Grandpa Bernie and the Millennials

So, my most recent op-ed for the Jewish Standard came out on February 12th, under the title of Zayde for President, the link again going to the posting on my Times of Israel/Jewish Standard blog, just FYI and in case you want to see it in that context. Anyway, it was given the subtitle of, "Grumpy, cool, fun grandpa speaks to millennials," and here's the rest of it:

When Larry David hosted Saturday Night Live on February 6, Bernie Sanders made a surprise appearance during a skit about a sinking ship — an apt metaphor, some might say, for the state of the union.

With David playing the part of a rich man arguing that his wealth earned him a spot in the lifeboat along with the women and children, Sanders was given the opportunity to deliver a few lines about the one percent “getting preferential treatment,” and the “need to unite and work together.” A brief exchange regarding democratic socialism followed, leading David to ask, “Who are you?” Sanders replied, “I am Bernie Sanderswitzky — but we’re gonna change it when we get to America, so it doesn’t sound quite so Jewish.” “Yeah, that’ll trick ’em,” David shot back sarcastically.

And certainly there is no disguising the fact that Sanders is Jewish, although this was one of the rare moments in media coverage of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination that any mention has been made of his ethnic and religious identity. And that arguably is odd, given how much emphasis was placed on the fact that Barack Obama became the first African-American president, and on Hillary Clinton potentially becoming the first woman to be president.

Maybe it seems that by contrast with African-Americans and women, Sanders becoming the first Jewish president would be less of a monumental breakthrough for the nation. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that some Americans believe that we already have a non-Christian president — that Obama is a secret Muslim. Or maybe it’s a matter of longstanding Jewish reticence, as reflected in the name change mentioned in the skit. Sanders is a traditional Anglo-Saxon name; interestingly enough, it originated in the same impulse that was prevalent among the Jews of antiquity, to name their children after Alexander the Great.

Of course, Sanders’ self-identification as a “democratic socialist” often is referenced by the news media, as it was on the Saturday Night Live skit, but would that make him the first socialist president of the United States if he is elected? Not according to Republican rhetoric, given that most Democrats have been accused of promoting socialist policies. More significantly, not according to Sanders himself, who positions himself in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and policies, as extended by John F. Kennedy and, significantly, by Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Those presidents avoided the label of socialist, however, given American opposition, from the Russian Revolution on, to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even during the brief period we fought together to defeat Nazi Germany.

To get a sense of the brief moment in our history when socialism first represented a serious political movement, we might turn to another Sanders, Edward Sanders. Perhaps best known as one of the founders of the 1960s rock band The Fugs, Ed Sanders also has distinguished himself as an activist, author, and award-winning poet. And his extended poem, called Yiddish-Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side, stands as a tribute to the likes of Meyer London, Morris Hillquit, Scott Nearing, Eugene Debs, and Emma Goldman:

To make a New World
inside the New World
at Century’s turn
the Yiddish speaking socialists
of the Lower East Side.

As the poem explains, they had, “a passion for Justice that never fades away,” although they failed in their efforts to translate their ideals into a successful political revolution. Ed Sanders, who is just two years older than Bernie, was an icon and leader of the counterculture of the ’60s and early ’70s. Although he was not Jewish, he took inspiration from the social justice activism of these early 20th century pioneers.

Movements like these seem to run in cycles, so it may well be that the socialism that arose at the turn of the 20th century and returned in the form of the counterculture over half a century ago is due to make a comeback now. Without a doubt, the counterculture movement also was a youth movement, and not surprisingly, Bernie Sanders has enjoyed widespread support among the youngest of our eligible voters, the generation referred to as Millennials. Indeed, this has been a frequently invoked theme in news coverage of the campaign, with the pundits often seeming at a loss as to why twenty-somethings would support a 74-year-old candidate.

The expectation that young people automatically should favor the youngest candidate perhaps has its roots in the fact that baby boomers venerated John F. Kennedy, who was the youngest person ever elected president, but this overlooks the fact that no one from that generation was old enough to vote in the 1960 election. As much as JFK’s appearance of youth and vigor seemed to resonate with the ascendancy of the boomers, we have no way of knowing how that generation would have regarded him had his career and life not been cut short by an assassin’s bullet. We do know that his successor, LBJ, was vilified for his escalation of the Vietnam War, and that happened despite his progressive domestic initiatives.

