Wil Forbis |
- Just testingHere is some content from the phone.
- I found...
- Why, man, why?
- You Think You're a Good Person? You're Not!
- Our Wacky Brain: What is Creativity?
- My soundcloud music
- The monkey gland craze
- Why decline, crime?
- Just testing
- The Devil Paints: did man evolve to create art?
- Nippleclamps and Beethoven
- Tickling consciousness
- Let it never be said that I don’t have Christmas spirit.
- The Psychology of Facebook
- Agent Zero (song)
- Where do thoughts come from?
- testing
- Blogging
- Music and Sound
- The Death of Counter Culture
| Just testingHere is some content from the phone. Posted: 13 Oct 2018 01:40 PM PDT Just testingHere is some content from the phone. |
| Posted: 23 Dec 2012 06:49 PM PST the CGI in the first Incredible Hulk film to be very dark. |
| Posted: 23 Dec 2012 04:19 PM PST It’s interesting to note how inferior the first season of Seinfeld was to the rest of the series. |
| You Think You're a Good Person? You're Not! Posted: 23 Dec 2012 10:48 AM PST Here’s a fun piece from the acid logic archives. ### You think you’re a good person? You think because you recycle, pet your dog once a day and donate 5% of your income to charitable causes then the heavens must smile upon you? Well I’ve got news for you. Thomas Jefferson thought he was a good person. Richard the Lion Hearted thought he was a good person. Alexander the Great thought he was a good person. And now we think of them as slave owning, gay hating, women oppressing douche bags. Why is this? It has to do with mankind’s constantly evolving sense of what is moral. What used to be acceptable 2000, 1000, 500, or even 200 years ago is now condemned as fatuous and corrupt. Our notions of right and wrong are ever shifting, our definitions of rights are ever expanding. This can lead you to only one realization: human beings 200 years from now will judge you as a heartless amoral bastard. One of the first instances of codified morality — the code of Hammurabi, written around 1760 B.C. — offered legal protections that would be judged comically inadequate by today’s standards. Jumping forward 3000 years we arrive at the Magna Carta, which got a little better, encoding the notion of the right to appeal against unjust punishment into law. Moving forward to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, people finally settled on the notion of inalienable rights, like the right to own property or protection from unjust taxation. Today, the theory of rights is an ever expanding area. Civil rights, gay rights, children’s rights, renter’s rights, worker’s rights… whatever you think of them, however obvious they may seem, they are concepts that would seem largely foreign to the people of yesteryear. It seems patently obvious to most thinking humans of the modern era that slavery is wrong. It’s insane to suppose that one person can own another person. However, 150 years ago there were plenty of intelligent, cultured people throughout the world unto which this notion had not taken hold. The idea that they could wake up, command their slaves to toil and indeed violently punish them if these slaves failed to satisfy seemed entirely reasonable. By studying the past, and gaining a sense of the evolution of morality, perhaps we can intuit where it is headed. I’ve long felt that there will be a wide expansion of animal-rights in the coming centuries. As animals are revealed to be more and more intelligent and emotive, and as the possibility of “growing meat” becomes reality, there will be increased pressure on the meat industry to soften its ways, or even dissolve completely. (The Spanish government is even currently debating vastly increased legal protections for gorillas.) And some scientists are already arguing that plants have an emotional life, so plant rights may not be far behind. Of course many a science fiction author has painted futuristic scenarios where pieces of technology – computers and robots – demand protection under the law. And in this future era, they will look back at citizens of our age — meat eating, gardening, robot abusing bastards — and be shocked at our cruelty much the same way we are appalled at the behavior of slave owning aristocrats of the 1800s. And with all this said, I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that in the future the reins of the world government will be handed over to a species of super intelligent gorillas who will rule with a fair and just paw. And it’s also quite possible that these gorillas will develop time travel in order to go back into the past and apprehend moral criminals. Imagine yourself seated in a darkened tribunal, surrounded by 12 super intelligent gorillas who have just kidnapped you and taken you into the future. The prosecutorial gorilla might say, “we hereby charge (Your Name Here) with crimes against all known morality. And we hereby demand that (Your Name Here) be placed in a detention cell for 20 years and forced to eat their own feces.” And the judicial gorilla will nod his head sagely and say, “Make it so.” You don’t feel like such a good person now, do you? Hey! What’s that moving in the corner of your eye? Is it a super intelligent gorilla who’s traveled from the future to take you to a secret tribunal where you will be forced to eat your own feces? No, it’s just your cat. This time… |
| Our Wacky Brain: What is Creativity? Posted: 22 Dec 2012 08:00 PM PST Here’s another acid logic article from the archives. #### What is creativity? I’ve phrased several of the titles in this Wacky Brain series in the form of questions. For example, my maiden voyage — in which I attempted to catalogue some of the brain functions and properties that lead to our emotional state — was titled, “What Is Emotion?” As is obvious, I’m taking the same tact here. But before one can attempt to answer the question “what is creativity?” from a brain perspective, one must ask another question: what is creativity? By this I mean: do we even have a general purpose working definition for the term, from which we can start to explore brain related aspects?
