One-Way Street

Podcasts from the Heptarchy

One of my first graduate courses in English was a research methods class taught by the department's sole medievalist. A few weeks into the term, once we got to know the professor well enough to ask such questions, a student asked him why he got interested in medieval literature in the first place. His answer was immediate and thoughtful, suggesting he'd been asked that question a lot. He mentioned the influence of a great teacher and an opportunity to do work in a relatively untrodden upon area of literary studies. Most of all, he said, was the period was appealing because it was so weird.

Some of that weirdness comes across in the podcasts on Old English literature by Stuart Lee, an English professor and occasional Director of Computing Services at Oxford University, which explains the podcasts. I'm a regular listener of Lee's podcast recordings of his lectures, available here and on iTunes. Each lecture begins with some shuffling of papers and a plea to mute cellphones. The lectures provide general historical context for the culture and literature of the pre-Conquest period. Lee delivers his lectures in the affable but exasperated tone typical of medievalists, who must deal continually with  misunderstandings about their period and the long shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lee is an engaging lecturer--he typically speaks for 52 minutes or so without a break--and he keeps things moving along at a brisk pace. The only problem with the podcast is that Lee distributes handouts and shows film clips (most of them from really bad movies, an occupational hazard, I would think) that are not available online, at least outside the Oxford network. Podcast subscribers miss out on the film clips, which make the students giggle, as well as the beautiful illuminated manuscripts and the lines of Old English poetry Lee reads with flawless pronunciation.

In the latest podcast, on the science, religion, and magic of the Old English period, Lee displays a picture of a crucifix. Evidently it's quite an object. "I grew up with that crucifix," Lee comments. If that point is lost to podcast listeners, the rest of the lecture is fascinating. Lee specializes in the period between the Anglo-Saxon migrations in the fifth century to the Norman conquest in 1066--a huge period of time. England as we know it emerged during this period, and the story Lee tells in each podcast is how this nation came into being. In the religion podcast he explains why the ruling Anglo-Saxon elite dropped their Germanic belief system for Christianity. The pagan beliefs were more fun--lots of slaughters and feasts--but Christianity was better at addressing some of the knottier questions of existence, like the afterlife. Compared to the church of the High Middle Ages (or Christianity today, for that matter), Anglo-Saxon Christianity was a casual affair. Priests could marry. Ordinary people could marry and divorce as local circumstances allowed, to the complete indifference of ecclesiastical authorities. The Bible was freely translated into the vernacular. The Christian virtue of suffering was lost on the warlike Anglo-Saxons, who still saw the necessity of making other people suffer.  Lee tiptoes around magic and pre-Christian beliefs, mostly because they're not well documented, and partly because they've morphed into irritating (to medievalists) New Age pan-theisms. "Not quite accurate," is how Lee characterizes these still fashionable beliefs.

Lee never directly addresses the main question a dilettante medievalist like myself would ask: just how accurate is Lord of the Rings, anyway? From listening to his podcasts I've gotten the impression that while Lee respects Tolkien's work, it's not quite accurate. Still, the wanderlust and nostalgia for lost homelands in Rings comes through in Lee's Anglo-Saxons. So does their humor and their fierce loyalties to family and community. Maybe next term Lee will come up with a video podcast. If he does, I'll certainly watch it on my (still to be purchased) iPod Touch.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.

Air Guitar

On Christmas Day I had the chance to play Guitar Hero on a Wii system. It was a Christmas gift to my nephew or my brother-in-law, it's not really clear which.  On one level, the game makes perfect sense. But on another, there's something unsettling about it as well. Interpreting the experience of performing in a rock band for a video game seems completely natural. The audience demographic for video games and guitarist music is pretty much the same, and sooner or later someone was going to fuse the narcissistic fantasies of rock stardom and video games.

And yet Guitar Hero is yet another example of a collective experience rendered virtual. To put it in Benjaminian terms, the game turns erfahrung into erlebnis; it turns a contingent and transmissible experience into a repetitive and closed-ended one. A crucial part of being a guitar hero is creating music, not just aping other musicians, and the experience of being a rock star is exactly what's being conveyed in a rock song. In other words, the subtext of every rock song is rock stardom itself. Even the game's performance scenario isn't all it appears to be. You must satisfy the demands of an inscrutable other--a crowd of dancing zombies--and play a repertoire that has more to do with corporate license agreements than drugs, sex and rock and roll. On stage with your anonymous band mates, you are alone within a group. In this sense Guitar Hero is a lot like work.

Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, the hosts of Sound Opinions, recently denounced the game, asserting that parents would be better off giving their children real guitars. Kot and De DeRogatis have a point: by the time one masters all levels of the game one could be a serviceable rhythm guitarist in a respectable garage band. In fact, I've avoided game counsels partly because the skills they cultivate seem like a developmental dead end. It's possible, though, that Guitar Hero may be an exception. Others, like Slate contributor Joel Johnson,  have countered that Guitar Hero opens the door for a revival of amateur musicianship, which, in turn, will make better music fans and, eventually, higher quality music for all. This claim isn't as absurd or exaggerated as it may first appear. Guitar Hero doesn't teach notation or time schemes, but the basic concepts are present.

Playing Guitar Hero isn't without its frustrations, but it does force one to listen to music like a musician. The level one songs--the only ones the game let us play--are guitarist anthems of surprising complexity. Even a primitive thumper like Fog Hat's "Slow Ride" has tricky passages. Heart's gimmicky "Barracuda" has those churning power cords, of course, but also some off-tempo runs in the bridges. Most intriguing are the practice screens in which each song is broken down into its component parts, revealing much more intricate structures than the verse/chorus alternation that's usually sufficient to guide a listening experience of a rock song. If the mysteries of "Slow Ride" can be uncovered by a video game, then maybe there's hope for guitarist music after all.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

SimApocalypse

Back when I had spare time--i.e., before I had children--I sometimes played SimCity. As the game grew more realistic with each edition, SimCity grew more engrossing and more frustrating. I became exasperated with my lazy Sims' refusal to walk more than a couple of blocks to see a doctor. I proved to be as inept at managing city budgets as I was at managing my own budget. Whenever a coal-burning power plant collapsed in a toxic heap, I was invariably short of funds to build a cleaner one to replace it, forcing me to raise taxes during brownouts. My department heads were supposed to help me avoid this sort of problem, but their contradictory, at times nonsensical advice induced the same sputtering incoherence as Mayor Daley is exhibiting these days. I kept playing, though, spurred on by the game's combination of whimsical humor and authoritarian power.  The feeling of omnipotence is a nice complement to the cloistered effect of being on a PC for long periods of time. 

Yesterday Electronic Arts launched the latest edition of the SimCity franchise, SimCity Societies. SimCity has always included pollution as a factor in its games, but it's never been as important as placing a health clinic on every corner. The latest version ups the environmental ante, making environmental factors like rising sea levels a much more important element in the game.  Because the game was created in eco-friendly San Francisco, you can bet you'll have to disperse windmills throughout your city and make sure your waste water is recycled, or you'll hear plenty of loud complaints from your Sims--and Sims are a cranky lot. Supposedly, in this edition Sims can be induced to walk to work, but in my experience Sims wouldn't leave their houses if you issued them flying carpets.

If you can stand the whining, I would think creating a putrid metropolis would be most people's first impulse. The temptation to hasten global disaster is all part of the pleasures of apocalyptic thinking. The Western tradition is rich with apocalyptic brooding, and that strain of thought is just below the surface of some neo-conservative and Christian fundamentalist rhetoric. For this reason one would think these people would have been among the first to embrace Al Gore's message about global warming. Anyway, as any veteran of SimCity knows, after one has completed the sewer system and built the airport, you start to hope for a tornado or an alien attack to give you an excuse to clean up some of the less successful parts of your city. (Sims never die, but their houses burst into pieces very elegantly.) In short, disaster is all part of the pursuit of social perfection.

It's interesting that the game makers continue to carefully limit themselves to a single city, even when playing with global ecological disaster. A player is polluting one small corner of the earth, or constructing an oasis so rigorously green you can drink out of sidewalk puddles. This seems entirely consistent with our current approach to global warming: the solution rests solely in personal consumer choices; we're not going to force our national politicians to do anything about it, no matter how many hectoring columns Thomas Friedman writes. I once played the SimCity franchise's first foray into eco-politics, SimEarth. The game wasn't successful, in part, because of the totalized nature of the game. The Gaia theory upon which the game was based dictated that one oil spill meant your whole planet was doomed, and, since there were no department heads to blame things on, it was your fault alone. It was despairing. On the other hand, the rewards for keeping a healthy planet weren't exactly obvious. In my ecologically sound world, antelope munched on grass. Rabbits hopped around. It was boring. I longed to create one fetid corner of my world--one Gary, Indiana in paradise, just to keep things real.