In the same sense that political movements may be cyclical in nature, so too are filial relationships. That’s why we often speak of traits and qualities skipping a generation. Millennial support for Sanders therefore should come as no surprise, as he easily fits into the role of America’s grandpa, or more accurately, America’s zayde. Often he comes across as a grumpy grandpa, as Amber Phillips of the Washington Post suggested last July. But Emma Roller of the New York Times labeled him “your cool socialist grandpa” in December, and just a few weeks ago, People profiled him as a “fun grandpa,” according to his own grandchildren.

Jeb Bush, who had been struggling to gain the slightest bit of traction, recently had his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, venture out into the New Hampshire snow to help him in his primary campaign. The news media has made frequent reference to her enormous popularity, referring to her as “America’s grandmother.” And there is no question that she fits the image, and did so even back when her husband was president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has included the fact that she recently became a grandmother as part of her campaign rhetoric, but she has not been able to come across as particularly grandmotherly, drawing criticism this past December for comparing herself to an abuela (Latina grandmother).

Grumpy, cool, and fun are not mutually exclusive traits, and there is something about the image of older Jewish men that plays well in contemporary American culture, and especially on television. It is indeed a mixture of idealism and humor, impatience with injustice, and infinite patience with the young. Whether this is a wining formula for the Democratic primaries remains to be seen, but the source of his appeal to Millennials, as a socialist zayde, should not be a mystery.

Space Oddities and Eventualities

With the relationship between the United States and Russia growing increasingly more strained over the crisis in the Ukraine, there has been a great deal of concern over our reliance on Russian rockets. Not only have we been depending on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from their base in Kazakhstan to get our astronauts to the International Space Station ever since the end of NASA's space shuttle program in 2011, but we also import their rockets into the US to get our own satellites into orbit, and this includes our military and spy satellites.

Of course, our use of Russian space technology was only supposed to tide us over while private, commercial companies moved in to fill our government's needs. That's the American way, after all, to turn things over to the private sector whenever possible. And it has worked well for us in many instances, but there are some things that the private sector is just not equipped to handle, and some things that just ought not to be privatized. Like roads and highways and prisons, for example, and police forces and fire departments. Moreover, Neil Postman pointed out that western nations that did not privatize broadcasting in the way that the US did were able to mitigate some of the negative effects of the television medium. 

On the other hand, we have a long history of commercial transportation by land, waterways, and in the 20th century by air as well. Stanely Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey famously portrayed a future where Pan Am, ironically enough given that the airline has been defunct since 1991, provided shuttle service from the Earth to an orbiting space station still under construction, and from there to our lunar colony.

Now, I want to acknowledge the very powerful argument made by Lewis Mumford, among others, that much of our space program has amounted to an enormous waste of resources that are sorely needed in so many other places. Having grown up during the Space Age, cheering on as we won the Space Race with the Soviet Union, I still have an emotional connection to the idea of space exploration, and I am more than a little disappointed that we are not living in the future that Kubrick depicted during my childhood, not to mention the kind of future Gene Roddenberry gave us in the original Star Trek TV series. And while I was not in favor of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly referred to as Star Wars, I did note that many science fiction fans actually came out in support of the proposal, not so much out of political conviction or military necessity, but because it provided a reason to expand our involvement in space.

So, from a hawkish perspective, there are legitimate national security concerns, given our present dependence on Russia, and China's expansion of its space program—they have their sights set on the moon now. From a more centrist position, there still are reasons to want to see space dominated by western democracies rather than nations with authoritarian regimes. And apart from these more practical considerations,
space exploration does represent the intangible value of inspiration, not just in lifting our morale, but in giving us a new perspective on ourselves and our world, as  summed up by Buckminster Fuller's famous phrase, spaceship earth, and with it in granting us the basis of a utopian vision of humanity united and looking outward, instead of consumed by internal conflicts. Now wouldn't that be something?