We tend to think of creativity as belonging mostly to the domain of the arts (much to the chagrin of scientists, politicians, manufacturers and business people who would correctly argue that they must be creative to succeed in their fields.) If we see a child painting several pictures of a cat, we say, “aren’t you creative!?” If we see a child playing with a microscope, we simply think he’s going to grow up to be a nerd. We also recognize that creativity is a measure of quality not volume. If someone pens 50 derivative horror romances about vampires (the Twilight series, for example) we did not consider them as creative as someone who envisions an entirely new type of monster and then puts this monster at the center of a novel which leads the reader down a series of twists and turns that completely challenge the narrative form. The newness of what is being created is relevant to how deserving it is of the term creativity. But what does “newness” mean? Does a creative art product need to dispense entirely with elements or materials used to make art in the past? (Would a creative musician have to completely eliminate instruments and melodies, for example? Would a creative visual artist do away with paints, sculpting clay or recognizable shapes and colors?*) Usually not. Creative art connects existing elements and materials in new and interesting ways. Paintings of guitars and faces been around for a long time before Picasso linked them to his Cubist ideas. The instruments of the symphony had been in existence for centuries before Stravinsky used them to play fresh rhythms and harmonies. Most successful creative ventures contain familiar elements that the audience can hook onto while simultaneously offering new and challenging ideas. * There are, of course, musicians and visual artists who have done exactly that, but they are a rarity. So, we can think about creativity in terms of making connections. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has used the term “novel associations” to describe the new connections that intrigue people about creative art. Thinking about creativity in terms of connections or associations may provide a clue as to how exactly the human brain creates. The human brain is a physiological network of connections. You have 100 billion neurons (brain cells) and each of them has thousands of connections to other neurons, leading scientists to theorize that the human brain could have 1000 trillion connections. (These numbers are debated, but no one disputes the fact that they are staggeringly huge.) How does the fact that the brain is a network of connections apply to creativity? Let’s consider Stravinsky again. Let’s presume he had a neuron that represented a particular rhythm. And let’s say he had another neuron that represented violins playing an A# note. These neurons exist completely independent of each other. Stravinsky was sitting at his keyboard, fiddling around with musical ideas in his head, and he generated a connection (a “synapse” in neuroscience terms) between those two neurons, resulting in the “idea” of violins playing to this particular rhythm. He engaged in the act of creativity. Unfortunately, the above paragraph has tons of misinformation. There’s no such thing as a violin neuron nor is there a neuron for a particular rhythm. It’s more correct to say that each of those “objects” is represented by a neural network e.g. many neurons. When you hear a violin, it’s various properties are interpreted by different parts of brain dedicated to hearing. Some parts of the brain focus on volume, others tone, others the frequency of the note the violin is playing etc. (For more detail, see “Making Sense of the Senses Part I.”) It’s only after the brain combines these properties (or should we say, connects them?) that we have the experience of hearing a violin. For Stravinsky to generate his idea, he needed to connect more than single neurons, but neural networks. So is being creative simply about making novel associations? Not really. To illustrate, let me offer some ideas for potential fiction narratives. a) A man wearing a chicken outfit is somehow protected from a radioactive meteor that kills everyone on earth. Trapped in his costume, he must roam a desolate planet. b) A talking fish becomes president of the United States and declares war with Ireland. c) A family of werewolves develops a device that allows them to shrink down to a molecular level. They then enter the bloodstream of humans and feast on their cellular structures. If any of these ideas struck you, would you be compelled to dedicate the long hours necessary to write a novel about them? Probably not, because these ideas (these novel associations between existing premises — chicken outfits, talking fish and werewolves have been around), despite being completely new (to my knowledge), seem stupid; they generate no excitement. A creative idea needs be more than just a novelty, it needs to have an emotional component – a zing! The “eureka moment” often associated with the birth of creative ideas provides a crackle of emotional electricity to race through the creator’s body at the moment of inception. Emotions are key to denoting “good” new ideas from “bad” ones. It’s worth noting that people with the condition of alexithymia — a feeling of emotional muteness — seem to lack creative abilities. Artistic people, on the other hand, are often said to be “in touch with their emotions.” Related to the emotional component of creativity is what might be called “drive.” Successful artists* tend to have a relentless desire to chase their artistic muse, especially during their younger years. Some might argue that this is a sublimation of their sexual or aggressive urges. Some might say that artistic tendencies simply thrive in the constant flux of emotional and hormonal changes that is the youthful brain. Whatever the cause, it’s often argued that the most creative period of an artist’s life occurs before middle age. (There are plenty of exceptions to the rule. I’d hold out Picasso and Woody Allen (though I think Allen’s work in recent years is mostly garbage.) * I realize the term “successful artist” is contentious. Are we talking about artists who made a lot of money, or artists who on some level achieved a form of artistic success that is difficult to define — van Gogh being an excellent example? We’re going to have to leave the term in its vague form for now. THE CREATIVE STATE We’ve all had experiences such as the following: someone asks a question like, “who was the bounty hunter who captured Han Solo in the Star Wars trilogy?” We struggle a bit, and then give up. Then, at two in the morning, we jolt upright in our bed and scream “Boba Fett.” The interesting thing about such experiences is that it implies that our subconscious mind is working on the problem even when we are not aware of it. Artists will often report a similar process for the inception of their ideas. The concept just kind of leaps out at them — it’s the “eureka” moment again. Of course, realizing the idea is then a matter of diligent work. The dream state — that period where the human subconscious is less inhibited by the “logical” frontal cortex — is often a fertile time for mining creative ideas. The classical composer Brahms — no slouch in the creativity department — once noted:
Brahms also practiced a kind of Christian meditation to seek out new ideas. In his view, he was communicating directly with God but one could theorize that by focusing his consciousness on religious thoughts he was freeing up his subconscious to create. Of course, if we are presuming much of creativity to be novel associations between existing ideas, then it’s helpful to have lots and lots of ideas in your head that can be connected. Thus, being educated in the theories, techniques and disciplines of a particular art form will give you plenty of creative fodder to draw from. Creativity seems to involve a more direct connection as well. The left and right hemispheres of the brain are connected via a band of neurons called the corpus callosum. In extreme cases of epilepsy, the corpus callosum will be cut in an attempt to prevent epileptic seizures from passing from one hemisphere to the other. At first glance, split brain patients seem remarkably normal. But, as Richard Restak notes in “The Modular Brain”:
Part of the ability to create seems to involve a delicate dance between the more artistic, free-flowing right brain and the more verbal, logical left brain*. The left brain sometimes inhibits the right brain and there are interesting instances where left brain damage seems to cause a release of creativity in the right. In “The Modular Brain” (pages 168-169) Restak describes a patient who, after experiencing epileptic seizures on the left brain, began drawing impulsively even though he had no interest in the art form previously. The doctors who tended to the patient presumed that “the impulses toward artistic expression resulted from the release, as a result of damage to the left hemisphere, of the complex visual and spatial skills of the right hemisphere.” In “The Tell-Tale Brain” neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran notes the case of an autistic child who, by the age of seven, is an exceptional illustrator. He theorizes that “poor functioning in many of Nadia’s brain areas results in freeing her spared right parietal [a lobe of the brain] to get the lion’s share of her additional resources.” (Page 223) * The notion of the right brain being artistic and the left brain being logical has come under attack in recent years, and is clearly simplistic, but I think it holds enough truth to be used here. Certain degrees of anxiety also seem to bring on the creative state. In the book “Fear Itself” author Rush W. Dozier, Jr. recounts the experience of physicist Abraham Pais. Pais, a Jew who hid from the Nazis during World War II in much the same manner as Anne Frank. At any given moment, Pais knew that Nazi soldiers could burst through the door and haul him away to a concentration camp. (Ultimately, that did happen, though he survived.) This period of hiding lasted months, but, though it was nerve-racking, Pais enjoyed a creative surge, reporting, “I would get up, exercise, have breakfast, then sit down at my little worktable and, presto, thoughts emerged totally unforced, by themselves.” This experience resonates with me personally. As I noted in the article “What Is Emotion?”, several years ago I developed strange symptoms of dizziness and fatigue while simultaneously dealing with symptoms of pain and denervation in my arms. The dizziness and fatigue was ultimately diagnosed as a disease of my vestibular (inner ear/balance) system and the arm pain is attributed to repetitive strain. However, the symptoms mimicked the onset of multiple sclerosis enough so that my orthopedist at the time ordered an MRI to look for the telltale brain lesions. I got the MRI, and they did find one lesion (still unexplained) which led me on to a three or four month journey of visiting neurologists attempting to rule out the MS and figure out exactly what the problem was. As you might expect, this period of contemplating the horrors of multiple sclerosis symptoms was very anxious for me. But it was also possibly the most creative period of my life. I wrote several songs that seem to appear, as Pais said, totally unforced. It was if I had an antenna to God. And these were not just any songs, but songs of a harmonic sophistication that seemed to be on the edge of my ability. (The only recorded example I have currently available is the song “Nightflowers” which can be heard on my MySpace profile.) And my regular writing (e.g. articles such as this) also seemed to jump up a notch. It became easier to connect disparate subjects and really explore themes and ideas in depth. (Perhaps the best example from this period is here.) Since that period, MS has been largely ruled out, and my dizziness/fatigue symptoms have disappeared almost entirely. But I’m not nearly as creative as I was in that period; I haven’t completed a song in over a year. I think most people have experienced a creative boost in times of anxiety. The classic behavior of college students is to wait until the last moment to write a term paper. And while such behavior does seem foolish there may be a method to madness. With the added stress of impending deadline, your brain does seem to get sharper. And we can even theorize an evolutionary impetus for this. Nowadays our creativity is mostly used for manufacturing art, or perhaps devising a clever business plan. Our predecessors needed creativity for much more vital interests — escaping attacking animals, obtaining food, attracting a mate (well, we still do that one.) It stands to reason that brains that became creative during periods of stress stood a greater chance of passing their genes on that brains that didn’t. So, as you can see, being creative is quite simple. You simply need to develop epilepsy or autism, get hit by lightning, live in fear of Nazis or contemplate a horrible disease. However, if these techniques don’t appeal to you, you can at least appreciate the following: creativity, long thought to be an ethereal, unknowable force, now seems to be offering up some of her mysteries. Techniques for creativity can be learned and applied.* (See your local bookstore.) The day may come that being creative will be seen as a ability like any other, one that with practice can be learned and mastered. * It’s possible that in the future very interesting methods of inciting creativity may be applied. In “The Tell-Tale Brain” Ramachandran notes an interesting experiment in which — via a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation — “higher-level” sections of the brain which theoretically inhibit more “lower-level” artistic centers were temporarily shut down in the brains of volunteers. For a brief period, these volunteers could “effortlessly produce beautiful sketches.” (Pages 225 to 227) |
| Posted: 21 Dec 2012 10:33 PM PST Here it is. |
| Posted: 21 Dec 2012 04:27 PM PST I've just started reading a book I've been very curious about: "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" by Robert Sapolsky. It's a breakdown of the various physiological processes that occur when we undergo stress, and what their evolutionary advantage was (and, often, what their disadvantage is in modern times.) The book has a number of interesting anecdotes. For instance, in the early 1900s, it was presumed that men lost their sex drive as they aged because of declining "male factors" in the testes. As a result…
It's a good thing I wasn't around back then. People would doubtless observe my awesome manliness and demand — perhaps by force of law — that I contribute my impressive "male factors" to inferior specimens of man. |
| Posted: 18 Dec 2012 07:12 PM PST I was just posting on the power of stories versus boring statistics. Stories have, I think we all realize, a more powerful impact. But there's a problem with stories. They can obfuscate the truth. For instance, with the advent of the Newtown, Connecticut massacre, one could hardly be blamed for thinking we're living in an era of increased murder and violent crime. (In fact, the very reason I'm writing this post is because I've had conversations with a few people who have voiced this opinion.) But, in fact, the opposite is true. The statistics show that violent crime has declined quite a bit in the past 20 years (gun ownership has also dropped.) If there is an interesting question here that no one seems to be asking, it is why has violent crime dropped so dramatically? if we could identify the cause, maybe we could augment its powers. I'll throw out an entertaining hypothesis I've seen presented elsewhere. This decline in crime corresponds almost exactly to the rise of the Internet. Has the Internet and its children (such as group video games, online dating, social media and online pornography) resulted in a generation so addicted to the computer screen they can't run out into the streets and kill each other? |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2012 02:47 PM PST I never thought I’d say this being that I’m desperate for any attention, but please ignore this. |
| The Devil Paints: did man evolve to create art? Posted: 14 Dec 2012 12:55 PM PST Here’s another semi-recent acidlogic article. ### “Where does art come from?” my father, a man of the ripe age of 91 asked me the other day. He’d recently taken to perusing prints of famous paintings and was becoming curious about the artistic process. He put the question to me because I, as a writer, song composer and dabbler in the illustrative arts, am a font of knowledge on such topics. I opened my mouth, ready to put forth an erudite answer to his query. “Well…” I realized I had no idea where art comes from. The question reminded me of the consummate philosophical conundrum that has echoed through smoky college dorm rooms since the dawn of time: what is art? After 30 plus years of consuming art, making art and thinking about art, I had more questions than answers. As such, it was obvious that the hand of God was present a few days later when he placed before me the October 8, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books which contained a review by painter/writer Julian Bell on a duo of books that addressed these very questions. (God is always performing minor miracles of convenience when he should be concentrating on big issues like the Palestine/Israel conflict.) One of the books being reviewed, “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution” by Denis Dutton, made an argument — one Bell found only partly convincing — that human beings are wired by the evolutionary process to create and consume art. How does this work? Let me explain with a ornithological anecdote. Some years ago I read about one scientist’s observation that the world of birds was full of deception. The primary example was a breed of birds who would use a high-pitched squeal to warn each other when predators were lurking. Birdwatchers observing this breed began noticing that if an individual bird found a bush rich with berries, he or she would emanate this squeal. The other birds would fly off in fear and this bird could eat all the berries for him/herself. Thus, this bird was more likely to survive and pass his or her genes on through reproduction. But as time went on, the other birds started to figure out the trick. They realized that they had to be a little more critical every time they heard this