SimCity Societies may end up teaching us the limits of our desire to clean up our world. Speaking for myself, I have a limited capacity for good acts that don't have an immediate payback. I've noticed, for instance, that the more I recycle the less I floss. If I buy the game and use up my thirty minutes of free time a week while both my children nap, I know I'll probably create a low-tax sinkhole and try to distract my Sims with stadiums and plenty of health care clinics. And this time I'll ignore my department heads.

The Googlization of Public Space

Today Google Maps adds Chicago to its "Street View" function, so that urbanites' activities in all their banality are memorialized until the next image refresh. No one cares that their phone may be tapped, but they get incensed if someone tries to photograph them unloading groceries.

The Street View is neither a panoptic intrusion into our private lives nor Walter Benjamin's utopian concept of a public space in which people feel as comfortable and as empowered as they do in private space. Rather, the Street View is a symptom of a reality deficit, in which everything is so indexed and classified that there's nothing left to discover. It's an anti-dérive.

Living the Digital Life

Remember the days before the iPhone? Some indispensable part of our culture arrives at the same pace Apple releases major updates to OSX. Google, YouTube, MySpace, blogs, and the iPhone all arrived very recently, and while it's easy for most people over the age of 12 to remember a time before they became fixtures in the culture, there's hardly any point in doing so.  Le mode retro, as the French called the vaguely historical style of the '80's and '90's, has itself gone out of style. Appearing immediately before the Internet became a ubiquitous force, le mode retro now seems to reflect a period in which we'd grown bored with the pace of technological change. Now that the pace has picked up considerably, people seem to be taking a more forward-looking stance. We're looking forward to the next upgrade in our culture's operating system.

But how do we define this moment, right now? Is Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism still of any help to us? Is this still a postmodern culture? Mark Poster's Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines isn't as ambitious as Jameson's landmark study, but Poster also attempts a symptomatic reading of contemporary culture in an attempt to identify exact what has changed since the days when we called information for phone numbers. Unfortunately, Poster is more comfortable reading Arjun Appadurai than he is surfing the Web, so he doesn't have many insights to offer about how life has changed now that we can watch The Office while sitting in our cubicles.

Poster's basic thesis about culture and politics in the age of digital machines is we're experiencing an intensification of the decentralization, deterritorialization, and flattening of the difference between high and low cultures that Jameson (and a whole lot of other people) identified as the salient qualities of postmodernist culture. His overall thesis isn't likely to send Cultural Studies students running back to the seminar rooms, but there are some useful insights in the book. Perhaps his most ground-breaking claim is that post-colonialism, as it's conventionally defined in the academy, is over with. The subaltern can now be found everywhere in the developed world, and she has a Gmail account. A claim with broader application is Poster's suggestion that culture is now "open source," which is a good way to think about how literary and film cultures are changing with the rise of the blogosphere.

Poster knows there's such a thing as blogs, but he gives no evidence that he's ever read one, or even done a Google search. His maladroit use of technical terminology is telling.  For instance, he insists on using the term "networked computer" to mean the Internet. While not every microprocessor is connected to the Internet, the networked/non-networked distinction isn't one that someone in e-commerce would make. Furthermore, Poster worries about things that aren't worth worrying about, such as private corporate networks. He warns darkly, "The massive flows of capital that course through the fiber-optic tentacles and radio waves are far more influential in undermining the power of the nation-state than the fledgling steps of netizen politics." Actually, the data that flows through extranets and other secure networks is the most regulated data on the Internet. It's your bank records and your medical files--the stuff you'd rather your fellow netizens didn't poke their noses into. The irony of launching into a discussion of identity theft only a few pages later is lost on Poster.

Granted, the academic publishing system (Poster's book is published by Duke University Press) is a hand-cranked press, and serious intellectual discussion about contemporary culture is tricky because insights can grow stale while waiting for peer reviews. The very few examples Poster cites from digital culture are actually pretty good, like the terrific Citibank ad campaign featuring ordinary people who appear to have made outrageously uncharacteristic purchases. Still, instead of devoting a chapter to identity theft, what about looking at a CEO's blog and comparing the identity constructed there with his identity constructed in the annual report?

What happens to us when we call up Firefox or open up Outlook? How can we describe the culture presented to us in a Google search? Is it fundamentally different than the one we watched on television when there were only three networks? Are our sentences still schizophrenic, our movies still made for glances, our music a collection of samples, our buildings citations of the past? Has YouTube changed anything important? These questions remain unanswered.

The End of the PC and the Rebirth of the Book

On my train ride home last Friday the man seated next to me remained hunched over his iPhone for the entire ride as he read long articles on the Web. As the train approached his stop, he slipped the iPhone into his pocket, but in the fifteen seconds it took for the train to fully pull into the station, he had to check the phone again. As it happened, that same day I'd dropped by the Michigan Avenue Apple Store during my lunch hour to check out the iPhone. I must have appeared a little too interested because the store security guard stood next to me for a while. Apparently he was worried I was going to chew through the steel cable bolted to the iPhone and walk out with the unit.