And maybe space is the means by which we can transcend our current travails, but we have a long way to go, and the question of whether our current activities are worth the price tag remains open. Be that as it may, the current concern over our capabilities of getting into space on our own reminded me of the video sensation that was a product of happier times, just a little over a year ago, in May of 2013. As you may recall, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space and the first Canadian to serve as commander of the International Space Station, caused quite a stir before returning to earth from his final mission in Earth orbit, when he posted a YouTube video consisting of footage videotaped aboard the International Space Station. It was a music video in which he sang the David Bowie song, "Space Oddity," but with a somewhat different set of lyrics. In case you missed it, here it is:





Now, for those of us of a certain age, "Space Oddity" was one of the best known and most popular songs of the progressive rock era, and it was David Bowie's first big hit back in 1969. For those of us who were into that kind of music, it was a song we loved to sing along to, or sing by ourselves. This was marvelously illustrated in a scene from the Adam Sandler 2002 film, Mr. Deeds (which was, of course, a remake of Frank Capra's 1936 classic Mr. Deeds Goes to Town):





The song also comes up in Ben Stiller's 2013 film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (which of course was a remake of the 1947 film of the same name starring Danny Kaye, both being adaptations of the 1939 short story by the brilliant humorist James Thurber). First there's the spoken word reference that comes up towards the end of this clip:






And then there's this wonderful scene, which has the performance of the song occurring in Mitty's imagination motivating him to actually continue on his adventure:








The scene mixes together with Kristen Wiig's imaginary barroom performance with David Bowie's original version. And I suppose I really ought to include the original recording here too, while I'm at it:







Now, when you consider how Chris Hadfield changed the lyrics, it makes perfect sense for him to not only make the song more descriptive of his experience as an actual astronaut, but to shift the sense away from Major Tom's essentially suicidal space walk. The original sensibility of the song was not at all the positive spin that Hadfield gives it. In some ways, it's more in line with the 2013 film Gravity, which actual astronauts have hailed as the most realistic cinematic depiction to date of what it's like to be up in space, albeit one that portrays a kind of disaster that has not yet occurred, a snowball effect where a destroyed satellite starts to take out other satellites resulting in a large debris field orbiting the Earth and destroying all in its path. It's a scenario that is not at all impossible, and sets up the main conflict in the film:





By the way, Sandra Bullock absolutely deserved the Academy Award for Best Actress for that film, no question about it. She was entirely brilliant in her performance, and about 80% of the film was her alone. But holding that aside, the film served as a reminder that space is not all fun and games and singing our favorite classic rock hits while floating in zero-g. In fact, it's an environment that is completely hostile to any form of terrestrial life, and space travel, at least as it exists now and will exist in the near future, is risky, dangerous, claustrophobic, disorienting, and absolutely inhuman. This all connects back to Mumford's criticism of the space program.

Getting back to "Space Oddity" by David Bowie, the song is a product of the sixties counterculture, and as such, runs counter to the depiction of astronauts as heroic types, blessed with what Tom Wolfe famously referred to as the right stuff. In Bowie's song, that other Tom, Major Tom, had become a media celebrity, was feeling vulnerable and impotent circling the globe in his tin can, and was apparently suffering from depression, although the song is also clearly inspired by Kurick's Space Odyssey where Dave Bowman also leaves his capsule at the end, but that occurs as part of a transcendent encounter with an alien intelligence. So perhaps Major Tom is also seeking the transcendence of becoming one with the universe, but the point is that he is no longer functioning in the efficient and predictable manner of an astronaut.

I would also venture to guess that science fiction writer Ray Bradbury's short story "The Rocket Man" (included in his 1951 anthology The Illustrated Man) was an influence on Bowie as well. The story depicts a near future in which astronauts are no longer the best and brightest, cream of the crop types, but rather more like workers, albeit ones working in extreme conditions, and therefore relatively well paid for their labor. Written a decade before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in 1961, Bradbury gave us a vision of the future in which space travel had become somewhat routine, and outer space a place of work, like, say, an oil rig or coal mine.

