Raymond Pettibon's Early Milieu

Years before his move into the world of galleries and museums, Raymond Pettibon gained underground notoriety through self-published 'zines like Tripping Corpse, along with album covers and gig flyers for SST Records. Founded by brother Greg Ginn (also leader/guitarist for Black Flag), this pioneering independent label defined Southern California punk in the 1980s; the label's overarching gestalt took shape by way of Pettibon's dark, funny world inhabited by junkies, film noir supporting players, and the ever-present Manson family. In later years, SST released a lot of junk, but their legacy was forever secured by a handful of essential records, musical anti-venom for the era's toxic corporate rock- here are a few examples:

As the label's first release, Black Flag's Nervous Breakdown EP set the tone for much of what was to come. Sonically scuzzy, one has to wonder if Ginn was pulling our collective chain when he professed an admiration for the Grateful Dead. With blatant disregard for punk orthodoxy concerning haircuts and clothes, they nevertheless hewed close to a fundamental rock template laid out long before the Ramones. The band's sound ossifed in their later releases, with Ginn--and the band's name itself--as the two constants amidst its otherwise shifting personnel; rights to the band's Pettibon-designed logo were later subject to an acrimonious court dispute between several of its former members.

San Pedro's Minutemen's were the best thing that ever happened to SST; their 1984 Double Nickels on the Dime was the band's defining statement (though their other records were great too), defying the pigeonholes of punk and hardcore to embrace and transcend a wide range of sources. Guitarist and singer D. Boon was a foil of earnestness and passion to bassist and sometimes-vocalist Mike Watt, who shines as a songwriter here; drummer George Hurley holds it all together at a level of inventiveness rivaling Ed Blackwell or Tony Williams; together, they were magic- an unstoppable and singular force that somehow managed to hold onto their identity as individuals.

SST was beginning its tailspin by the time Sonic Youth signed with the label in 1986, yet Expressway to Yr Skull was a major step forward from the New York no-wavers' previous efforts on other labels. The lyrics all throughout Evol--the album on which this song serves as the closing cut--are curiously simpatico with Pettibon's verbal sensibility and imagistic obsessions, while the music channels a thick Gotham drone that echoes back through the work of LaMonte Young and the Velvet Underground.

And lastly... Pettibon extended some of the themes familiar from his drawings--with the help of friends such as Mike Watt and artist Mike Kelley, and a heaping helping of self-mockery--into scrappy DIY video narratives; Sir Drone is perhaps the best-known of the bunch.

Waste Flows

To augment the conversation about e-waste and excess consumption we had in the previous week's class, here's a tremendous website I've spent a good deal of time with lately.

Also worth checking out is a book I like very much, one that traces the history and possible futures of our waste stream- it's called Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers, and you can learn more about it here.

And lastly, a short film by David Fedele on the e-waste trade in Accra, Ghana.

"...the manifestation of talent where there was none."

The title of this week's entry is from Stop Player. Joke No. 4, William Gaddis's first stab at writing a cultural history of the United States and what he called "the false democratization of the arts" through exhaustive focus on the player piano. Aside from the material we're reading this week, Gaddis never made it past the research and note-taking stages; Agapē Agape, his last published work, voiced his own deep regrets (by way of a thinly-veiled fictional self) over this unfinished project in the months before his death.

Here's an excellent web resource on the player piano's history (along with technical descriptions and other miscellany), adding up to a much greater complexity than Gaddis cared to admit:

http://www.pianola.com/

Once the player piano had reached market saturation, one strategy adopted by certain manufacturers was to shift away from the instrument's populist appeal and toward the prestige of association with serious composers writing specifically for the instrument, such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, and George Gershwin.

A recurring theme throughout the history of modern (and particularly, electronic) music was a belief that instruments as they currently existed were inadequate; again and again, composers doubled as inventors and programmers in the development of instruments, technologies, and interfaces for the realization of new sounds. Nicolas Collins's essay does a fine job of outlining some of the key issues and challenges that composers have faced; one his own innovations is demonstrated below:

Here's a short video about Reed Ghazala, whose circuit-bending work is based on the playful modification of cheap electronic instruments and toys; the popular/avant-garde distinction that we once thought was clear is no longer so:

And finally, the composer/inventor Trimpin and his Fire Organ:

Novel Mapping

Map from Franco Moretti's Atlas Of the European Novel, showing spatial interactions of the characters in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Somewhere on my long lifetime to-do list is the task of verifying a story told by an old painting teacher of mine; Robert Carroll, an American artist who'd relocated to Rome, was invited in as a visiting professor during my final year of study in Cleveland.  Once, in support of his advice to follow through on my intuitions, he recalled having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  This strange and singular book, Poe's only completed novel, takes the form of a diary kept by the stowaway character of the title.  As Carroll read it, he became convinced that its frequent mentions of navigational coordinates, appearing dozens of times throughout, had an added significance beyond realist plausibility, though he couldn't say what that might be.  This nagged at him to a point where he felt he had to investigate; obtaining a large scale map, he plotted each location with a pin; moving through this task, he was stunned to see the outline of a seagull taking shape.  Was this Poe's intent?