My point isn't that Apple's new touch screen technology is irresistible--it is--but that it could develop into something that ebook technologies (Sony's and, soon, Amazon's) so far have failed to accomplish: become a true convergence device for reading. Ben Vershbow at if:book isn't especially impressed with Amazon's forthcoming Kindle. He focuses instead on Google's less splashy but potentially more important announcement that they will sell access to a selection of books.  Vershbow looks ahead a few years to when Google sells access to every book in its collection. Then things get really interesting:

By then a good reading device will almost certainly exist (more likely a next generation iPhone than a Kindle) and people may actually be reading books through this system, directly on the network. Google and Amazon will then in effect be the digital infrastructure for the publishing industry, perhaps even taking on what remains of the print market through on-demand services purveyed through their digital stores. What will publishers then be? Disembodied imprints, free-floating editorial organs, publicity directors...?

While I like the idea of ebooks, like a lot of people I doubt they'll ever completely replace books as physical objects. Everyone knows publishing houses have to adapt to the new conditions of the public sphere, including, I would imagine, people who work for book publishers. Some publishers have already been aggressively courting online communities for both producers and consumers of literature.

Perhaps we should be paying less attention to the impending end of the printed page and pay more attention to the impending end of the PC. The iPod didn't just kill off the CD and opened up a whole new decentered distribution system; it also killed off the giant stationary stereo system. Similarly, the desktop computer is still tied to its origins as a corporate workstation. Laptops aren't the answer, either. Even my ultraportable Fujitsu laptop is too bulky for spontaneous use--not to mention a backbreaker on my bike commute to the Purple Line station. Portable devices like the iPhone and the iPod Touch represent plausible alternatives to laptops and desktops as conduits to the Internet and as aggregators of reading, viewing, and listening material. The "nascent online communities" that Vershbow predicts will be the "new imprints" will depend not only on the infrastructure of Google and Amazon, but also on highly portable wireless devices. A fully decentered means of distribution won't really happen until the mode of consumption becomes fully integrated into the ways people actually read. Desktops and laptops (which are mostly used as desktops) not only lack the portability of a printed book, but also the intimacy of the paperback—or the iPod. Once reading on a wireless device becomes as engrossing and as personalized as writing in a book you own or listening to your idiosyncratic music collection, then a truly post-industrial publishing model will be possible. From the looks of that guy with the iPhone on the Purple Line, that moment may be closer than we think.

The SenseCam and the Art of Technology

Blogging is now officially old hat. In the near future we will be lifelogging, if Microsoft has anything to say about it. As it is currently practiced by Gordon Bell, yet another inventor of the Internet, lifelogging is walking around with a SenseCam hanging around your neck, snapping a photograph every minute or so. The SenseCam is a Microsoft product in development at the center of Bell's MyLifeBits project in which he records everything that he does, however mundane. The next challenge is figuring out what on earth one would do with 1500 photographs of their day. If you think blogging is a pointless activity, just wait until we start lifelogging.

In Alec Wilkinson's New Yorker profile Bell describes the concept behind lifelogging with a SenseCam. Bell sees himself as

building “a personal-transaction processing system.” The term is from the financial world. "Every transaction you have—a deposit, signing a check—those are all registered as a unique event," he says. "Capturing all the activity associated with a Web page, or e-mails, or your phone calls, or the SenseCam means that every event in life is being logged. It has a time stamp on it. This idea of being obsessive about things is a feeling we have that this is the way things are going to be."

Really? This is the way things are going to be? Is that good or bad?

The financial transaction metaphor is a telling one. A person wearing a SenseCam gives something to something else--to an archive, or more broadly, to the technology governing the archive. As it happens, "to give" is an important verb for Martin Heidegger. In German, es gibt (literally, "it gives") means "there is." The SenseCam wearer becomes a "standing reserve," not really a person acting freely but rather something existing in order to give data to an archive.  For Heidegger "standing reserve" is closely related to the idea of "instrumentality," by which he means turning everything into something that is no longer "good" in and of itself, but only "good for" getting something done. An airplane, for example, has no meaning or value in and of itself; it is merely a means of transportation.