Bradbury's story gives us a future in which going to outer space is neither glamorous nor heroic, and that's what Bowie's song does as well. "The Rocket Man" is also the inspiration for the Elton John hit from 1972, "Rocket Man" (included on his Honky Château record album):










Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on "Rocket Man" states that, "the song echoes the theme of David Bowie's 1969 song 'Space Oddity' (both recordings were produced by Gus Dudgeon)." A third song I would group together with these two is neither as spacey as Bowie's nor as wistful as the lyrics Bernie Taupin wrote for Elton John, but rather one that exhibits a bit of humor about it all: Harry Nilsson's: "Spaceman":





While owing much to Bradbury, I think Nilsson's version is the most prescient of the three and it's certainly the most fun!)). By the way, the view of space as a working environment involving a great deal of drudgery was the basis of the little known 1974 dark science fiction comedy directed by John Carpenter, Dark Star. The script for this relatively low budget, independent film, written by Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, borrowed heavily from Bradbury's short story. Here's the trailer:





Dan O'Bannon, it is worth noting, went on to become the lead writer on the 1979 Ridley Scott horror-science fiction hybrid Alien, which further elaborated on the vision of a future in which astronauts are nothing more than employees of a corporation, in this case divided between white and blue collar types, and all considered expendable in an effort to obtain the incredibly dangerous and deadly alien for the company's weapons division. 

But maybe the way to bring this post to a close is with the Grateful Dead song, "Standing on the Moon" from their final album, Built to Last released in 1989:






Although Robert Hunter's lyrics were written almost two decades after "Space Oddity" was released, the sensibility is in keeping with the sixties, perhaps less dramatic, more, dare I say it, down to earth? "Standing on the moon, with nothing left to do, a lovely view of heaven, but I'd rather be with you." Mumford would approve—what really matters, in the end, is not our technological prowess, but our human relationships.

NY Media Ecologists 1991

Well, well, well, look what turned up on the internet, over on Pinterest of all places.  The photograph was taken on October 19, 1991, at the annual meeting of the New York State Speech Communication Association, held in Albany.

Over the past two decades I've changed a bit.  Yeah, that's me, front row, left of middle, sitting next to Neil Postman, with Christine Nystrom to the left of Neil, and Bill Petkanas to the right of me. 

Standing behind us, from left to right, are my good friend and former classmate Robert Albrecht, Paul Thaler, Gene Secunda, Janet Sternberg, Sal Fallica, Mary Alexander, Thom Gencarelli, and Casey Lum.  

It's a gaggle of media ecologists.  Or is that a giggle?  Or a flock? Maybe a mob, because some call it the media ecology mafia.  But let's keep that in the family, okay?

Somehow, seeing myself so young in this photograph, I'm reminded of the Bob Dylan refrain from "My Back Pages" from 1964:  "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."  The Byrds did a cover version of the song in 1967 that turned into a Top 40 hit, and here's an amazing live version of the song reminiscent of the arrangement from The Byrds, and featuring the band's leader, Roger McGuinn, along with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Dylan himself, all jamming out, and segueing into another Dylan tune, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door":  





And let's get Bobbie's original lyrics to "My Back Pages" in here as well:

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

I am not trying to make any connection between the photograph and these lyrics, I hasten to add, beyond the remembrance of time's past.  But given that all of us in the picture studied general semantics with Neil Postman and Chris Nystrom, I wonder if lines like, "using ideas as my maps," "abstract threats," and "good and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow," don't all suggest a certain non-Aristotelian influence on Dylan's thinking?

As for the photograph, it is a map of sorts as well, a map of a territory no longer accessible, a territory that no longer exists.  And I know this makes no sense, but somehow, I used to think the lyrics said, Ah but I was so much older then, I'm younger then, not now...  And, after all, I am.

Noriginality

The topic of remix has come up here on occasion, and it's one I cover in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University.  So it seems only right that I include this Ted Talk video that recently came to my attention, entitled Kirby Ferguson: Embracing the Remix. Here's what the blurb over on YouTube says:

Nothing is original, says Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix. From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, he says our most celebrated creators both borrow, steal and transform.

And of course, I hasten to add that there is nothing original about the idea that there is nothing original.  As Walter Ong explains in Orality and Literacy, this realization is relatively recent in literary circles, where it is associated with the concept of intertextuality, that no text is a closed system, but that all texts draw on previous writings through quotation, allusion, or simple influence. 

Moreover, what is generally unacknowledged is the fact that the language itself is borrowed, not the invention of the author.  In this sense, all writing is remix.  And all speech as well.

Through most of the modern era, originality was idealized to the point of worship. And as general semantics scholar Wendell Johnson notes, idealization is the first step of the IFD Disease, a result of treating high level abstractions as if they were concrete phenomena, and failing to adequately define our terms, establish procedures, and set measurable goals.  As the IFD disease progresses, idealization leads to frustration, and ends with demoralization. And in some instances, the elusiveness of originality was seen as reason enough for suicide, at least among poetic types in the Romantic era.

And let's not forget the first lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes (the original Hebrew name of the scroll being Kohelet, which means preacher), attributed to King Solomon.  Here's the poetic rendering from the good old King James Version:

1	The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2	Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3	What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4	One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
5	The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
6	The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7	All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
8	All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9	The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10	Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11	There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

So life is a remix, whether you believe in the Bible, or in those twisty strands of DNA.  Well, anyway, where was I. Oh yes, the video, right, here it is (and special thanks to Maria Popova and Brain Pickings for bringing this to my attention):

As you might have guessed from the fact that I am including the video here, I am generally sympathetic to Kirby's view.  Of course, there was the case of George Harrison being found guilty of plagiarism, however unintended it may have been.  Here's a YouTube video that does a great job of demonstrating how Harrison's 1970 hit song "My Sweet Lord" really did plagiarize "He's So Fine," a song written by Ronald Mack and recorded by The Chiffons in 1962:

And that's the problem, after all. We don't want to do away with intellectual property rights altogether, or at least I don't think we do.  In fact, as a product of the typographic media environment, they are very much undermined by the electronic media, and especially by the fact that digital copying can be done so easily, and without loss of quality. While the extension of copyright to protect corporate interests is absolutely unwarranted, those interests, and those of all intellectual property holders, individual and conglomerate, are threatened as never before by the new technologies, and there is no easy solution. 

I am far from alone in saying that for many years Lawrence Lessig has been a voice of reason in all this, and his fabulous Ted Talk is included in my previous post, Say Amen to Digital Sampling, along with a very interesting YouTube video that relates to it.  And for something a bit more offbeat, another post from a while back on the topic is McLuhan Redux/Remix.

And yeah, I know, this post wasn't very original at all, was it?  Maybe we need a new word, like maybe...

 Noriginality?

Merchant of Verses

Back in May, I had the opportunity to attend the annual Convention of the American Library Association, in my capacity as a member of Fordham University's Library Committee, which was a truly marvelous experience, and very educational indeed.  I actually joined the ALA, at the time to get a discount on the registration fee, but I have to say that I'm glad I did, and plan to maintain my membership in the future.

One of the amazing events to take place at this convention was a private concert by Natalie Merchant, whose music I have been a great admirer of for some time now.  It was an absolutely outstanding experience, and what made it particularly interesting was the fact that Merchant had recently released an album with songs based on poetry (I missed the fact of the CD's release earlier, but hey, I'm just not on top of these things anymore).  Here's a PBS Newshour segment about the CD:


 


At the ALA, along with her performance of selections from the album, she gave brief background biographies of the poets, showed pictures of them on the big screens set up for her (let me emphasize that this was a ballroom set up for lectures, not a large auditorium or concert hall, and I was seated about eight rows away from the stage!), and acknowledged all of the different libraries that helped her in obtaining background information or images.  It was a little funny for me, not being a librarian, to be on the receiving end of her thank yous directed at the librarians, but I found it altogether touching and gracious.  And as you no doubt know, if you've been following me a bit, poetry has been one of my enthusiasms in recent years, so this really resonated with me.

Here are some photos of the performance, courtesy of the ALA:

I just fell in love with the music, and of course, I've since bought the CD,  Leave Your Sleep, which comes with a lovely booklet, and I highly recommend it to you, both for the music, which is varied and wonderful, and for the poetry.  The poetry is childhood-oriented, and includes selections by e. e. cummings, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Graves.  It also includes The Blindmen and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe, a poem favored by folks attuned to general semantics, for its expression of the ways in which different people abstract different details from the exact same phenomenon.  And it includes Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet that was the subject of Walter Ong's MA thesis, and whose notions of sprung rhythm has been of interest to media ecology scholars.  I also found The Janitor's Boy by Nathalia Crane to be irresistible, not the least for its mentions of Sheepshead Bay, which is in Brooklyn, and an unlikely location for a dessert isle:





That was from a performance in Portland.  I also got a kick out of The Dancing Bear, from a poem by Albert Paine, that's set to Klezmer music.  This video comes from Scottish radio:





And here's a video, in two parts, of Natalie Merchant performing selections from the CD live on BBC Radio this past February.  The sound quality is excellent, but there's not much of her explanations of the background of the pieces, which I very much enjoyed at ALA.








