Somebody has finally nailed the operative ethos of our times:
Category - commentary
Acerbic observations on the state of the world, art, politics, and culture.
In which I ponder the endangered Nashville species called ‘Music Row’
(originally posted on July 1; reposted July 8)
“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
–Marshall McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage
Here’s a little-known fact about me:
The first summer I spent in Nashville (1994), I had a ‘job’ as a tour-guide and entertainer on the Nashville Trolley.
For several hours on weekend afternoons, I’d sit with my guitar in an alcove-like space next to the engine housing in the front of one of those tottering, wheeled behemoths as it lumbered along a serpentine course from Riverfront Park, up Broadway to Music Row and back.
My job was to recount the history of the landmarks along the route, and between the landmarks and history lessons I’d play my guitar, sing songs from the Nashville canon – and try to be heard over the roar of the diesel engine beside me.
I don’t remember much about my repertoire now but I’m pretty sure that somewhere along Music Row I’d sing Alan Jackson’s Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow (Spotify):
I made it up to music row
Lordy, don’t the wheels turn slow..
It must have been quite a sight: a by-then middle-aged Jewish kid from New York singing country songs from a perch alongside a whining diesel.
I’d had to pass an audition and some vetting to earn this lofty position, but the job only payed whatever tips I could wheedle out of the tourists as they got off the trolley. So on the floor in front of me I placed a large jar with a label that read, “Garth Brooks and them play for millions – the rest of us play for tips.”
Little did I know at the time what a prediction that was for the future of the music business.
Needless to say the jar was never very full after a shift… and I didn’t last very long at that particular ‘job.’ I guess my ambitions lay elsewhere… Read More
CohesionArts – (that’s mostly me, Paul Schatzkin)- is looking forward to providing event photo coverage of the Rock Your Influence that networkers extraordinaire Dave Delaney and Amber Hurdle will be hosting on July 16 at Bongo Java Upstairs Theater near Belmont University in Nashville.
If you’re following the links from Dave and Amber’s postings about the event and would like to get a better idea of what we offer, please follow this link to our photo galleries.
I’m looking forward to meeting some new folks at the event.
…but I can’t seem to tear myself away from it.
There is probably a lot more to be said on this subject, but that will have to wait for another time and post. In the meantime, this pretty much says it all:
@WilliamShatner @GeorgeTakei The wisdom of Cap’n @JamesT_Kirk
#startrek #starship #enterprise #captainjamestkirk #jamestkirk #kirk #williamshatner #captainjamestkirk #shatner #montgomeryscott #yolo #beammeup #primedirective #trekkie #jameskirk #facebook #wisdom #sheerprofundity
©2014 [email protected] aka @driver49
I posted that (the subject header) to as a rather random, off-the-cuff comment to a Facebook thread started by my friend Craig Havighurst in response to his posting of the most recent screed from yet another singer-songwhiner about how the Internet is making paupers of his particular profession.
In the comments, I said,
I just re-read that headline, “…Songwriters Are Getting Screwed…” Well, excuse me, but why do songwriters think they’re some uniquely aggrieved class? We are ALL getting screwed, if learning to cope with a New Reality is your definition of getting screwed. And by “all,” I mean all of us, for example, who supply content – as we are doing right here – for the digital oligarchs. We are supplying the content and Facebook is getting the money. How is that not also getting “screwed?” Oh, this should be fun…
And then I realized that my comments were in fact stimulated by something I’d just read (heard, really, since I’m listening to the audiobook) in Jaron Lanier’s book, “Who Owns The Future” (which, credit where it is due, I am reading in part because Craig mentioned it to me last week):
The information economy that we are currently building doesn’t really embrace capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism.
Full stop.
That would seem to explain a lot of things going on in my own life right now: from this obsession with medieval ruins to my devotion over the past couple of months to all things “Game of Thrones.”
It has been said often that when contemporary popular culture sets out to portray other periods in history, the narrative conveyed is more about the period in which the content is created and consumed than it is about the period being portrayed.
If that’s the case, then what on earth does a brutal, medieval fantasy like “Game of Thrones” tell us about the (evolving) digital world we’re living in now?
Could it be anything as simple as: “The new world is not a capitalist democracy, like we’re led to believe in our daily media/news stream; it’s a feudal oligarchy, in which we are all vassals and peasants.”
Consider: we all create content on a regular, fast and furious basis for sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.” But as Lanier opines, all the value that is created in these enterprises rises to the owners of the “siren servers.”
How is this not like peasants working the land for Starks or the Lannisters? The nobles own the land, and we toil in the fields to create the wealth that maintains their estates, and they in turn promise to protect us by continuing to provide the service.