In "The Question Concerning Technology," from which the idea of the standing reserve comes from, Heidegger considers how we relate to technology, or, really, how technology has come to shape how we look at the world. Heidegger isn't interested in the question of improving technology itself, for, as he puts it, "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological." Rather, technology is a way of looking at the world, what Heidegger called "enframing." Technology as it is generally applied tends to turn everything into a resource to be exploited--including people. (The people who work on the software development projects I run are called "resources.")  But Heidegger doesn't suggest that we should avoid technology; in fact, he says we can't. The SenseCam, by the same token, isn't automatically a horrible technology provided it frees us to do something we couldn't do before.

One of Bell's colleagues at Microsoft, Jim Gemmel, wants the SenseCam to enable what he calls "auto-storytelling." He explains, "My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, 'Go blog it,' so that my mother can see it. I don't have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images."  Auto-storytelling doesn't work, of course, but Gemmel is on to something. In Heideggerian terms, turning mere recording into a creative act revives the ancient Greek relationship between techne and poeisis, which means of bringing forth or revealing--ultimately "the realm of truth." Poeisis is also the root of poetry. We're trapped by technology when it's used merely to exploit and to more precisely classify the world. Technology can be freeing when it's more like an art form, which entails looking at the world as it really is.  The SenseCam can be free us if it shows us something in our world that we've never seen before, and if it allows us to create autobiographies that reveal who we really are, or at least a plausible version of who we are. In that case we would have the essence of technology--as an art form. Either that, or we'll have yet another junk drawer app.

                                                                              

Interview with Saul Austerlitz

Now that the music video is packing up and moving from television to the Internet, it's time to take a look at how the form started and how it developed.  Saul Austerlitz traces the history of the music video in Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. Born of the World War II-era Soundies, the music video first took its modern form in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964). Austerlitz details the development of the form through its MTV heyday to its current incarnation on You Tube and other online outlets.  I asked Saul about his book and his thoughts on the future of the music video.

What interested you in this project?

I grew up with MTV, in what turned out to be the last moments of its unquestioned primacy as musical tastemaker.  I used to watch “120 Minutes,” on Sunday nights, religiously, and take notes on what videos were shown, who the directors were, etc.  Being mad for music as I was, music videos seemed miraculous to me, as cultural products invested with wit and vigor and a sense of cool, and yet flew almost entirely under the cultural radar.  This only became more true when music videos were bounced, for the most part, from TV.  I became fascinated by the idea of the music video as a shadow cultural history that had been neglected, caught between music and film, and wanted to write a readable, hopefully enjoyable history of a form that possessed a remarkable array of performers, styles, and traditions.  When I started, it was also intended as something of a summation of a closed genre- one that had nearly ended its run.  It ended up becoming something else because of the Internet-fueled revitalization of the music video, and became an assessment of a form in the midst of major change.

I was struck by the Foo Fighters' video for "Everlong," which you rank as the second best music video of all time. It's an amazing video directed by Michel Gondry, who you regard as a major video director. Yet, as brilliant as the video is, the song is kind of boring--to my mind, anyway. Do you think there are acts that wouldn't have been nearly so popular or highly regard without the music video?

I happen to like “Everlong” as a song quite a bit, but I fully understand your question, and think you’ve hit on something.  I think that in the early years of MTV, especially, it was possible to see sonically unexciting bands flourish by virtue of the skill shown by their videos.  I happen to like the British New Romantic groups, like Duran Duran or Adam and the Ants, but it’s clear to me that neither of them would ever have achieved the success they did in the U.S. without their videos.  It’s even more true for later artists who sell sex in their videos; does anyone think that Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” or Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” would have been hits of the same magnitude without Tawny Kitaen and Bobbi Brown, respectively?  Examples like these are only further proof of the power of the music video, which is capable of resuscitating otherwise uninteresting songs, and making classics of mediocre work.  Who actually loves “Thriller” as a song?

The music video was originally developed as a promotional vehicle.  But you mentioned that certain videos seem to instruct the viewer in how to listen to a song. How did this instruction work?

One doesn’t discount the other.  The instruction doesn’t take away from the promotion, or vice versa.  What I meant by the notion of instruction was that certain videos tell their viewers how to hear the music- in short, what to look out for sonically, or how to picture the music visually.  One of the examples that springs to mind is Dave Meyers’ videos for Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It,” which serve as visual analogs to the processes at work in the song itself.  Just like the songs, Meyers’ videos are shattered- split into a thousand pieces, and then haphazardly reconstructed.  Seeing Meyers’ choppy, splintered imagery, we grasp the nature of Elliott and producer Timbaland’s enterprise better than we would have been capable of without the video.

There seems to have been an implicit dialog between male and female artists over gender definitions.  Who do you think is key in this debate?