squeal. And, as these birds wised up, they increased their chance for survival and thus passing on their genes. So the trickster birds had to get even more clever in their tricks, and the birds being tricked had to get even smarter. As such, trickery was essential to these birds evolving into more intelligent creatures. It’s not hard to extrapolate this anecdote to human beings — we too have used deception to increase our odds for survival. And in fact, lying, or at least glossing over the truth, is still part of our mating ritual. A guy buys a fancy car to imply that he has a big bank account and can easily provide for a mate. Women use makeup and hair products to maintain the look of youth, youth being ideal for childbearing. Duping someone into sleeping with you is a great way to ensure that your genes last another generation. (I’ve long blamed all my romantic failures on the fact that I am inherently an honest person.) So how does this relate to art? Well, art is a kind of deception. Let’s look at the written word, particularly fiction. Fiction is largely the act of describing events that never actually happened. Fiction is lies, albeit well-intentioned lies. As evolution rewarded good liars, it was helping propagate the genes capable of writing good fiction. But what about the visual arts: paintings, statues and such? Are those “lies”? Well, not really, but we generally think of those forms of art as having representational value. Is the Mona Lisa a real woman? Obviously not. It’s a representation of a real woman. And representation is, again, a well-intentioned lie. (Of course, sometimes visual art is deliberately used to deceive. Think of the background matte paintings used in film. When Ben Kenobi eked his way on to the catwalk of the Death Star to turn off the tractor beam that had trapped the Millennium Falcon, we saw him precariously balanced above a seemingly bottomless mechanical pit. But that was an illusion.) And what of music? Most popular song contains lyrics and lyrics are often fiction, or at least filled with metaphor and hyperbole. And even instrumental music is representative and symbolic. Imagine yourself sitting in your sofa with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting out of your stereo. As the pounding brass and strings approach a crescendo, your palms start to sweat and your heart picks up its pace. Why? You’re not about to hop into your helicopter and strafe a Vietnamese village*. You’re sitting on your sofa like a lethargic loser. Music is making you feel things — sensations, emotions — that aren’t real. Music is lying to you. * As the music was used to accompany the classic scene in “Apocalypse Now.” Okay, fine. So evolution rewards good liars and therefore propagates artistic tendencies. And those who inherit genes rich with those tendencies make good artists*. But the artist is only one half of the equation of art. What about the audience? Does human nature make us prone to fall for falsehoods? * This evolutionary analysis of art also explains one of life’s great mysteries: why are women attracted to artists? Take a look at your average male struggling musician/writer/artist. He’s a scrawny, flea bitten scally-wag who hasn’t showered in three days. Yet there’s no end to the line of man hungry trollops ready to bed him. Because they understand he has the genes of deception racing through his DNA, genes that will give their children a greater advantage at life. Interestingly, one need only jump forward a few pages in the same issue of “The New York Review of Books” to an article by William Easterly called “The Anarchy of Success” to find commentary related to this very question. In making the point that authors and economists often misread financial data he states, “Humans are suckers for finding patterns where none really exist, like seeing the shapes of lions and giraffes in the clouds.” That seems to pass the smell test. We’ve all seen movies of human ingenuity or fortitude and yearned for them to be true. (Strangely, we’ve also all seen movies of nuclear apocalypse with the resulting destruction of all authority and found part of ourselves also yearning for them to be true.) And one of the great disappointments is to find out they are not. As humans, we like to be fooled. So question that pops up is “did we evolve this way?” In the appendix to Robert Wright’s new book, “The Evolution of God,” the author makes the argument that indeed we did. A simplified form of his argument breaks down to this: for most of man’s evolution, we existed in groups of 20 to 40 people e.g. tribes. These tribes usually had two or three Type A personalities who were leaders. These leaders, in the interest of cementing power, often told exaggerations or outright lies. Because an individual’s very existence was dependent on being part of the tribe, it was better for him or her to accept these lies than to critically analyze them for flaws. Those who aggressively criticized the leaders’ stories were cast out of the tribe and denied the chance to reproduce. As Wright points out, this explains the phenomenon of Stockholm syndrome where a person is kidnapped and soon finds themselves sympathetic to the kidnappers who they are dependent upon for their survival. Let me leave you with one final thought. Is it possible that the genes that encourage the creation of art are the same as those that encourage the consumption of it? Let’s look back to that notion of seeing lions and giraffes in the clouds. Is “seeing” images in clouds itself a work of art? The viewer’s brain is constructing a representational image out of blobs of water vapor. Is that so different than assembling a statue for blobs of clay? What an artist essentially does is take materials — paints, words, vibrations of sound – and encodes them into a work of art. The audience decodes those works – that’s what you’re doing when you observe a bunch of paint on a canvas and recognize it as the Mona Lisa. Are those two skills intertwined or even the same? |
| Posted: 11 Dec 2012 12:04 PM PST Here’s another acid logic article from recent years. I did a live reading of this once, and pissed off some old hippie who didn’t like some of the ideas contained within. It was a good day. #### Years ago I attended classes at the Musicians Institute of Technology in Hollywood, California. One of the classes I took was on the subject of composition and was taught by an eccentric but infinitely knowledgeable fellow named Carl Schroeder. At one point during his tutoring, Schroeder let slip that he had written the score for an adult movie. My ears perked up — here was a teacher discussing my two greatest loves: music and porn! And I had intellectual reasons for my interest as well; I was genuinely curious how exactly one scored a porn film. Were you limited to only using bad 70s funk? “Oh, they just wanted some big crescendos while the guy was coming,” Schroeder explained, waving his hands in the air to represent either a symphonic conductor cueing his musicians or ropey beads of ejaculate flying off screen. The point Schroeder was hinting at — that the peaks and valleys heard in music are analogous to the sex act — was hardly original, but it was original to my ears. And it’s a thought that resurfaced in my brain recently while I was thinking about the topic of what makes us like some music compositions, and dislike others. Let me give some background. Recently I’ve become fascinated with the first movement of Beethoven’s famous fifth Symphony, and have been spending my rum soaked evenings playing it over and over, attempting to dissect what makes it work, what makes it operate as such a cohesive whole. Unlike so many classical compositions that I find weighted down with ornamental fluff, there’s very little in this piece that seems extraneous. It ends not a measure to soon, nor a measure too late. That Beethoven could architect such a masterwork, that he could work on granular detail (say, constructing the exact melody for bar 214) while keeping an eye on the greater whole is something I find mind-boggling impressive. So what is the glue that holds the piece together? I would argue that in his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven offers a perfect balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. He starts out with the classic melody everyone knows: Duh nuh nuh Nuh! He then repeats it a few times to drill it into your skull. Then he takes the basic rhythmic core of the melody and builds new musical material off it. The new material is clearly descended from the original motif but it’s undeniably new, and that unfamiliarity — that sense of “where’s he going to take this?” — is what makes it enticing*. * Music propeller heads have doubtless noticed that I’m describing the technique of “theme and variation” which is the spine of much of classical music. How does this relate to sex? Keep your pants on (presuming they were on to begin with.) We’re getting there. About 20 years ago I got into a big blues phase. Having been raised in a household that primarily listened to classical music, and then having spent most of my teens listening to pop and heavy metal, the blues was a genre that was largely unfamiliar to me. I spent a decent chunk of one summer driving around the Northwest listening