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Category: music

Beckett, A Quinn Martin Production

Somehow I've always thought about Samuel Beckett like this. Along with the profundity, the sadness and the humor–there was at bottom, the detective.

The theme music is from the classic television show “The Streets of San Francisco.” It was composed by Patrick Williams and features a killer lead saxophone by Tom Scott. This is what television sounded like in 1972. It's worth listening to the whole thing.

 

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Slippin’ Into Darkness

Milton Glaser has designed a graphic representation of our biosphere. The first thing I noticed about it was that the darkness seemed to be spreading from the top down. The second thing was how little green is left. In 1700, seven percent of the world's land was used for farming. That number is now more than fifty percent. Ecological awareness is beginning to interupt the conversation about Capital, optimization and the possibility of infinite growth that we've been having with ourselves for the last couple hundred years.

 

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Computers Augmenting Humans: Humans Augmenting Computers

Technology writer and venture capitalist Om Malik opens a recent blog post on big data and big responsibility with the following paragraph:

“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.

Malik goes on to explore the idea that, aside from some half-baked libertarian ideology, the big technologists don't really have a moral vision of the future. He doesn't come out and say it, but the powerful technology that will have a profound influence on what you see and buy is under the control of 13-year-old boys (in the bodies of adults). This technology may very well create the boundaries of your imagination and make you its plaything within them. Malik is too timid to speak truth to power, he makes vague gestures about how somebody oughta do something or some sorta bad thing might happen. He deserves some credit for bringing the issue up, but none of the titans of technology are going to lose a wink of sleep over his blog post. In the old days, we'd call his post tomorrow's fish wrap.

Imagine instead someone a hundred years in the future looking back on this moment. Think of it as a moral thought experiment. That future that Brin spoke of, a dominant Orwellian consumer-oriented big data cultural hegemony, has become the air we breathe. It's our everyday prison house.

We often talk about what we would do if given access to a time machine. A typical response has been a plan to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler prior to his rise in Germany, thus changing the course of history, and possibly saving millions of lives.

Looking back on our day from the future, at the moment when Sergey Brin talks about the global networked computing machines that Google is in the process of building, do we think: we should have stopped it right then and there. Malik seems to think Brin and Page are “really smart guys,” but they aren't smart enough to pull the emergency break and take a good hard look at what they're doing.

 

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Annette Peacock: Solving for the Unknown Known

If you've lived long enough and you look back on the trends and history of recorded music, you sense that something's missing. In that era of the late 60's when music was undergoing so many changes and revolutions, there's a space where there should be a groundbreaking female avant-garde musician. Perhaps someone who tripped with Leary, performed as a hologram in a Salvador Dali installation and a pioneered the use of the Moog Synthesizer in treating vocals. A person who changed the politics of avant-garde jazz improvisation by creating the “free form song.”

Annette Peacock was thinking about gender and the politics of jazz improvisation while most of us were having our minds blown by what appeared to be a free jazz improvisational structure. Free jazz was so new and such a different way of making music that we didn't know how to think about it, how to critique it. We barely knew how to appreciate it. Here's Peacock on how it was:

I came back to New York at the time I started my career – if you can call it that – in the world of avant-garde jazz, everything had broken loose. Everyone was blowing, improvising together simultaneously in the lofts. It was totally free. It was an aggressively masculine texture assaulting you. I’m not male and I wasn’t involved in it so I could see it from an objective perspective. And it seemed like I had to carve space out… to slow things down. So I started writing ballads, with two notes basically, just intervals. No chords. Very minimal. Musicians had no idea what to play on it. Drummers had no idea what to play on it. I felt at the time my responsibility was to create environments that improvising musicians could perpetuate; to create an architecture basically. ECM, the record label, built a very successful label on the concept of those ballads that I wrote.

Peacock's first recording, “Revenge” wasn't released by the record label. And that's why there's a hole in the history of recorded music. “Revenge” was an incredibly influential record that never made it on to the turntable. Peacock explains the choice she was forced to make:

Oh yeah, they didn’t release it. There was a problem with going over budget. Paul (Bley) had recorded some music in Boston with his trio but they weren’t interested in releasing it. So they gave me a choice: release the record and the musicians won’t get paid or pay the musicians and the record won’t get released. So I said pay the musicians because that’s the kind of guy I am! But it was devastating. It was agony. It broke my heart.

Annette Peacock has recently released a remastered version of what she calls “the right album, in the wrong century.” The new title is “I belong to a world that's destroying itself.” The white hot radicalism of the recording is still there, but from this distance we can begin to hear it. We can connect the dots and understand the missing sound that influenced so many threads of music. More importantly, the music still challenges us. We haven't progressed as much as we'd like to think. The ecology she sang about, is the ecology we've yet to sing about. All her recordings are worth listening to, but in this first one Peacock is still out ahead of us all these years later. Still avant-garde. Still a visitor from the future.

Yeah, she's the one.

Word is that there's a new record coming soon. And the great Anil Prasad of Innerviews says he's been in contact with Ms. Peacock about an in-depth interview when her new recording is completed. Happy days are here again. You can buy some of Annette Peacock's records artist direct. You should do that.

 

 

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