You can’t talk about gender and video without talking about Madonna, and David Bowie.  Bowie predates the MTV era, but in many ways he is the figure that represents its promise, and its excitement.  Bowie goes from video to video without ever keeping to the same look, the same style, or the same aura.  Is he straight, or gay?  Comic, or tragic?  Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke?  Bowie is all these things, and his videos understand implicitly the fluidity of persona that music video would come to embrace.  Part and parcel of this is a willingness to expand the borders of masculinity to include his 1970’s brand of fey theatricality, bordering on outright homosexuality in videos like “Heroes” and “D.J.”  Madonna picks up where Bowie leaves off, messing around with notions of femininity from video to video so that she becomes a larger-than-life Everywoman.  In one video, she’s an innocent young girl from around the way (“Borderline”); in the next, she’s a scheming modern version of Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (“Material Girl”); and soon after that, she’s Mary Magdalene for the 1980’s (“Like a Prayer”).  With Bowie and Madonna, it’s less a debate than a meeting of like minds.  It’s not women vs. men; it’s the video-savvy going up against the unsavvy, and it’s no contest. 

Michael Nesmith seems to be kind of a hero in the rise of the video in the 1960's. What impact did he have?

Nesmith was one of the first musicians to appreciate the capabilities of music video.  He not only made videos for his 1970’s solo work, he sought to get in on the ground floor of music video in the U.S..  Nesmith was originally involved in the discussions for what would later become MTV, although he was quickly given the boot.  Nesmith was never commercial enough to take the music video to a mass audience, but he was one of the first to imagine it being possible.  Nesmith was willing to experiment; he was even one of the first to make a long-form video for an entire album.  In many ways, Nesmith is the Moses of the music video; he’s the first to imagine the promised land, even if he didn’t quite make it there himself.

Country music was slow to embrace the music video, but eventually the form flourished there. Why didn't the form catch on with other kinds of music such as jazz or classical?

I suspect it’s due to the fact that jazz and classical are less abundantly commercial forms.  Music videos are salesmen- they look to close the deal.  They want to sell a performer, a song, a lifestyle, or more prosaically, an album.  Jazz and classical, being products of high culture (at least relatively speaking), are too high-minded to sully themselves like that, and therefore the music video has never particularly worked for them.  It’s also a youth-culture form; music videos are the fruit of adolescence and post-adolescence, and have never translated particularly well to more adult musical genres. 

What, if anything, has rock and rap lost with the decline of the music video on cable television?

They’ve lost the ability to talk directly to a mass audience through the medium of video, the way they once did.  For mainstream rock and hip-hop, there isn’t much to replace what they once had- although hip-hop still has BET, and rock, to a lesser extent, has Fuse.  However, the rise of the Internet as a repository for the music video has greatly changed the equation.  While YouTube is not going to cut it for the mega-bands of the world, it has been an enormous boon for smaller artists.  YouTube and other streaming-video sites have become places for bands to be discovered, and videos themselves another way of attracting an audience for up-and-coming acts.  The Internet has replaced cable as the locus of the music video, and what it loses in unity (everyone watching the same clip) is made up for by its capabilities as a virtual library of music-video history.  Go to YouTube, check out Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” and tell me that the Internet isn’t working miracles in preserving the forgotten detritus of music-video history.

You talk a lot about how the production values of music videos improved in the 1990's, making me wonder if the improvement in television technology during this period had something to do with the creation of ever more elaborate visual effects in video. You see the future of the music video in small-screen outlets like YouTube and MySpace. Given the technological limitations of online viewing, in your view how will the music video develop in the next three to five years?

Well, you’re right, inasmuch as watching a music video online remains less vivid an experience than watching it on TV, because of the low quality of Internet video.  Computer technology improves so fast, though, that what was once impossible becomes de rigueur in no time at all.  Streaming video itself is a fairly recent development, and as computers, and Internet connections, grow more sophisticated, the gap between Internet and TV will shrink accordingly.  I think the music video will grow in the same direction it has been heading over the next few years, becoming one of the essential enticements of the Internet.  Whether the mainstream will find a place in this sphere, or if music videos will remain primarily under the purview of up-and-coming artists, remains to be seen.

Politics of the Virtual World

You'd think the French would be the last people who would get involved in something like this: Molly Moore of the Washington Post reports that all four major candidates for president of France established campaign offices in Second Life, a web site that describes itself, redundantly, as an "online digital world." The site's tag line is "Your World. Your Imagination." This sounds suspiciously like George Bush's political credo, but the French seem to be taking the politics of Second Life very seriously. The French are the second largest group of Avatars, as the inhabitants are known, after Americans, and there have been some lively political skirmishes in Second Life. What would Montaigne say?

I'm not sure what to make of this. In online world terms, I'm still stuck in its text-based prehistory. Back in the 90's I signed on to a MUD upon the recommendation of some grad student friends. The MUD was supposed to be a discussion group of some kind--something serious like cultural studies. I entered the first room and was immediately greeted with a one-line text message: "Welcome. Let me give you a hug." I immediately bolted from the room and never returned to a virtual world. Since then online worlds have come a long way, of course, and Second Life is generally regarded as one of the best of its kind. Online digital world technologies may soon break out of their fantasy-world confines and into the business world, which is already in the same neighborhood as the fantasy worlds. Developers and investors are looking into applying Second Life technologies to virtual offices. Someday soon we'll gather around a virtual conference table and discuss SOX controls--dressed in dark cloaks, I hope. But if I end up in another damn cubical in a Second Life office, I'm going to be pissed.

Anyway, the French electorate is having a good time in Second Life. They're squabbling over the presence of the National Front on Porcupine Island, a shopping mall. Some gullible Avatars are devoting hundreds of man-hours to maintain Ségolène Royal's campaign headquarters, which is made of wood to express her concern for the environment. (I hope her headquarters isn't made of wood from rare species in the virtual Amazon.)  Three Democratic presidential candidates--Clinton, Obama, and Edwards--have established campaign offices in Second Life. According to reports, however, the American political sites are moribund compared to the French ones, although someone took the trouble to vandalize John Edwards' headquarters--one of his fired bloggers would be my guess.

Somehow something must be wrong with a polis located in a fantasy world. Or maybe you could say that virtual world politics are consistent with Montaigne's reaction against Machiavelli stripping the world of value and enchantment. Since Montaigne's solution was generally sunnier than Shakespeare's reaction to the same predicament, perhaps the French are more at home in a virtual political world than we are. After all, for six years now Americans have endured a government that's been operating in the same kind of mytho-Christian dream world as many of the online virtual worlds. Live in the virtual world too long and it begins to look worse than the real one.

Jonesing for an e-Book

I've always considered myself something of a technophile. I carry a BlackBerry Pearl and at least one of my two iPods with me at all times, even when I walk the dog. I'm a Mac addict, but I'm currently enamored with OneNote, the first Microsoft product in years I'd pay money to own. I'm holding out, though, on buying an e-book device, at least for now.

The e-book device du jour is the Sony Reader, which has gotten mixed reviews. The reviewers come to pretty much the same conclusions. The pros: the e-ink technology is great, battery life is terrific, the unit is a good size. The cons: the interface is clumsy, it doesn't work on Macs, the text isn't searchable or annotatable, not enough books are available to read on it, and it's too expensive. As everyone notes, the book is already a portable device, and it doesn't require recharging.  So why even consider buying a Reader?

David Skinner at the Weekly Standard is intrigued for the same reasons I am. He offers Sony some help with its advertising, noting "the perfect advertisement for this device would be a picture of my bedstand without its ever-present leaning tower of literature. More reading, the tagline would say, fewer books." I would add the more books I can carry with me on the CTA, the better. This morning my backpack contains Michael Thomas's Man Gone Down and Saul Austerlitz's Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes (I'll have more on the latter soon). Neither is available for the Sony Reader. I'll pay Sony $350 if it can make a device that will allow me to carry around both of those books, plus all of my Walter Benjamin and a sampling of the French Post-Structuralists, and allow me to search for the music video director Michel Gondry and konvolut K from the Arcades Project, and jot down some notes while I'm reading. Oh, a Mac interface and better page turning button placement would help seal the deal, too.

As Skinner realizes, literature is not the same thing as the book; the fate of one isn't tied to the other. I love books as physical objects, so I'll always want at least a couple of bookshelves around. I need to have books in the place in which I live. But I live a mobile life, and I like having my books available at my fingertips. An elegant, easily portable e-book device would be ideal. If reports are correct and Sony is working to improve the Reader and the Connect store, then I'll buy the next iteration of the device. Supposedly Amazon is working on an e-book device of its own, but it looks clunky and  inelegant. So for now I'll forgo buying an e-book, but eventually I'll succumb. I'm a bibliophile with the mind of a magpie: I have to have all the shiny objects.

Video Games and the Exception Française

The French government has just announced they will grant tax breaks to video game developers. Patrick Ollier, the head of the National Assembly committee that oversees tax laws, described the tax law as a means to "harbor the innovative vitality of France's creative juices, by inciting small enterprises to create imaginative works that take advantage of tomorrow's technologies." This means the French video industry will enjoy the benefits of the exception française--provided the EU gives its approval.

