A film about the life of Charles Darwin called “Creation” recently debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. The film hasn’t found a distributor in the United States. The word is that film distributors are concerned about a backlash from the religious right. It’s interesting to observe the effect of fear and intimidation on our culture and the circulation of thought.
The absence of this film from the American market is a signal of an inflection point in the evolution of film distribution. Routing around the installed movie theater infrastructure will be enabled by a number of technologies including: semi-pro “home” theater, HD video distribution via the Network, and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Movie theaters used to require that the projector be physically present in the theater. In the Network, every point in space is next to every other. The beam of light emitted by the projector can now be routed through the Network to any set of screens. It will much more difficult to block distribution through this kind of Network. Although I hope I don’t have to wait for the mechanics of natural selection to become operative before I have an opportunity to see this film.
We, perhaps, misunderstand silence. We think of it as the absence of sound. Or the absence of music. We might think the same silence fills each absence. But silence itself, is always full, whenever there is a listener.
In John Cage’s work 4:33, the performer and the audience become one. Every assembly of witnesses marks a different social graph, listens through a different network of consciousness, a different set of dreams.
There’s an old joke that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. But more and more, it seems like everything is happening at once.
Where television channels used to offer one program at a time, one after the other, laid out along a time line, now there are an infinite number of channels. To the extent that programming is recorded, or recorded live for broadcast, it can be tuned in on demand. Programs don’t need to unravel at a particular time on a schedule anymore. We’ve entered the era of random access; everyone can be watching different shows on the same channel— because it’s the watching that is the channel, not the broadcasting.
Live broadcasts used to be so labor and infrastructure intensive that it wasn’t possible to go live with more than one signal. Many broadcasters now emit multiple signals—different mixes and playlists of programming.
Assume for a moment that broadcast video/audio will move entirely to the internet—the new Network. How will you know what’s on? When everything that exists is on at the same time—how do you choose? This problem is similar to deciding which book to check out from a public library. The selection set you walk into the library with doesn’t include every book on the shelves.
I hate cable television listings because they present everything equally in a grid. And, of course, this is Comcast’s product—I understand that TiVo is much better. The schedule of programs knows nothing about me, therefore it presents everything in the equivalent of a comma separated value file with sub-primitive tools to work with the data. Everyone gets the same bad listing of a 1000 streams. There’s a sense in which this is the same problem users have with RSS readers and Twitter streams. Rolling cable television listings look disturbingly like an RSS or Twitter stream. They’re a linear representation of simultaneous data.
The suggested solution isn’t really a solution. It’s simply the acceptance that you’ll miss things that would be valuable for you to see. It’s noted that since you can’t completely consume a multivalent, multi-threaded real-time stream, instead you must simply jump in from time to time. When you jump out, you miss what you miss— and that’s okay. As with phone calls, if it’s important, they’ll call back.
With so much programming simultaneously available, its value is significantly reduced. Experiencing something and not experiencing it have a roughly equivalent value. This corresponds to the idea: The more information, the less significant information is. The less information, the more significant it is. Philip Roth put it this way: in Eastern Europe (before the fall of the wall) nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.
More and more we live in simultaneous time with links that provide us with random access to an almost infinite number of connections. The index was the first tool that was attempted, but the map could not keep up with the rapid growth of the territory. The search engine using a citation algorithm was the next tool. This would be a welcome method to discover when a program was on, when a program with an actor was on, when a program by a writer was on. More complex queries would enable more advanced discovery.
Why did the girl throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.
But as we live in simultaneous time so do the things that we experience. As McLuhan noted, everything has become television, streams of text, video and audio sensory data. We aren’t matching the grid of our daily schedule to a grid of programming. The grid is an artifact of linear time. The selection set in simultaneous time doesn’t contain everything, it emerges from a swarming micro-community in real time. The infinite universe is bounded by the social graph, but it expands into infinity through six degrees of separation.
The new guide leverages the swarm, the social graph, the real time network and track. So, what’s on?
