The public relations profession was created to repair the reputations of the 1%. The robber barons who consolidated control over industry in the United States needed to boost their numbers in the polls, and thus began the professional publicizing of acts of charity. The technology industry and its titans have finally taken that lesson to heart.
Fighting tooth and nail, then threatening to leave San Francisco for more accommodating tax havens, technology companies have negotiated big tax breaks. They're special. Not the sense that they need an extra helping hand to get their business of the ground. It's just that they want to use every piece of leverage they have over the city. When what they've wrought becomes plain for everyone to see, the oldest public relations plan in the book is trotted out. They'll participate in the community, but only on their terms. Here it comes, sweet charity.
Instead of public services coming organically through our tax base and distributed through a public political process, the tech company decides what cause gets money and how much. The money they donate creates capacity within the public budget which is then redirected to other needs. In a few years when the corporations stop giving and the public budget can't accommodate the programs, they're eliminated. What seems to be a windfall is really a death sentence.
Criticism of charitable acts is a rare thing. That's why it's a classic public relations play for the 1%. Google funds a transportation program for low-income youth, Facebook buys a police officer, etc. PR firms are paid big bucks to make sure we all know about it. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
William Blake wrote “The Human Abstract” as part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Put this poem on the “experience” side of the ledger. His criticism of pity and charity continue to ring true. Out of the pity of the technology giants comes charity for the poor and disadvantaged. Blake shows us that it's not “pity” and “charity” you want to put up on a pedestal. It's a difficult case to make, but Blake does it. These virtues are symptoms, born of inequalities.
Suddenly the world was filled with zombies and apocalypse was the theme du jour. The movies are one of the ways we tell ourselves the story of our dreams and nightmares. Our anxiety about the future viability of the biosphere spills out on to the silver screen. All this could be coming to an end.
As philosopher Tim Morton likes to say, the film we're both watching and creating is a noir. We're the detectives searching for the villain threatening our planet. Of course, it turns out we are the ones we're looking for. Those super villains and monstrous aliens on the big screen are disguised aspects of ourselves. We're Dr. Jekyll looking for Mr. Hyde.
Recently there's been a small change in the dream narrative. The story has always been about the hero who prevented the end of the world by defeating the villain. A new film by Darren Aronofsky starring Russell Crowe makes the story of Noah into an action adventure movie filled with big special effects. The change is that Noah doesn't save the world; he builds an ark. The world is destroyed, but Noah preserves the seed of a new world.
Hidden within the apocalypse of the flood is the idea that once the waters recede, the earth will be cleansed and the biosphere will be able to provide a new home to the virtuous ones who survived the end. It's the kind of ending that's a new beginning. We think of it as the kind of change that only happens after hitting rock bottom.
Uncontemplated is the ending in which the biosphere is no longer able to support a majority of current life forms. It's not so much a matter of poisoning the biosphere as causing it to change at a rate that exceeds a majority of species ability to adapt. In the end it will be the unpredictable strangeness that leaves so many species out in the cold.
We seem to have lost the liner notes. On some labels and for some artists the liner note provided a context or key to the music contained within. Reading song lyrics while listening to an album for the first time was an important ritual. Before the counter-culture was totally absorbed into mass culture, the photographs on the album were a window into a new form of life. An album required decoding and the casing provided some of the clues.
For those too young to remember, the liner note was an essay, photographs, lyrics, credits, etc., usually printed on the inner sleeve of a vinyl record album. The sleeve that held the vinyl platter was called a record liner, sometimes referred to as a dust jacket. When commercially recorded music became digital bits there was no need for a dust jacket and thus no where to print the liner notes. The material relationship of the liner note to the physical media that holds the encoded music can’t be replaced with hyperlinks.
The record album created the perfect canvas for the liner note. Its size was more like an art book, plenty of room for the interplay of text and image. The compact disc shrunk everything down to an unreadable size. Text is still printed on compact disc packages, but only as a matter of form. It’s like those credits that roll by at hyper speed at the end of a television show. You know they say something, but they’re not really meant to be read.
Allen Ginsberg writing about Bob Dylan’s album “Desire” is my strongest memory from the heyday of liner notes. Listening to the music through Ginsberg’s lens connected it to a long line of poetry and song. Long afternoons lying next to the stereo, reading and discussing the notes, listening to the tunes, parsing the lyrics until they were burned into memory.
Recently I’ve had a similar experience with poetry and podcasts. While footnotes to the poetry of Wordsworth and Milton don’t always give me the same charge — listening to close readings of the poetry is like getting a great set of liner notes. Here are a few that I’ve listened to more than once:
If liner notes were to make some kind of comeback, I think they might look more like what Anil Prasad does with his web site Innerviews. His interviews with musicians are completely different than anything you’ll find in the commercial music press. His writing opens up both the players and the music. When I first discovered it I realized that I’d missed years of great interviews. I spent days going from Bill Bruford to Allan Holdsworth to Zoe Keating to Laurie Anderson, and then to Marc Ribot and Joan Jeanrenaud. I have to be very careful about visiting Innerviews. I start reading and when I look up, several hours have passed and I wonder if I can squeeze in just one more interview.
Another possibility for liner notes is the video note. Here, soprano Joyce DiDonato talks about singing an aria from Rossini’s “La Donna del Lago.” This is a warm up for a concert, but it would be a welcome addition to a recording.
The video liner note that kicked off this whole train of thought was the DVD that accompanies Jeremy Denk’s new recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Denk is both a writer and a musician, and is particularly adept at taking you inside the music and the experience of playing it. Listening to Denk talk about what he’s playing is much like listening to Timothy Morton read and interpret Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc.” You go back to the work with new eyes and the aesthetic object unfolding in front of you bristles with new possibilities.
The liner note was physically linked to the media it described. You’d think in an age where the hyperlink has become so dominant that liner notes would proliferate. But like a restaurant with hundreds of online reviews, you have trouble knowing where to turn. You need a review of the reviewers to even get started. Here the economy of abundance is a detriment, it’s the limitations that force the liner note to be something special.
A last liner note, this one also by Jeremy Denk. I’d always had trouble hearing Gyorgy Ligeti’s piano etudes. Somehow my ears weren’t quite ready. A work of art asks you to attune to it in a certain way. To see perspective in a classical painting, you need to stand in a certain spot with respect to the canvas. Listening to music is much the same. Sometimes it’s the liner note that tells you where to stand.
It’s with the digital that we imagine we’ve made the bits small enough to get to the bottom of things. Nothing is smaller, more atomic, more essential, than those ones and zeros that make up the digital. With high-definition 3-D digital motion pictures we appear to capture things perfectly, to get to their essence, their reality. In some cases, the digital simply replaces a thing. What was encoded on vinyl records is now bits in a file on a hard disk or flash memory. An image once printed to photographic paper is now just flashed on a screen as part of an ongoing slide show.
This notion of capturing the essence of something surfaced recently while reading an essay by Ulrich Pfarr on the painter Gustave Courbet in the book “Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art.” The essay looks at how the quality of “introspection” is conveyed in the portraits painted by Courbet. Of course, a portrait is also meant to capture something of the essence of a person. It’s not a snapshot, or a documentary representation of how a person looked at one particular tick of the clock. We understand that the portrait captures a general way of being of a person. Here’s Pfarr on Courbet and portraits:
Conspicuous eyebrow movements are also a feature of the Rembrantesque chiaroscuro in the portrait of art dealer H. J. Van Wisselingh. As a consequence of the hard incidental light, the drawn, furrowed eyebrows cast the eyes into shadow, so the nerves are not tense and therefore the eyes are not narrowed. In this way, the expressive touch of anger in the eye area is toned down into a sign of inner concentration that, combined with the slight tilt of the head, is condensed into the image of an energetic personality. Of course, this may reflect not Van Wisselingh’s inner constitution so much as his professional mask. To that extent, Courbet, who complained that Baudelaire looked different every day, seems to have only a limited interest in the dubious ability of the physiognomy to offer indications of psychological traits in fixed physical features. Although these pictures confirm Courbet’s endeavors to filter permanent features from transitory visual phenomena, the deeply etched traces of facial movements are in turn adjusted in favor of the subjective impression you only get from a living sitter, which art theory traditionally calls an “air.”
Following phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, we might imagine that the essence of a thing could be definitively determined by statistically analyzing every possible profile a thing presents to us. We might easily conclude that the essence of a thing is, what it mostly is. There’s a kind of democratic quality to this approach; as though inside each thing an election could be held with its essence determined by a majority vote. Normativity rules. In this kind of big data scenario, the concept of “essence” is hedged through the use of words like “propensity” and “probability.” Our actions with regard to a thing tend to line up with the majority — we act as though we perceive an essence. We’d be fools to buck the odds.
Going back to Courbet’s portraits, there’s a kind of compression of observation that produces an essence. The resulting essential painted image may very well be outside the actual collection of observed data. Here the expression of essence might be different than any one thing perceived or recorded about a thing. But a thing’s essence is more than just an average or composite of the majority, it’s the unique minor elements that create all the specificity. In fact, the expression of essence in a portrait is fully contained in the small differences.
When we look at a thing, we see it at a certain tempo. You can think of this as “beats per minute.” A tune can be played within a whole range of beats per minute. Returning to a charged memory at a later time, we can play it back at a slower speed. We become the director and editor of our memory, shaping it to fit its purpose. William Wordsworth wrote about this process in his preface to the “Lyrical Ballads.”
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.
We can see new aspects of a thing by changing the tempo. Jean Luc Godard’s 1980 film “Slow Motion” (also called “Sauve Qui Peut” or “Every Man for Himself”) gives us some memorable examples of this phenomena. There’s a scene that has stuck with me since I first saw the film; it’s sequence where Nathalie Baye rides a bicycle through a country landscape. Occasionally the film slows down and stops on a frame for a moment. Out of this fluid bike ride, these very poignant sculptural moments are carved out. Suddenly we see the outward signs of the inner world, the quality of introspection becomes visible. A simple bike ride is revealed to contain an infinity of interior space. Nothing about the real-time video recording contains those moments.
If we were to look at the world through the eyes of the objects around us, we’d see at varying tempos. The rock has a slower tempo than the honey bee, the electron has a faster tempo than a pumpkin. As humans, we tend to think of the music of the spheres all moving at the same tempo. A single beat holding down the discotheque of the universe — a human beat. Viewing a stop motion film of a flower growing and blooming, we can clearly see that plants dance to a different beat. Sunlight, soil and the plant all relate at the plant’s tempo. Humans require the technology of stop-motion photography to speed plant tempo up to human tempo so that it becomes visible to us.
Returning to our starting point, we ask whether the digital as a medium has any particular advantages in capturing the essence of a thing? Certainly it has reduced the cost of certain kinds of reproduction. Video, still image and sound recording have been made much simpler. With our big data systems we’re able to create very large haystacks where previously invisible patterns suddenly emerge. Is there a simple method that combines raw digital capture and algorithmic computation on big data sets that results in a picture of the essence of a thing? Or as it would be said in the lingo, a “high probability” of the essence of a thing? Could it understand the introspection of a thing operating at a radically different tempo? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Imagine if this kind of encoding were done using oil paint. Again, here’s Pfarr on Courbet:
Courbet has a whole repertory of techniques to suggest the gradations between half-sleep, falling asleep, waking up, and daydreaming, ranging from wide-open eyes to the features of deep sleep. Figures with eyes half or completely closed feature sitting upright, smoking a pipe, or holding a cup, like “The Lady on a Terrace” — in all these cases, the facial expression does not function as an empirical physical symptom but indicates various gradations of mental introspection.