It couldn't be accidental, thought Carroll, especially since there appears toward the end of the novel a horrific image of a gull devouring the flesh of a dead man.  Excited by his discovery, he shared it with a couple of English professors, whose reactions were basically, "hmmm, that's curious...", and that was that.  Carroll was discouraged by their apathy, and never pursued it much further.

Maybe Carroll was just unfortunate in his timing; though there's no telling what the literary scholar Franco Moretti--whose maps appear in the Denis Wood chapter we're reading this week--might've made of the image symbolism of this avian contour, he might on some level feel vindicated by learning of Carroll's strange discovery.  Known for his pioneering use of mapping, data visualization, and quantitative analysis in the study of European literature, Moretti has come under fire from more traditional peers who feel his methods (often wildly mischaracterized) treat novels as nothing more than data sets to plug into Excel spreadsheets.  For those who take the trouble to actually read him, one quickly finds that Moretti is extremely skilled in his application of an entire range of traditional literary tools, along with ones derived from mathematics and science.  Here's a link to some thoughtful assessments of his work (there are many others too out there), so you can begin to decide for yourself:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/franco-morettis-distant-reading-a-symposium/

John Cage and the Graphic Score

As we look at the graphic scores of post-war avant-garde composers this coming week, a series of questions inevitably arise, such as: is the score decipherable by itself, or might some assistance or further instruction be necessary?  Does the new graphic language contain ideas that are vexing to performers schooled in the customs and values embodied by traditional notation, and if so, how might those issues be addressed?  Is it possible to follow the rules laid out in a graphic score and still not "get it right"?  It's important to remember that in most cases these scores were performed by ensembles or soloists working closely--often in ongoing collaboration--with the composers themselves; in that way, the music had its best chance of being brought to life by a sympathetic performer.  But what happens in the more conventional context of a symphony orchestra, where performers are bound by contract to accept their musical director's choices?

The New York Philharmonic's 1964 performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis gives us a particularly vivid example of all that can go wrong.  Originally premiered in 1961 and using an astronomical star chart as its template, the piece was Cage's most ambitious large ensemble effort up to that point.  At the time--and it's not so different now--major orchestras were criticized for ignoring the work of living composers and enforcing their obscurity; however difficult the music might be for the average Mozart devotee, the refusal of orchestras to engage on some level with serious music of the present, critics claimed, would doom them to be nothing more than a cultural mausoleum.

Detail of score for John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis

But Cage's piece was dead on arrival; the piece was only granted two brief rehearsals, barely enough time for even proper instruction on how to read the score, much less play it (Benjamin Piekut gives a very thorough account of the concert, along with considerable insight into the piece itself, here). Conductor Leonard Bernstein, otherwise lauded for the tirelessness of his educational outreach--working with TV, radio, and his ongoing series of Young People's Concerts--reveals his blind spots here, unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between the various places Cage courted chance in composition or performance; at certain moments in his spoken introduction above, he seems to have bent over backwards to undermine the presentation of the piece and any possibility that the Philharmonic audience might make up its own mind about it.  The orchestra's commitment to honoring Cage's intentions, grudging at best, was questioned later by the composer, who referred to the musicians as "gangsters."

Cartoon by Ad Reinhardt from PM Magazine, late 1940s

Beg, Borrow, or Steal (miscellany)

Craig Baldwin is an important filmmaker, writer, programmer, and raconteur, and one of today's foremost advocates of moving image appropriation; this YouTube interview is a nice supplement to the material we'll be discussing this week and next.

Ethan Hein has written an excellent blog post about the many ways in which elements of Miles Davis' So What have been incorporated into jazz, pop, and hip-hop contexts, uncovering many mutations of its distinctive bassline (and other elements too):

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/so-what/

Andy Baio's brilliant 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is available here in its entirety:

http://kindofbloop.com/

Despite getting legal clearance for the music itself, Baio neglected to do the same for the cover art. Here's his account of the problems that ensued:

http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

And finally, here's a lengthy blog post by Terry Hart arguing that Baio got what he deserved:

http://www.copyhype.com/2011/07/kind-of-bamboozled-why-kind-of-bloop-is-not-a-fair-use/

The Memex (and more)

Herman Hollerith's Tabulator, first used in the 1890 U.S. Census

A few miscellaneous items related to this past week's readings and other things we discussed in class:

A few years back, an article appeared in the NY Times about a new national ID system in India that will use iris scans and fingerprints to build the world's largest biometric database; it serves as an interesting point of comparison between the Hollerith Tabulator and today's technology. A fascinating subject, even if the article provides little support for its assertions that the new system alone can address the nation's bureaucratic inefficiencies; you can read about it here.

Here are some images of Vannevar Bush's Memex:

Drawing of Vannevar Bush's Memex (Life, September 1945)

Memex microfilm screens (Life, September 1945)

The camera as prosthesis: not quite Google Glass, though its ugliness is perhaps better justified:

Memex camera (Life, September 1945)



And here's a typical example of the ads that appeared in post-war issues of Popular Mechanics; it gives nicely illustrates the ready availability and apparent demand for electronics parts (and other materials) produced during WWII and the Korean War.  These diodes, transistors, and other sundry components  could be had for pennies, supplying hobbyists and small business startups:

Ad from Popular Mechanics magazine, circa 1954