In Beckett’s Endgame, the character Hamm says: “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” The beginning, however always seems to emerge from the middle. The release of the remastered Beatles Catalog has caused me to replay memories of listening to their music as it was originally released. And as I listen to the new releases (at this point, I only have Rubber Soul), the music isn’t heard directly, but through the lens of the intervening years. The music travels backwards and forwards through time connecting to a thousand threads, its sound resonant with reverie.
From this distance, I see the arc of the band beginning with Rubber Soul, continuing with Revolver and ending with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The time period spans 1965 to 1967. Of course, they performed and recorded before and after those dates, but this is the period where they seemed to really come into their own. The times were tumultuous, culture and technology were changing rapidly and the Beatles provided much of the soundtrack. The distance from Rubber Soul to Sgt. Pepper seems like it could only be measured in light years.
In the film Help, they presented an image of what it was like to be in a successful rock and roll band. The lads were friends and collaborators, they lived together, worked together, and enjoyed each other’s company. They serve as an extended family to each other; they inhabit a world without parents, wives or children. On Rubber Soul, you can begin to hear each member of the band start out on a path that will ultimately end in a parting of ways. I’m going to focus on the work of John Lennon and George Harrison. (You can do this same exercise for Paul and Ringo). By this time, they’d met Dylan, psychedelia was emerging and the idea of a rock band as a social unit was beginning to feel a little hokey. The band’s popularity had started to cut them off from both the world and their identity as performing musicians.
John Lennon had a tragic relationship with his mother, and it colored his relationship with women all his life. The line I’d like to trace here is from the song “Run For Your Life” with it’s violent lyrics about jealously and fidelity to a later, solo effort, called “Jealous Guy.” The movement within Lennon reflected the movement and growth of our culture. A similar arc can be traced from the song “Girl” to the song “Woman.”
The idealized relationship of the band as a kind of endless post-adolescence was beginning break up, as each of the members had to struggle with their own inner demons and find an individual path (the path to adulthood).
George Harrison’s contribution to Rubber Soul was a song called “Think For Yourself.” In the lyrics of this song you can see the seeds of Harrison’s future direction:
Although your mind’s opaque
Try thinking more if just for your own sake
The future still looks good
And you’ve got time to rectify all the things that you should
One can trace an arc from that song to Harrison’s solo work, specifically songs like “Isn’t it a Pity” and “Beware of Darkness.”
Watch out now, take care
Beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of maya
As with the beginning, the end, too, emerges from the middle. The Sgt. Pepper album marked the end of the Beatles as a performing group and the beginning a new era of recording artistry. The asynchronous process of recording the album put additional stress on their unit cohesion. Ringo remembers those recording sessions as the time when he learned to play chess. The recording studio had become the dominant instrument, and the producer’s role central to the creative process. The resulting album marked the pinnacle of their success.
Around this time in Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan’s backing band was creating an album that would be known as Music from Big Pink. It was the polar opposite of Sgt. Pepper. The group would eventually be called “The Band,” and they presented a new idea of what it meant to be in a performing rock and roll band. Their sound was firmly, and visibly, rooted in the sounds of American country music, early rock and roll and the Stax/Motown sound. After Sgt. Pepper, each member of the Beatles tried to move the group back toward being a performing unit. But the music was now Paul with a backing band, John with a backing band and so on. The Beatles were over.
The release of the remastered Beatles catalog provides an opportunity to really listen to the music, and the quality of the sound they created. I’m retracing my footsteps, starting with Rubber Soul. It may take 20 or 30 listens for me to truly hear it. Then I’ll move on to Revolver, and finally to Sgt. Pepper. Over 36 months, The Beatles’ music changed radically, it traces an unexpected and expansive route. As they used to say, “it blows my mind.”
I paid less attention to the work George Harrison the first time around. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate him more and more. One of the things that brought me back around to Harrison was this cover of his song Isn’t it a Pity by the Cowboy Junkies:
