Category: money

Discovering a Company of Thieves

Published August 18, 2013 by cgerrish

In the age of the connected digital Network, they call it “discovery”. It’s not what you like right now, or what you’ve liked in the past — it might be described as what you’ll like in the future. Mostly it doesn’t work, but on occasion something delightful it discovered. The algorithm usually goes like this: if you like tea, you’d probably also like this weak tea. When a discovery occurs, it usually has nothing to do with tea.

The problem is “discovery” actually works through leaps, gaps and other forms of discontinuities. Algorithms can provide options along a path of logical extension. The further the extension moves from the source, the weaker the connection. The strange thing is that when the connection becomes so weak it’s non-existent, that’s when discovery might happen. Machines that attempt to replicate serendipity have trouble with this last piece. That zone of strangeness feels a bit like chaos to them — there’s no reason at all to take the next step in any particular direction. If you’ve been down this road, you know this point in a process of discovery is different from randomness. The accumulated context makes a difference.

When you’re young and for the first time discovering a lot of new music, there’s always some older figure who turns you on to the music from your future. There are new worlds in front of you — outside your realm of experience. A stack of records can give you a preview into the soundtrack of these alien worlds. This is how young minds are blown. It’s also the kind of peak experience that can stay with you for a lifetime. To some extent, all music going forward will be compared to those transformational sounds.

Once you’ve grown up, figured out what you like and filled up your library with your favorites; discovery becomes a much more difficult process. That transformational process isn’t likely to happen again. You “are” that older figure, and now you’re annoyed that young people today don’t appreciate the music that first turned you on.

If you’re storing your music in the cloud, your music provider probably knows your library better than you do. Every “play” is logged and plotted to determine what you currently like and what you’ll like and purchase next. This is where you’ll find complex genomes of music underlying auto-generated playlists mixing with the quantified self.

I recently discovered a band called “Company of Thieves“. I wasn’t looking for them, or anything like them. I was actually more interested in learning about what Daryl Hall was doing these days. I’d had an interest in him since his first solo album produced by King Crimson’s Robert Fripp — the long delayed “Sacred Songs“. (Check out his vocals on the song “North Star“). I’d seen a few moments of “Live from Daryl’s House” on television and traced it back to the web. YouTube provided a nice selection of the greatest hits from the show. The clips of “Company of Thieves” kept drawing me back. There was something about them. There isn’t an obvious link between Daryl Hall’s music and what Company of Thieves does. There’s no recommendation engine that spit would out “if you like Daryl Hall, you’ll probably like Company of Thieves”.

Chicago-based Company of Thieves (Genevieve Schatz and Marc Walloch) has released two albums on Wind-Up Records, but despite their best efforts hadn’t broken through on any of the media that I follow. The band’s appearance on “Live from Daryl’s House” was in January of 2009. It’s with these four-year old videos that I started following their story. There’s not much in the mainstream music press. It was really through YouTube that I was able to piece together an idea of the range of the band’s sound.

While I loved The Beatles when I was younger, these days I find it hard to listen to them. I’ve heard the songs too many times. It’s the Beatles Anthology recordings that still have some interest for me. I like hearing the songs in their rough form, it’s there that I can see through to the bones of the song to see if it still works. Company of Thieves has done something similar. Their finished recordings have very complex and compelling arrangements; the band gets a very big sound. But they’ve also released videos of acoustic performances of their songs — and not in an ideal studio environment. Instead, they perform out in the world, without a net. Not only can they actually perform the songs from their recordings, they can put them across in the ordinary world — on a beach, riding in a car, on a moving train, at an amusement park and walking down the street in the rain. To me, that makes a connection that a lot of computer-based music has lost.

When I think about the criteria used in my process of discovery, it doesn’t seem like something that could be wrapped up into an algorithm, scaled up and served out to the masses. I want something that I’ve never heard before. It might even be something that I don’t initially like; something that takes a while to grow on me. It might even take a couple of weeks before I decide that I need to buy this music and support the artists. This kind of discovery is pretty rare, and that’s part of what’s good about it. If I could push button and receive a new discovery every day that was custom-built based on the artifacts of my listening behavior, it would soon grow boring. And what could be worse than a cloud-based networked computer program that effectively caused me to become bored with my own taste.

I understand that Company of Thieves is working on some new music. That makes me smile.

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The Humanities and the Price of Gold

Published June 30, 2013 by cgerrish

It’s by looking back that you can see the seriousness of the fever. At the time, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Take that gold jewelry stashed away in the back of a drawer and turn it into money — big money. Inherited gold jewelry impossibly out of fashion could be sold for the value of its gold. No need to haggle about the artistic value, all that mattered was gold content. The trade value of the jewelry is simply the value of its gold.

On August 23, 2011 the price for an ounce of gold hit $1,913.50. That was an all-time high, and while the price has begun to decline, it remains at historically high levels. If you look at antique gold jewelry on eBay, you’ll see the prices have moved with the base price of gold. The collectibility of a work, its rareness, or even the acknowledged skill of the artist who created it — all these factors were overwhelmed by the spot value of gold as a commodity. During this period a lot of antique gold jewelry was melted down to create commodity gold bars or coins. Someone told me that in Hong Kong, the jewelry stores price their gold jewelry by adding up two figures, the first is the weight of the gold multiplied by the spot price, and the second represented the aesthetic value of the piece.

The relationship between form and matter becomes strangely clear when the value of the material destroys the unity of an object and creates a new commodity object — ostensibly one without any formal features. Gold, the commodity, doesn’t need to look like anything in particular. Although its usually given the shape of a brick for easy stacking and marked with its weight for easy price calculations. The material seems to shed its visible aesthetic appearance in favor its pure commodity value.

Gold shows us something important here, something that has some truth beyond the buying and selling of gold. I thought about the price of gold when reading some recent essays on the decline and fall of the Humanities in universities around the country. Certain kinds of math and science have taken on the qualities of gold in the University. A university education has always required the declaration of a major area of interest. And now we can easily assign a value to a diploma based on the degree to which it can be traded for employment that at minimum has the potential of paying back the student loans incurred in the process of attaining it. What was a university education has been disrupted by the spot value of one of its component parts.

As with objects made from gold, the university education is no longer a university education. They keep up appearances, but in many cases they’ve been reduced to their commodity value. The decline in the humanities is the process of melting down the aesthetic externalities to get at the pure gold bricks of the spot value of an education.

The humanities have a value, but not in this new object that has been created in the place of the university. Gold jewelry has a value, but not in the context of historically high spot prices for gold. The price of gold is falling, so it’s entirely possible that the old object could re-emerge out of the new object. But, of course, once you’ve melted down your great grandmother’s gold jewelry the damage is done.

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TNK: It Is Not Dying

Published May 12, 2012 by cgerrish

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There’s a story that movie stars often tell about the trajectory of a popular actor’s career. It goes like this:

“Who’s Hugh O’Brian?”
“Get me Hugh O’Brian.”
“Get me a Hugh O’Brian type.”
“Get me a young Hugh O’Brian.”
“Who’s Hugh O’Brian?”

The “Mad Men” television episode was called “Lady Lazarus” after a poem by Sylvia Plath. In this episode the ongoing theme of the emergence of 60s rock and roll and its relationship with advertising is explored. In earlier episodes, the ad men had tried to sign the Rolling Stones to do music for a commercial. In this episode, a client wants the Beatles, or something that sounds like the Beatles. In the trajectory of the movie star’s career this is the “Get me a Beatles type” phase.

The client wants the Beatles-type sound for his ad because he feels that the Beatles are in touch with, and even driving, what’s going on in current culture. Those lovable mop-tops running from adoring fans in “A Hard Day’s Night” have really struck a chord. And if you can’t get the real thing, then a close copy will do. This is when the counter-culture was being sterilized and injected into the mainline culture. In the moment depicted, the two cultural streams are quite far apart. In fact that’s the conceit of the episode. The 60s, as a cultural phenomenon, is about to explode into the world of Mad Men. As viewers, we know something that Don Draper doesn’t know about what popular music will mean to this generation.

In the end, getting a Beatles-type sound turned out to be both possible and profitable. Bob Rafaelson and Bert Schneider were able to construct “The Monkees” with the help of Don Kirshner, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond and Harry Nilsson. Advertising no longer needed to appropriate popular culture, it produced popular culture.

With the advent of social media, we’re in a very similar place. The means of production are in everyone’s hands—including corporations. The paper towel you use to wipe a spill on the counter now wants to be your friend. Won’t you “like” it with a public gesture so that all your other friends will know about your new relationship? One thing was “like” another thing. Now the two things swim together in the same stream.

With this story, Mad Men had painted itself into a corner. The song the ad executives come up with, the one that’s supposed to sound like the Beatles, sounds nothing like the Beatles. Now the show itself had to deliver, not for the client, but for the audience. And not something that sounded like the Beatles, or some other artist doing a Beatles song. Here we become highly attuned to the difference between the original and the copy. The series creator, and writer of this episode, Matthew Weiner, working on multiple levels of signification, does a beautiful thing . The Beatles song he delivers is “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The song plays as Don Draper sits back in a chair in his perfectly-designed Manhattan apartment.

Instead of a song that perfectly captures that moment in the culture, we hear a song that is utterly alien. No client of an ad agency would want this song playing over an image of their product. This song explores the vast internal landscape inside every person. The material world of products and social status is dissolved, but don’t be afraid the song says, “it is not dying.” Even the title of the song tells us that things are changing and the future is uncertain. The overlay of the song on the image of a sitting Don Draper doesn’t create the feeling of harmony. Instead we feel a profound dissonance. This song isn’t just out of sync with the image, it wants to blow up the whole material world and release the listener into the infinite interior in all of us. Sometimes music can be dynamite.

In the spirit of things that are like other things, here’s my favorite version of the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a live rendition by a band called 801.

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Without Kings

Published May 1, 2012 by cgerrish

Spending two weeks in Paris, I was immersed in the past. Architecture of bygone times poking through from a dozen historical eras as I walked the streets. There’s a kind of sublimity that’s the experience of being overpowered by the object of contemplation. The size, scale and beauty of the cathedrals and chateaus take the breath away.

I was never so conscious of being born and raised in a country that never had Kings, a country that was never dominated by the Church. These monuments left by Kings and Cardinals just aren’t the kind of things that could exist in my country. We’ve had our industrialists and captains of industry, but the power of capital simply isn’t at the same level.

Stewart Brand wrote a book about how buildings learn; even these monuments created to glorify royalty or the institution of the church have adapted to the new environment of the Republic. We preserve the sublime without regard to its origin. We experience its beauty and turn a deaf ear to the raw power responsible for its being.

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