to a compilation tape that included songs like Lowell Fulson’s “Reconsider Baby” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin.” As the years went by, I expanded my listening repertoire, and even played guitar in several blues bands. But fast forward to now and you’ll notice one thing about me (aside from my stunning good looks): I almost never listen to the blues. It’s not that I don’t like the blues anymore, it’s simply that I listened to so much blues— I so thoroughly digested its form and content and clichés — that it became too familiar. There were no surprises left. And I suppose if I heard “Reconsider Baby” today, having somehow magically missed it during my formative blues years, I would not be particularly impressed. Because while the song would be new, the bits and pieces it’s made up of — the chords, the riffs, the rhythms — would be pieces I’ve been exposed to in numerous other songs. And this is where I think music is analogous to sex. To be interesting it must be both familiar and unfamiliar. Let me paint a scenario for you: it’s late one Saturday night and you find yourself wondering into a local bar, say Los Angeles’ The Cinema Bar, which is a known congregation point for people with low sexual mores. You meet someone, and end up having hot monkey sex for several weeks. Then a little more time passes and you find yourself hoping the phone doesn’t ring for that late-night booty call. The appetite that was so initially whetted, seems timid. And you realize you’ve gotten bored of sex with this particular person. (Perhaps they feel the same way.) At which point, you have two choices*. 1) Break up. * Actually, there is a third option. You can attempt to broaden the scope of your relationship from the simply physical to include an emotional, intellectual and perhaps even spiritual component that can complement and even augment the sexual to such a degree that you feel a profound connection with your partner you arrive at new heights of personal bliss and finally obtain a sense of contentment and completeness. Never tried this myself. It’s important to understand that I didn’t add the topic of sex as an appendage to this article merely to generate a catchy title. I wanted to make the point that we grow tired of routine music in the same manner we grow tired of routine sex. It’s not an intellectual decision we make, it’s something that occurs in our subconscious. Often, especially in the case of boring sex, we’d rather it not be so for the sake of the relationship. But it’s something beyond our power. Think of it this way: none of us listen to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” anymore. Why? Well, partly because it’s an insanely stupid song, but also because it’s too familiar, too mundane, too boring. Even if you’re not a musician, I think you can understand that the harmonies behind the song have been repeated in an infinite amount of songs, and the melodic content is childishly simple to ears that have been exposed to the amount and variety of music as most of ours have. When you were a kid, when everything was fresh and new,“ Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was interesting, as were several other classics about teddy bears, puppy dogs and spiders going up water spouts. But sooner or later, we all have to grow up. |
| Posted: 08 Dec 2012 10:10 AM PST As mentioned before, I'm rereading the now classic tome on neuroscience, "Descartes' Error." And I'm reminded of the fundamental theme of the book — that what we refer to as emotions are really subtle and not-so-subtle changes in our physiology, changes that we sense in the same way that we sense pain, pleasure, stomach discomfort and whatnot. In essence, we "feel" emotions the same way we "feel" everything else — through our sensory nerves. This is at odds with the conventional argument that emotion is… well, something almost indefinable. Something that belies description. Something that is both there and not there. And, that was my view up until reading the book, partly because I'd never really thought about it. (Obviously this conventional view ties in with most religious beliefs which espouse the concept of a soul, or some kind of nonmaterial mental presence in the body.) After I first read the book, I found myself doing some home experimentation. In particular, I would lie in bed early in the morning, half awake/half-asleep, and just notice how thoughts affected my body state. Why just this morning I had a pertinent experience. I was lying there in that blissful "I don't want to get up" state, and then was reminded of a Facebook post I'd posted the night earlier, one that I was eager to see responses to. Suddenly, sleep's hold on me diminished, and I wanted to get up. (Fortunately, I was able to talk myself out of it.) The exact feeling was so subtle that it's hard to describe, but it was almost a mild sense of tingling, perhaps a tightening of muscles. I'm guessing a mild shot of adrenaline was released into my system (I've mentioned in the past my idea that this "tingling" is the sense of nerves being stimulated by hormones or neurotransmitters.) My point here is that this is emotion. It's very subtle, often only tickling the surface of consciousness rather than brusquely announcing itself like a overweight woman pounding on the door get your support for her candidacy for the school board. But the other main point of "Descartes' Error" is that emotion — these subtle, shifting physiological states — are key in helping us reason and make decisions. More often than we want to admit, we make decisions because "they feel right." (How our emotional systems come to these conclusions is complex and theoretical, but Jonah Leher's book "How We Decide" explores the topic.) But if emotions are so sometimes elusive, we can presume there are many people for whom emotions don't register and that those people probably make shitty decisions. That's somewhat disturbing. And, there's another source of concern. I think people can be wired up to be too emotional, and their own emotional chaos overwhelms their decision-making processes so that they also make shitty decisions. (People who are overly anxious and frightened by the world, for example.) When you consider the possibility of people out there whose emotional system is either providing too little or too much information, well, the world starts to make a lot more sense. |
| Let it never be said that I don’t have Christmas spirit. Posted: 07 Dec 2012 01:05 PM PST Let it never be said that I don't have Christmas spirit. |
| Posted: 07 Dec 2012 10:35 AM PST Here’s a recent article I posted on acid logic. ### I was always something of a late bloomer in regards to using social networks. Friends had to pester me for years to join Friendster, until I finally signed up just in time for its implosion. I also took my sweet time getting involved with MySpace which now also appears to be on its death bed. But I had learned my lesson by the time Facebook — the most successful of the online social networks — arrived at the doorstep of popular consciousness. I signed up, and regularly visit the site. I even admit to experiencing some of the “Facebook addiction” that is often commented on by pop psychologists and cultural nannies. What makes Facebook so popular? On the surface, it’s merely a collection of pre-existing Web technologies — status updates (which can be thought of as mini blogs (or to use the modern nomenclature, “tweets”)), the ability to comment on such status updates, e-mail, embedded video and audio, and simplistic video games whose appeal is entirely lost on me. There’s not a whole lot new here — certainly nothing Friendster or MySpace hadn’t already developed. So why has Facebook succeeded whereas the others failed? I suspect there are many answers to that question, some having to do with managerial decisions, timing, marketing etc. But there is one concept Facebook employed that no other social network ever got right: the “stream.” The stream is the core of the Facebook UI — the descending tower of status updates, links and videos created by your social contacts. The power of the stream is that it allows you to quickly answer the question, “what are my friends doing/talking about/thinking about right now?” One could then ask, “why do I care?” And, indeed, a lot of what ends up in the stream is essentially uninteresting fluff. Do I really care that my neighbor from five years ago is going out for coffee? (Frankly, do I care that my life mate is going out for coffee?) But enough of what’s in the stream is of interest to keep us coming back. It is something of a thrill to find out that your cousin is reading a book you raved about three years ago. And it is intriguing to discover that the chick you dated in Los Angeles happens to be a friend of someone you know in Chicago, even though they travel in completely separate social circles. So is that the magic of Facebook? Is it simply the modern town square, bringing folks together for the sweet pleasures of human companionship? Anyone familiar with my writing knows that such a warm, inspirational answer is not enough to satisfy me. There must be some other need, deep within the dark selfish recesses of the human unconscious, that is being satisfied. In the past, I’ve posited that social networks allow transactions of what I call “social currency.” You can think of social currency as favors. In the old days, I might have done my neighbor a favor by bringing back his stray goat. But I did so not for purely altruistic reasons; secretly, I expected him to keep an eye on my fenced cow. And if he failed to do so, I would hold it against him. This concept of doing favors and expecting favors in return is what’s often referred to as reciprocal altruism. In the realm of economic studies called game theory, they refer to the strategy of reciprocal altruism as “tit for tat.” Tit for tat says, in essence, that people will do favors for other people, until they get screwed, in which case they stop the favors. However if the person who screwed them suddenly does them a unprovoked favor, their faith is renewed and they will return the favor. Now, you can see reciprocal altruism and “tit for tat” all over social networks, especially Facebook. To do so, let’s first acknowledge the rather obvious truth: people want to be popular. They want to appear to have of friends, and want their friends to be interested and involved in their lives. Facebook literally tells you how many friends a person has (at least how many “Facebook friends.”) And you can get a pretty good sense of how involved a person’s friends is with their lives by looking at how often that person’s status updates are commented on and the nature of the comments. If I comment on a friend’s post, I am aiding them in their universally human need to be loved and admired. BUT, I’m not just doing it out of the goodness of my heart — I expect them to return the favor or some equivalent when I post an update. And, if I feel like that favor is not being returned, I may stop posting on their comments. Essentially, I’m angry because I’m not getting a tit for my tat. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. If it were, everyone Facebook would probably have a generally equal amount of friends, and replies to their posts equal to their own output of replies. But there are people who have 3000 friends, while others have 30; there are people whose benign statements are lauded as profound, whereas there are people whose brilliant observations seem to go by the wayside (I feel that I often fall into that latter category.) Some people are social hubs, others are social duds. Why is this? Well, partly because of the real world outside of Facebook. Attracting even middling attention from the gorgeous girl in your French class is much better than inspiring total devotion from your best friend’s little brother. There is such a thing as a social hierarchy, and some people are higher up on it than others. A dollar of social currency imparted from a king is worth more than five dollars of social currency imparted by a fool. The dirty secret of reciprocal altruism is that we are ultimately looking after our own best interests. If we spend our social currency wisely, we can climb our way up to the VIP room with the movers and shakers — the people who grant us social power, attractive sexual prospects, and good job prospects. (This is a massive simplification of human interaction, of course, but I think holds true as a general rule.) Ascending the social ladder in real life is often difficult – at first glance it’s often hard to tell the winners from the losers. But with Facebook, the numbers are literally written across the page. As a result, one has to wonder how much power can be gleaned from viewing Facebook data. Across the nation, across the world, there are millions of social circles – groups of friends and social hierarchies. Before Facebook, this data about these human relationships was almost unknowable except on a very cursory level. But now it is quite accessible, at least to Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts. Want to know how many times Julie M. of Saginaw Michigan has commented on her office manager’s posts? They can tell you. Should Suzy Q. be concerned about the number of times her best friend has clicked like button on her husband’s banal status updates. Only if she can see the data. Want to know how many degrees of separation you are from James Franco? In theory, the answer is stored somewhere in the Facebook servers. At first, it might seem like this would be intriguing but ultimately pointless information. But who knows what knowledge could be gleaned from studying the trends in human companionship — average number of friends broken down by geography, average number of status updates by age etc. Such data could allow us to learn quite a bit about our behavior is social animals. But would we like what we find out? |
| Posted: 05 Dec 2012 08:05 PM PST Here’s an interesting song I just posted at soundcloud. Agent Zero by Wil Forbis |
| Posted: 05 Dec 2012 12:36 PM PST I'm rereading the book that really set me off on the journey of understanding neuroscience: Antonio Damasio's "Descartes' Error." The book has a section that kind of introduces the basic functionality of the brain and reading it today led me to an interesting rumination. We understand the brain as a series of interconnected wires (neurons.) These neurons can only fire in one direction. Additionally, these neurons can receive input from numerous other neurons, not just one. (I think 5000 inputs is about average.) So, you can envision a very complex wiring system with of all these neurons overlapping each other and sending signals across the circuitry. It's very easy to presume, as some scientists do, that the ethereal thing called consciousness merely arises as a kind of emergent property from all this complex circuitry. But something struck me about this today. Let's consider that point that neurons are unidirectional. This means even if you have a signal that is following a complex path through the brain, going through hundreds of neurons, it had to start somewhere. Where? Well, the obvious answer is our sensory nerves — the nerves in our eyes, skin, tastebuds etc. A photon hits a nerve in my eye, and that fires off a signal which goes to my brain and contributes to my sensation of sight. A salt molecule stimulates a nerve in my tongue which also goes my brain, culminating in taste. So that would explain our brain's processing of our sensory experience. But what about our internal life? What about thoughts? They seem to arise out of nowhere. What is the initial event that fires them off? Now, I'm the first to admit that I don't know. Maybe nobody knows, or maybe this is well understood in neuroscience and I'm just not aware of it. But I can offer a couple ideas. One is that a lot of thoughts ultimately do arise from some kind of external sensory stimulation. You find yourself thinking about your ex-girlfriend named Rose, but as you trace the origins of that thought, you realize that you just passed a guy who had a nose ring, and Rose had a brother who had a nose ring. So this seemingly random rumination actually had an external source. (There's a parallel to this in dreams. You'll have a strange dream where a unicorn starts playing Paganini on a violin, and when you wake up it occurs to you did see an ad for a Paganini record sometime last week. This observation has just been filtering around in your unconscious, waiting to be expressed in a dream.) Is there anything else that could set off trains of thought? It seems possible that our body processes might lead to the creation of thought. For instance, your stomach starts rumbling, and this remind you of the last time your stomach rumbled and how you solve the problem by eating cheese and crackers and boy you sure like cheese and which is better? Cheddar or Swiss? My point here being that your stomach rumbles and suddenly you're on train of thought. And your stomach rumbling has nothing to do with external stimulation*, but internal, visceral. (Again, we have a parallel in dreams. I recently had the experience of eating something that disagreed with my tummy, and I had nightmares.) *Not entirely true. Your stomach rumbles because you haven't eaten, which could be thought of as external simulation (or the lack thereof.) But this opens up a more interesting question. I'm alleging that all brain processing (thoughts) ultimately needs some kind of stimulus, either from the external world or our internal body processes. What happens if that stimulus never comes in? Does the great and powerful Oz, er, I mean brain (a construct some have called the most complex thing in the universe) fall silent? Maybe, I don't know. Certainly it's noticed that minimizing your stimulation — through meditation, immersion tanks or just going to the park and staring at the lake — seems to eliminate some of the chaos of brain activity and provide a certain peace. |
| Posted: 04 Dec 2012 02:15 PM PST To see if this post gets to blogger. |
| Posted: 04 Dec 2012 01:19 PM PST Often I wonder what the point of blogging is. Is it to exercise the demons percolating in your personal hell, causing them to flee to the printed page? Is it to provide witty and pithy banter for the masses? Is it to entertain celebrity gossip? Who knows? Who can know? |
| Posted: 04 Dec 2012 11:48 AM PST Here’s my new acid logic article, Music and Sound. ### Music and SoundBy Wil Forbis |