France has a long history of supporting forms of cultural production that the US leaves to the whims of the marketplace. Most famously, the French film industry has long been heavily subsidized by the government. Consequently, France has one of the largest and most creative film industries in the world. To receive government support a film--or now, a video game--has to reflect "Frenchness," whatever that may mean. This may pose a challenge for French video game developers, for as Wired's Bruce Gain points out, "France's contribution to video-game culture around the world often does not seem very French. King Kong, for example, takes place on a long-lost island and in New York, and was based on the recent Hollywood hit movie." Then again, a few urban realist titles aside, the form's proclivity for otherworldly settings and science fiction narratives would make it difficult to ground its aesthetic in any particular national identity. Maybe a French video game developer can use his or her tax breaks to create a game based on Alphaville.

Supposedly, video games will eventually take the place of cinema in world culture, just as film and, somewhat later, radio displaced Vaudeville and the novel as popular culture forms. It remains to be seen if video games will ever become broadly popular, or even if it's desirable that they do. Thanks to video games we now have 12-year-olds who know as much about battlefield tactics as anyone at the Pentagon. One thing's for certain, though: the video game industry has replicated the American film industry's consolidation of production into a few studios (Electronic Arts, Sony, and Activision) with enough resources to cover the $15-20 million development costs of a PlayStation game.  Independent video game developers in the US are imperiled enough to warrant the formation of independent game publishers like the Gamecock Media Group modeled on independent film production companies--our version of the exception française. While the US government is unlikely to grant tax breaks to domestic video game developers--somebody has to pick up the slack from the oil companies' tax breaks--we're not so far from the French model of granting video games official status as a cultural institution. An archive of video games has been established at Stanford University. Can a graduate program be far behind? Someday soon we may see Will Wright donate to a presidential candidate's campaign fund, then say snarky things about his opponent.

Can You Hear It Now?

Like about two-thirds of the American population right now, I'm contemplating getting another iPod--my second, but I know people who are already on their fourth or fifth. While the newest iPods are more exquisitely elegant than ever before, Apple still hasn't upgraded the one feature I'd really like to see improved: the sound quality. I know I can go lossless in my CD conversions, but Apple lossless conversion still leaks bits and eats up disk space, forcing me to make decisions about what goes on my iPod and what doesn't. I don't like leaving anyone on the iMac; I prefer to take everyone along on the ride. I'm not an audiophilic bit rate snob, but 80% of the music I listen to is jazz, which generally features acoustic basses and trademark tonal differences between musicians. Listening to rock music on earbuds is no substitute for the sonic force of a live concert, but the trade off comes in the form of greater intimacy--hence the disappointment at the often canned sound of iPod rock.

MP3 conversion is the first new audio format to have lower fidelity than the one it replaced. If this article is any indication, there's a growing chorus calling for higher quality compression methods that won't result in having an iPod full of a wonderful-sounding Outkast album but not much else. There's even a website devoted to educating the pink iPod Mini crowd to the virtues of high fidelity. Hopefully, Apple is listening, and they'll come out with a way to release a song's full sonic glory from a compressed file. Maybe they'll have the new format ready by next Christmas, when I'll be ready to buy my third iPod. 

The iPod and the Technological Sublime

The iPod is five years old today, so I've given mine the day off. (More about that in a minute.) Salon's Farhad Manjoo takes a look at Steven Levy's The Perfect Thing. The iPod may be perfect, but it makes everyone a little weird. Levy has named his kids Mini and Nano. Reporters traveling with Dick Cheney don't dare violate two rules of Air Force 2: Don't ask Cheney about Iraq, and don't unplug his iPod no matter how badly they need the outlet for their laptops.

As Manjoo notes, the iPod is one of those rare technological products that impacts the entire culture. To my mind, the iPod is important because its the only truly aesthetic technology.

Technology Screws Up Your Flow

Here's old news to anyone who works in an office, such as a software company, like me. With stuff coming in from every direction, it's hard to lose yourself in a task. (Cf. the post below on happiness.) So both we're anxious nits both by nature and by nurture.

The End of the Internet?

I've stumbled across this kind of late, but Jeff Chester at The Nation asks if we're facing the end of the Internet. He says if cable and telephone companies have their way, the entire Internet will be privitized. Considering no one's figured out how to stamp out spam, it's hard to see how a few companies can monopolize the web. On the other hand, I've always suspected the free drinks weren't going to last forever.