At the risk of violating every copyright law known to man and The Seven Gods (to say nothing of the God of Light…), I have taken the liberty of purloining an entire chapter from Jaron Lanier’s book to illustrate the point. Follow this link to read the chapter, which imagines what the End License User Agreement (EULA) might be like for a child opening a lemonade stand with “Streetbook” – an road-operating company that sounds a lot like an app store.
Follow the link, listen to the reasoning, and then tell me if this doesn’t sound downright “feudal”…
SECOND INTERLUDE (A PARODY)
If Life Gives You EULAs, Make Lemonade
Funny to look back on it now, but I think Monty Python knew what was coming like 40 years ago…
In response to a question posed recently at a social occasion, I offered this:
1. There was no coherent story.
2. My “inside sources” proved to be inconsistent and unreliable.
3. My principal “collaborator” proved to be bat-shit crazy.
And that’s all I have to say about that. .
I dunno about “forgiveness,” but “bat shit crazy” explains a LOT:
Study Shows: Dark chocolate ingredient may prevent obesity, diabetes
Too bad the source is Fox News:
Dark chocolate is rich in flavonols, a type of antioxidant shown to improve cardiovascular health by lowering blood pressure and improving blood flow. In order to determine whether flavonols also have a protective effect on weight, researchers placed lab mice on a high-fat diet rich in flavonols.
Their results, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, demonstrated that a flavonol known as oligomeric procyanidins (PCs) seemed to have the greatest protective effect on health.
I do prefer dark to all the other chocolates.
And “white chocolate” is an oxymoron in my book.
And who on earth am I to wonder such a thing?
But after reading David Carr (my new favorite NYTimes columnist) critque the shenanigans at last week’s Austin Clusterfuck (aka “SxSW), you do have to wonder…
You may have heard by now that pop-star performance artist Stefanie Germanotta – aka Lady Gaga – was this year’s marquee performer and keynote speaker, following in the steps of such luminous predecessors as Bruce Springsteen and David Grohl. Maybe you’ve heard that the whole thing was a big shill for Doritos. Or maybe you heard that who got in to the big show in was determined by a raffle held via Twitter.
I guess this is what we missed:
We missed quite a spectacle, from what I can see in video clips and news reports. Lady Gaga was smeared in barbecue sauce and mock-roasted like a pig and then, with the ink on the check from Doritos barely dry — and with millions destined for her charity — she bit the tortilla chip that fed her. “I won’t play by your” — insert street-cred adjective — “rules,” she said.
She then wagged a crooked finger at her fans who were shooting pictures on their phone and had tweeted their way in at her instruction: “When you leave this earth, no one is going to care what you tweeted. Don’t let the machine and don’t let technology take you from this earth.”
Note the use of the word ‘spectacle.’ A word that often comes to my mind when watching the Grammy Awards. Who can forget Pink and her Cirque de Soleil routine?
Apparently we are supposed to overlook this latest exercise in spectacle-borne hypocrisy because Ms. Gaga donated the Doritos money to her charity. Well, Gagme.
Carr continues:
At her keynote address on Friday, Lady Gaga thanked Doritos and said plainly, “Without sponsorships, without all these people supporting us, we won’t have any more festivals because record labels don’t have any” money.
And, given the nature of this particular performance, that would be a bad thing because….??
Still, she’s probably right about anybody caring what I tweeted.
I wrote a little something yesterday about streaming music and the transition that is now threatening to disrupt the music business again as much as the advent of paid downloads did a decade ago.
In the course of that post I made a reference to seeing the future “through a rear view mirror,” which is one of the fundamental lessons I picked up years ago in the writings of Marshal McLuhan.
While I was citing that notion, it dawned on me to Google the phrase “mcluhan rear view mirror” and was surprised to discover that the phrase has its very own web page, which quotes the pertinent passage from The Medium Is The Massage:
When faced with a totally new situation,we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.’1
In other words, we are trying to fathom a streaming media future with the metrics of a unit-purchase past. In other, other words, flogging the engine with a buggy whip. Git along, little motorcar…
Actually, if you have any interest in McLuhan’s observations, this whole site is worth spending some time with. It is based on a doctoral thesis by an Australian named Alice Rae and is extensively researched and documented. Hopefully Alice won’t mind if I cite the centerpiece of her ‘about’ page:
Was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) one of history’s greatest thinkers?
Tom Wolfe, who met McLuhan in 1965, praised him in the New York magazine as a thinker on par with ‘Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov’.
Critics remained unimpressed, calling McLuhan a ‘false prophet’ and ‘one-idea man’ and his work ‘pretentious nonsense’ or at the very least ‘slightly dotty’.
Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, the advent of the Internet and the vindication of McLuhan’s theories has led to something of a McLuhan renaissance.
He was declared ‘Patron Saint’ of Wired magazine in 1993.
Which maybe explains why I keep coming back to him.