| Posted: 03 Dec 2012 11:30 AM PST Here’s another recent article from acid logic. I grew up as a teenager in the 1980s. The 80s are a decade mocked by cultural critics, dismissed as hedonistic, shallow and bereft of meaningful art and style. If the 80s had any form of culture it was generally assumed to be a corporate culture, a culture whose style and substance, icons and imagery were produced not by organic movements of creative citizens but by entertainment corporations. The music of the 80s was not raw and rough like rock music of the 60s; it was polished and slick, and heavily dependent on soulless technological accoutrements (synths and drums machines.) The movies were big budget mediocrities — predictable, formulaic and audience tested before they hit the theaters. Nothing was left to chance; the 80s was the decade when the accountants took over. That’s the story anyway. And I suppose parts of it are true. But that wasn’t my experience in the 80s. Certainly much of the music was slick (I was a great fan of the Thompson Twins), and many movies were banal (Remember "Running Scared" with Gregory Hines and and Bily Crystal?) but there was an undercurrent of… something. Rebelliousness. Rage. Not all facets of American culture were in complete agreement on the agenda. For every ten smiling faces you saw in the crowd, you caught glimpse of one seething in anger. As a kid growing up in Hawaii, I spent a lot of time at the large shopping center, Ala Moana. In the center of Ala Moana was a courtyard area and here a different sort of teenage group would gather. These were kids riding skateboards, sporting mohawks and wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with hand drawn graphics mimicking the logos of bands. These were, of course, the punk rockers. I eventually grew to loath punk with its fascistic need for conformity but at the time I found punkers quite mysterious. And, one day when a semi cute punk rock chick came over and talked to me, I felt a strange excitement. Being that I was deathly afraid of girls (still am) the conversation did not go far, but it’s entrenched in my mind as my first encounter with what I would eventually understand to be a counterculture. (Later, I did become friends with many of the punk rockers who held court at Ala Moana, but never saw that girl again. Who knows how differently my life might have turned out were that not the case? Sigh…) There were other signs of the counterculture during my teenage years in Hawaii. In 1985, I saw ads for a movie entitled “The Return of the Living Dead,” and knew it was vitally important that I see it. Critics will argue to the end of days whether "ROTLV" was a genuinely counterculture film or a shallow attempt by Hollywood to exploit the punk scene, but for me it felt different from other movies. The protagonists were all punks, but it was more the movie’s attitude that set it apart. I can’t get into the details without giving away the story, but the film seemed to be saying, “Fuck it! We’re all doomed, so let’s party!” It captured a certain teenage nihilism quite well. But the movie that best encapsulated this spirit of the underground 80s was “Repo Man.” An absurdist farce, “Repo Man” spat its bitter bile towards a cross section of mainstream America and western culture: Christians, The Military, Corporate stooges, liberals, conservatives and on and on. In a lesser film, such condescension might have seemed forced but “Repo Man” was just so fucking funny that it worked.
Musically speaking, in the 80s, I was a great fan of the band Devo. I was first drawn to them simply because their songs were catchy. But the more I listened, the more I caught on that this was not your garden variety rock band. They spoke of a process of De-evolution in which the human existence was not getting better (as the presumption of progress inherent in most Western philosophy of the past 500 years dictates) but worse! They perhaps best expressed their disillusionment in the song, “Beautiful World,” in which they sang in voices with dripping sarcasm: It’s a beautiful world we live in Devo’s pessimism always seemed a little trite to me, but there was no denying its subversive nature. Around that time, a much darker perverse and degenerate musical rebel came to my attention. My friend Sylvain introduced me to punk rocker G.G. Allin. As a musician, Allin was a negligible force, but as a performer who aimed to shock and offend he had no equal. He battered himself bloody on stage, fought with the audience and ate his own feces. (Roughly speaking, Allin indulged in almost every offensive act one can envision.) He was so over the top that the mainstream could safely ignore him, but he’s had a cultural lasting power far beyond many of his contemporaries, despite his death in the 90s. Anyhoo… I was thinking about all this the other days and it struck me: Where is the Devo of today? Where is the “Return of the Living Dead” of today? Where are the punks of today? I’m not blind, of course. I’m aware that there are still subversive bands, zombie movies and punk rockers out there. But I can’t help sense that they have lost the impact they once had. They no longer have the cultural resonance they did in my youth. What happened? Where is the counterculture of today? It’s a question one does not want to answer because one is then forced to define one’s terms. What, for fuck’s sake, is culture? (Are we talking bacterial culture? some might ask, muddying things further.) And what is a counterculture? The minute you attempt an answer to these questions you find yourself sounding like your community college sociology professor. (Dry, flat voice.) “A culture is the collection of art forms, belief systems and practices that define a group of people who exist within a defined geography of…” SHUT UP, SHUT UP, FOR THE SAKE OF EVERYTHING DECENT, SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE HOLE!!!! “… Next Thursday’s quiz will cover pages 122-115 in your text book.” But, as I think of it, perhaps these terms need not be defined because we already understand them. What a culture is will never be perfectly clear and the definition is ever evolving, but we - erudite individuals like you or I - get the gist of it. And a counterculture? Well, that’s some kind of sub-culture that works in opposition to the main culture. Of course, that’s not quite right. I could argue that the Tea Party or deaf people are examples of countercultures. And to some degree they are. But when we discuss counterculture in America we’re discussing a specific group with specific beliefs and representations. It’s vaguely leftist, anti-conformist, anti-corporate, tied to rock music (specifically punk, hippie rock, and even folk) and modern art. Drugs are involved. So is sex. And fashion. Historically, it’s a movement that goes back to the hippies of the 60s, then further back to the Beats of the 50s, and frankly back even further from there (to groups I know little about, nor am I willing to research them.) It’s a “you know it when you see it” phenomenon. The New York Dolls were a counter cultural band. Poison, who looked quite similar to the Dolls, were not. Counterculture thrives at your local used record store. It’s absent from WalMart. There’s still more to it. Part of the counterculture is a movement which has political goals. Fighting racism, ending homophobia, banning genetically modified foods, that sort of thing. But there’s another part of the counterculture that is really about music (and other arts.) This is the underground music scene that thrives in almost every town. This is college radio, indie bands etc. This is “alternative” music. I should be clear about one thing here. I don’t consider myself a particularly counter cultural guy. I find punk music tedious, and I think the general counter cultural critiques of modernity, capitalism and the mainstream are simplistic and often dependent on conspiracy theories which give far too much credit to whomever they’re trying to defame. (I once read an interview with Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day in which he argued that video games were part of a grand plot to induce complacency in the masses.) Despite all this, I’ve spent much of my life in close contact with counterculture. I lived in Olympia Washington at the moment it became the darling of the 90’s underground, spawning bands like Bikini Kill and (eventually) Sleater Kinney. (I actually lived just off the street from which the band took its name.) I spent most of my twenties in Seattle when the formerly sleepy and cloudy town was exploding into global consciousness with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and a protest movement that reached an epoch with the famous and destructive WTO riots of 2000. (I actually had cops fire tear gas at me - read here for details.) I probably sound like an aging hipster trying to establish his “cool” credentials for the kids, but I think my background is relevant. With that out of the way, there is one interesting possibilty to explore here: maybe the counterculture wasn’t all that alive to begin with. Maybe my bloated sense of the glory days of counterculture (say 1960s-early 90s) was fueled by the fact that many young counter culturalists of that era moved into the media and journalism business and created