But leave it to good old TED to provide a video that comes the closest to the performance I saw at ALA:





When I got back from the ALA meeting in Washington, DC, I enjoyed talking about what a privilege it was to be there for Natalie Merchant's performance.  But I was surprised to learn that some of the folks I spoke to didn't recognize her name, although after some prompting it was clear that they had heard her music, especially the "thank you" song.  But my favorite of her hits is "Wonder" which doesn't seem to have a video on YouTube, except for live performances, but I rather liked this fan-produced contribution by Sue Shanahan, which is subtitled Girl's Self-Esteem--Down Syndrome:





Yeah, I kinda get teary-eyed, I can't help it, I'm an easy touch, I admit, and this hits very close to home with my own experiences with my daughter's autism.

Anyway, Merchant ended her ALA performance by coming back out for an encore, which in and of itself was awesome, and performing her best known song, "Kind and Generous" (that's the "thank you song").  So, I'm going to end with the video for that one, but I want to direct it back to the singer herself:





Thank YOU, Natalie!

Say Amen to Digital Sampling

This is a video that was first brought to my attention by one of my interactive media students a few years ago, one that I just shared with the Introduction to New Media class that I'm teaching this summer at Fordham University.  We had just been talking about the differences between the concepts of digital and analog, and gotten into the practices of remix and sampling, and this was a perfect illustration.  And while the video was posted on a class blog back in 2008, I realize that I never added it here to Blog Time Passing, so it's well passed the time that I remedy that oversight.

Here's the write-up from the YouTube page where the video is entitled Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop:

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

And here's the video itself:





The video mentions Larry Lessig, and now I realize that I never added Lessig's TED Talk, which I have used many times in my new media classes, to this blog (and here I thought for sure I had!).  It's called Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity, and the summary reads

Larry Lessig, the Net’s most celebrated lawyer, cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the "ASCAP cartel" in his argument for reviving our creative culture.

 And Lessig's short bio reads

Harvard professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues, with a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.

There's a link over to his Profile Page where the longer bio reads

No expert has brought as much fresh thinking to the field of contemporary copyright law as has Lawrence Lessig. A Harvard professor and founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, this fiery believer foresaw the response a threatened content industry would have to digital technology -- and he came to the aid of the citizenry.

As corporate interests have sought to rein in the forces of Napster and YouTube, Lessig has fought back with argument -- take his recent appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court, fighting the extension of copyright protection from 50 to 70 years -- and with solutions: He chairs Creative Commons, a nuanced, free licensing scheme for individual creators.

Lessig possesses a rare combination of lawerly exactitude and impassioned love of the creative impulse. Applying both with equal dedication, he has become a true hero to artists, authors, scientists, coders and opiners everywhere.

And here now, is his outstanding TED Talk video:



And of course including all this here on my blog is fair use, right?  Right? Right...?

Causation or Coincidence?

First, thanks to those of you who left comments or sent private messages after my last post, A Minor Medical Mystery.  I really appreciate it,   And I want to quickly acknowledge that this is far from the worst that could happen.  As I understand it, kidney stones are generally not that serious of an illness, the pain is about as painful as pain can get, but that's about it.  And on that score, things have improved, as I haven't experienced the worst of the pain in the last couple of days.

On Thursday morning, I was checked by an urologist, the stone should pass at some point, and I have to drink lots of fluids, and take Tamsulsin, which increases the flow.  With all that, well, you might say a river runs through me!  Oh, and I have painkillers to take, as needed.

But, here's the interesting part, or at least mildly interesting.  In my previous post, I mentioned how the emergency room doctor characterized getting this kidney stone after a colonoscopy as a "bizarre coincidence" and how my family physician was of the same opinion.  But in a comment Michael left on A Minor Medical Mystery, he said, "The stuff that you take to clean out your system can have an impact on the kidneys," and he is quite right, indeed.

Specifically, my urologist said that the preparation for a colonoscopy involves draining the water out of your digestive track, along with washing everything else out), and that dehydration leads to kidney stones.  In fact, he said that this is the kidney stone season (did you know kidney stones have a season?  I didn't), as it's been quite hot in the area lately, up into the 90s, and that results in people getting dehydrated as well.  I haven't been out that much, though, so it's really about the dehydration from the colonoscopy preparation, which no doubt pushed whatever was already forming in my kidney past the tipping point.

Of course, this is not to say that there's any proof that the dehydration from cleaning out my digestive system caused the kidney stone problem I encountered a few hours after my colonoscopy, just that it's a possible explanation for this not so bizarre coincidence, and a reasonable explanation for it.

Part of the problem in pinpointing the connection is that, rather than simple cause and effect, we have cause and side effect, where the side effect occurs in a system other than the one being acted upon.  We also have cause and indirect effect, where there is one or more intermediary effects, in this instance colonoscopy causing preparation (which came before the colonoscopy itself, but was required for the procedure, so a case where the cause precedes the effect), preparation causing dehydration, dehydration causing stone.  The problem of dealing with side effects and indirect effects comes up quite frequently in media ecology, as we try to understand how changes affects systems (e.g., technological innovations affect social systems).

When folks work from a non-scientific approach, they sometimes dismiss the possibility that anything can be a mere coincidence.  In one sense, this fits in with an ecological approach, all things are interconnected.  But in terms of linear cause and effect, that's not the case, which is why post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy.  For those unfamiliar with this, the Latin phrase basically means after this therefore because of this, in other words, because one event came after another, the earlier event must have caused the later one.  Certainly, we expect the cause to precede the event, so temporal sequence is part of the story, but it's not the whole story when it comes to causation, as there must be a direct link between cause and effect (or a series of direct links in a chain of causes and effects).  Assuming that there is a direct link when there isn't is, in general semantics terms, assuming that it's a statement of fact when it's only an inference.

Put another way, researchers will caution that correlation is not causation.  By the way, when there's correlation without any necessary temporal sequence, say when two events happen simultaneously, that sort of thing is associated with another logical fallacy, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, with this therefore because of this.  Again, the fallacy is believing that there is causation involved, or even some direct interrelationship, rather than simply coincidence, that is, simply a temporal relationship of co-incidence.  Or synchronicity.

For example, I said above that "you might say that a river runs through me," and that was meant as a humorous allusion to the book and film title, A River Runs Through It.  I made that little joke before checking to see what new films have been added to the Starz On Demand cable television service for this week, and when I went to check, I kid you not, the 1992 Robert Redford film A River Runs Through It had been added to the line-up!  Did I somehow cause it to happen?  Did some kind of supernatural force line the two events up in time?  Or is it mere coincidence?

Another, different kind of example.  Today, my mother called me up.  She was upset, because she was watching TV, and a commercial came on for one of those law firms saying to come and see them for getting compensated for various medical conditions.  I've seen them before, no doubt you have too.  Well, she saw one that I had never seen or heard of before, one where they included on their list of possible causes for legal action, if your kidneys have been damaged by a colonscopy!  There is at least some element of coincidence in her seeing this commercial at this time (and I reassured her that what I have is a stone, not kidney damage (as least I hope not)).  But apparently there is enough of a causal relationship to merit malpractice suits, and advertising time!  And quite a few hits on a Google search as well!

Proving causal relationships is always problematic, which is why the cigarette companies were able to get away with denying that tobacco causes lung disease for so long.  It finally took a collective cry of BULLSHIT! and some legal and legislative action to get them to own up to it.  On the other hand, there's a psychological syndrome that's not all that uncommon where people genuinely believe themselves responsible for something they couldn't possibly have caused, say someone is looking at a stranger on a city street, and that person gets hit by a car, and the onlooker thinks that he somehow caused that to happen.

Or, on the lighter side, one of the silly amusements we engaged in, as I recall from my misspent youth, was to put on an album that we liked, turn on the television with the sound off, and enjoy the random connections that could be made between the music and the moving images.  I vaguely recall watching figure skating with some rock album on, and the synchronicities had me and my friends in stitches.

One thing such practice that diffused through the social networks a bit after my time was that you could watch the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, with Pink Floyd's trippy album, Dark Side of the Moon playing, and you'd see remarkable coincidences.  My guess is that this didn't really come up until after the movie came out on video, which would have been around 1981 or so.  It probably also followed the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1983, as vinyl would require flipping the album over, whereas the practice is to set the CD on repeat (it plays three times through to the end of the movie).  I think we can consider it an early form of the mash up or remix.

