written in ASCII.
*People’s names are written in any single character set.
*People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
*People’s names are case sensitive.
*People’s names are case insensitive.
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