narratives that overstated their movement’s importance. (There were a ton of hippie movies in the 80s.) Maybe the counterculture was more myth than reality. Maybe… possibly… in fact, I think there’s some truth to this. But ultimately I think the "classic" counterculture was a real force to be reckoned with and that force has declined. So the question persists: why? To investigate this I posed this question on my Facebook profile and got a voluminous response. I was struck by the fact that many people had thought deeply about the topic and had largely arrived upon similar answers, answers which largely matched my thoughts on the subject. So what was to blame for the decline of the counterculture? That old foe: technology. To explain, let’s first consider technology’s role in disseminating a culture (counter or otherwise.) At its core, a culture is about ideas — ways of doing things, ways of thinking about things, ways of observing the world. Ideas are best expressed in words — in treatises, in rants, in manifestos and even in fiction. But that’s not the only way to express ideas. Romantic era classical music (say, works byTchaikovsky or Chopin) with its raw emotional expression was a reaction against the more restrained music of previous eras. In the visual arts, Cubism was a reaction against traditional representative arts and was even an accusation that man’s senses could not be trusted. Art forms other than writing can communicate heady, sea-changing ideas. How did average citizens of earth's recent past encounter these art forms and the ideas they represented? Obviously, for a long time, written ideas had to be hand copied and distributed. That changed with the Gutenberg press. For centuries, listening to music required live musicians playing the music for you. The advent of the phonograph and radio changed that. The visual arts, for a long time, could only be appreciated by visiting a museum. Printing and photographs changed all that. These technologies accelerated the distribution of media and as such, what used to be only appreciated by the rich and powerful found its way to the common man. Technology also altered the production of art and its ideas (though to a lesser extant that its distribution.) In the past 100 years, the recording of music has become high art. The visual arts have expanded into multimedia. Even the lowly word processor has made writing spittle inflected tirades much easier. (Trust me. I know.) However, in the 20th century, there was still much controlling the distribution and production of art and ideas. If you had a great idea for a book, you had to prove to publishers that it would be worthy of their monetary investment. The same went with music — record companies wouldn’t just invest in any old band. Visual artists had to struggle to be presented in established museums and periodicals. Aside from issues of money, there were issues of taste. The powers that be might decide that electro-gangsta-reggae was out and acoustic-proto-folk-metal was in and there wasn’t much that could be done to change their minds. (I’m admittedly oversimplifying things here — these powers were affected by the whims of the masses.) Artists were dependent on these greater forces for money to mass produce their product and on the blessing of the tastemakers for their art to fall in favor. In Marxist terms, record companies, book publishers, magazines, television companies, (e.g. agents of “the mainstream”) controlled the means of production and distribution.
This control was not absolute. The underground popularity of zines - hand copied, self-written and designed periodicals that thrived in certain circles - stands as one example. So too did the thriving market for independent music that grew from the 60’s onward. Underground comics also had an impact. This media gained popularity partly because they were not representative of the tastes of the mainstream, in fact they were often in direct opposition to them. This media was the music of Devo, of G.G. Allin (and most punk bands), films like “Repo Man” and “Return of the Living Dead”* and on and on. * You might rebut and say that Devo and the films mentioned were actually produced and distributed by “mainstream” record companies. And this is true and gets us into the allegations that the mainstream co-opted elements of the underground. Certainly that did happen, but exploring that topic is outside the purview of this article. You could say the counterculture put up a good fight, but it was a battle it was destined to (not lose but) never win. A punk band might sell a run of 10,000 records but mainstream acts were selling millions. It took years for “Repo Man” to make its money back. (I think - I’m going off memory for that one.) This was partly because underground products just kind of sucked. Photocopied zines had a certain charm but couldn’t compare to a glossy magazine. Underground music was recorded on equipment that could never capture the full dynamic range of sound that a Nashville studio could. Underground movies could never provide the bang and boom of “The Empire Strikes Back.” But then something happened. In the 1990s, the internet arrived. It had a great effect on the distribution of the written word. Zines, which in their paper form cost at least dozens of dollars to produce and netted only a limited readership, could now be produced online for (close to) nothing and reach tens of thousands of readers. Underground music could now be distributed via web sites like mp3.com and Napster (now Soundcloud, Facebook, Reverbnation etc.) Film largely stayed in the realm of the mainstream, but Youtube and various sources have engendered greater distribution of counter cultural video (with more to come.) In addition to greater ease of distribution, producing media became easier and cheaper. Web sites could be easily assembled via affordable software. The power of a million dollar recording studio was imported in Garage Band and similar products. Producing your own video project became much easier. In short, the mainstream no longer controlled the means of production or distribution. As a result, the media marketplace was flooded… with a lot of crap, yes, but also with genuine gems and products of promise. The effect was to dilute both what the mainstream represented and what the counterculture represented. This was a double whammy as each culture — to some degree — defined the other (The counterculture was whatever the mainstream wasn’t and vice versa.) It wasn’t so much that either of these cultures died as that they split into a million sub-genres. Nowhere is this clearer than in music. If one peruses the genre names musicians are using to define their music on music distribution site Soundcloud, one sees “Chiptune, Nujabes-styled underground hip hop, Darkstep, Breakcore, Raggacore” (to name but a few.) There was one other effect of technology worth considering. As communication technology became ubiquitous, the barriers between nations broke down. As a result a punk rocker in Iowa Springs could hear what a trance musician in Bombay was doing. Iranian independent films could make their way to your local indie theater. The neat categories that had existed in the pre-internet area were and are under constant assault. Culture has become “mushy” - hard to define and comprehend, and certainly not subject to terms like “mainstream” or “counterculture.” Is that it? Is this the end of counterculture? I would have been quite happy to say yes, until someone pointed out to me that there are still strong counterculture movements in other countries. Think of the green revolution in Iran. The social unrest in Egypt. The all out warfare in Syria. Counterculture, in its most general sense, is thriving in the Arab world. Partly because those countries had (in same cases until recently) a strong mainstream, e.g. and oppressive dictatorial force. This force is in every case worthy of opposition but also provides counterculture warriors with a means of definition: “We are not that.” Doubtless the counter cultural movements of those nations are comprised of disparate groups that might not agree on all that much (as we are starting to see in Eqypt) but they are united by their opposition to the enemy. As your old sociology professor might point out, we use the “other” to define ourselves. The problem in the modern West is that the counterculture (and the mainstream) lost their other. And it's hard to fight a war when everyone is wearing one of a thousand possible uniforms. |
Clearly creativity is involved in creating, or making, things. But we apply the term somewhat indiscriminately. If an auto worker helps make a car, we don’t think of him as particularly creative. When your mom makes dinner, you don’t compliment her genius.
Years ago, I was watching a "Star Trek: Next Generation" episode in which Picard, the sage captain of the space vessel, walked into the room of some impertinent alien prince. The kid was playing this absolutely chaotic, atonal music full of clangs and groans and Picard sort of sighed, presumably thinking something like, "These teenagers and their crazy music!"| You are subscribed to email updates from Wil Forbis. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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