For a rundown on all of the synchronicities that come up, check out The Darkside of Oz - www.angelfire.com.   For a more balanced account, take a look at the Wikipedia entry on The Dark Side of the Rainbow.  And to see for yourself, at least through the first third of the film, take a look below, courtesy of the good people at Google:

My thanks to Chad Calease, who brought this video to my attention via Twitter.  Chad's website, thinfilms, and his thinfilms blog, are worth checking out.

So, what do you think?  For my part, I can see being in college and checking this out with a group of friends, everyone inebriated and finding it absolutely amazing, and hilarious.  Context is everything! But now, watching it on my own, sober and older, it's just, meh.  Cute, but the coincidences seem few and far between, and not all that much.  What really amazes me is that some people actually believe that Pink Floyd deliberately recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, which came out in 1973, long before CDs and home video, to sync up with The Wizard of Oz in this way.  Causation?  Or the Pink Floyd ergo Oz hoc fallacy?

But it's no coincidence that someone came up with the idea of commercializing what can arguably be termed a "folk" practice, that is, a practice that originated from people, as a form of play and creative expression.  And so, we have http://www.syncmovies.com for your convenience!  And not only do they sell a DVD of The Dark Side of Oz sync, but twenty other syncs as well!  All for $189.99!  The perfect gift for any occasion (check it out by clicking here)!  They also have a groovy page of Sync Links you might want to check out, if you're into conducting further research on the subject.

As for me, I'm stuck with the dark side of the kidney stone, drinking lots of liquids, which means that I'm constantly running off to see the wizard, if you know what I mean...

Hey Rube!

No, I'm not asking for help, and no, I won't think you're a rube yourself if you've never heard of the famous 20th century cartoonist, Rube Goldberg.  He was pretty well known when I was a kid, but better known to older generations than to us baby boomers.  I don't see any reason to fault folks for when they were born, and for the popular culture references they may or may not get, so much of that is generational.

So, if you want to read up on Rube Goldberg, check out his Wikipedia entry, and the website http://www.rubegoldberg.com.  And just know that he is best remembered for his cartoons of overly elaborate mechanical devices, machines that took a simple task and accomplished it through the most complex and convoluted means imaginable--and boy, Goldberg's imagination was like nothing else.  I remember learning that his name had become a figure of speech back when I was a kid, and according to Wikipedia, "in 1931 the Merriam–Webster dictionary adopted the word 'Rube Goldberg' as an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complex means."

Here's an example for you:

Such Rube Goldberg machines spoke to a particular moment in history, the era of the assembly line (some like to call it Fordist nowadays, but I think that term sounds awful), a time when mechanical and industrial technology had reached its peak, and was about to reverse into the age of electricity and information.  In a sense, then, Rube Goldberg was parodying his times, but also presciently making the machinery that was in the process of becoming obsolescent into an art form.  But that's enough McLuhanizing.

So, as I was saying, when I was a kid we knew about Rube Goldberg more by reputation than current exposure, but we knew very well one particular Rube Goldberg machine (although it was not one that he actually created), the Ideal Toys board game, Mouse Trap.  Here's the original commercial from 1963:

Oh, how I wanted one myself.  But it was not to be, although I did get to play it once or twice at a friend's house.

Anyway, all of this came rushing back to me recently, when the following music video, OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version - Official was brought to my attention:

Here's the description that accompanied the video:

From the new album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky" available at http://www.okgo.net/store OK Go on Tour http://www.okgo.net/shows/  Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs (http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.  There is an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the warehouse here: http://www.okgo.net/this-too-shall-pass-rube-goldberg-machine.

That last link, http://www.okgo.net/this-too-shall-pass-rube-goldberg-machine, is worth checking out, as it has a very intriguing, interactive map of the warehouse and machine layout.  The band also has four short "making of" videos on YouTube that are interesting, but not as informative as I would have liked them to be.  But for what it's worth, here they are:

Back in Rube Goldberg's time, specialization reigned, and so art was art, music was music, and machines were machines. Today, in the electronic media environment, the boundaries are blurred, the coolness of artists and musicians blend together with the hot intensity of technologically-minded nerds, and we return to the original, ancient sense of tekne as arts and crafts, music and machinery.

I wonder what old Rube would have made of the internet, though...