Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 07-02-2015, 09:55 PM

[Repost from the What'cha Readin'? thread]

I couldn't be happier - this week I firmly decided that I want to really immerse myself into the dark-humored linguistic labyrinth that is Finnegans Wake. Not just superficially - read-aloud gatherings are jovial exercises in social theater where attendees discover more about the reader than of the text. Instead, I've secured gorgeous hardcover editions of Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and McHugh's similar Annotations to Finnegans Wake. These are the two most exhaustive analytical and scholarly texts on Joyce's masterwork.

I want to explore the world's least-read great novel and develop a concrete appreciation of Joyce's sharp wit and of the novel's legendary morphemic acrobatics.

This is an exercise I aim to lose myself within. I've an addiction to cerebral projects and find myself ever-searching for the next big challenge. It is in part escapism from the "dumbed-down" mass-culture I so actively avoid. Independent academic ventures are a realm of safety where all knowledge shines brightly and wisdom is the ultimate virtue. But it is also an activity which simply appeals to my core values - my love of learning, challenges, and discovery. I am, as Cage once said, "a student from the school from which we'll never graduate."

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs...

[EDIT] A side note to fellow readers - Annotations is considered an academic text and as such commands an $85 price from all sellers. Astonishingly, if you visit the John Hopkins University Press website, you can purchase a new copy of the 648pp Hardback for 71% OFF - only $25! (LESS than the price of the paperback!) Today is my lucky day.

innerspaceboy · 07-03-2015, 03:51 PM

I could not be more excited! I bought a used 1st gen Creative Zen X-Fi audio/video player in 2009. 32GB of internal flash storage, expandable to 160GB of Flash memory via SD card. Excellent internal speaker and shipped with Zen's killer IEMs which at the time retailed for $86.

After 6 beautiful years of service my Zen started going crazy as if buttons were being randomly pressed, rendering it unusable. This morning I cracked open the case and gave it a thorough cleaning. It was back in action in minutes!

Friends, don't give up on your gear - show it a little love and it will continue to serve you well for YEARS to come. Best $120 I ever spent.

innerspaceboy · 07-05-2015, 07:26 PM

I had a wonderful day of antiquing with friends and took home some lovely musical treasures. Nothing rare or collectible, but there is incredible educational value in these specimen. File under "Great Music No One Is Looking For."

The Schulze LP is a welcome addition to my growing collection of his works.

The Django Reinhardt disc is a collection of live performances from 1935-38 in Paris with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and others. It is my first LP to feature guitar work by Reinhardt and I'll certainly be looking for others.

But the Gil Evans record was the real surprise. The cover photo is unassuming and bland, but apparently it has little to nothing to do with Evans, himself.
According to Ashley Kahn's book The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (2006), the label's head, Creed Taylor, was in the process of being lured away by Verve Records when this album was in pre-production. They already had the cover-art for it, pre-planned as a sequel to his successful Out of the Cool, so Evans decided to treat the project as a contractual obligation.

What I have, instead is a record showcasing third stream abstract atmospheric jazz led by Johnny Carisi and the other half, weirdly, an experimental/free jazz record by Cecil Taylor playing with, among others, Archie Shepp and Sunny Murray.

Spoiler for Hidden due to the nude Schulze cover:

innerspaceboy · 07-10-2015, 05:36 PM

As foretold in the prophecy - my textbooks have arrived!

Above - a Penguin Paperback of the unparalleled Finnegans Wake, and two scholarly texts on the novel - A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by the master of monomyth, Joseph Campbell and the latest edition of Annotations to Finnegans Wake published by John Hopkins University Press.

(Pardon my excitement but these are wonderful additions to my library.)

From the introduction of Annotations..., this page outlines conventions and languages referenced throughout the book.

...additional languages referenced. (Joyce was a brilliantly mad linguistics expert.)

And this is how the body of the book is laid out.

For those unfamiliar with the Wake, Jacques Mercanton described the book as being written, "in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe were attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams."

My affinity for analytical processes makes Joyce's final work an exciting undertaking! (Perhaps I'll have the good fortune of joining the NY chapter of The Wake Society to participate in a reading.)

innerspaceboy · 07-11-2015, 12:50 PM

The following article was published on my music journal this afternoon. I intend for it to start a public conversation about the future of the net.

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s writings on piracy culture, particularly The Anarchist in the Library, reference numerous examples of the church and crown’s efforts to maintain a stranglehold on the flow of information to protect their power. In a chapter discussing the history of control, there are clear parallels between the Catholic Church and those of the United States with the implementation of The Patriot Act.

In the 14th century, John Wycliffe was the first to produce a handwritten English manuscript of the 80 books of the Bible. 44 years after Wycliffe had died, the Pope declared him a heretic, banned his writings, and ordered a posthumous execution. His bones were dug-up, crushed, burned, and scattered in a river. Similarly in the 16th century, William Tyndale was the first to translate and print the New Testament into English. As a result he was imprisoned for 500 days, strangled and burned at the stake.

William Tyndale, before being strangled and burned at the stake, cries out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”. woodcut from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563).

By the dawn of the 21st century, the freedom of information that came with the printing press experienced its most-recent incarnation with the world wide web and social media. The Patriot Act was the government’s struggle for control over the anarchic freedom that was the internet and came in the form of mass-surveillance.

Edward Snowden became the latest in the line of dissidents who worked to empower the public by exposing the corruption of the government, just as Tyndale and Wycliffe before him. And a curious web search for the terms “Spanish Inquisition” + “Patriot Act” instantly returns a piece by Walter Cronkite comparing and contrasting the two systems from 2003.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger states in his article, Who Says We Know that “Professionals are no longer needed for the bare purpose of the mass distribution of information and the shaping of opinion.” This same dissemination of distribution is what resulted in the music industry’s panic and frenzied struggle for control with crippling technologies like DRM and its continued anti-piracy campaign. There is simply no longer a need for the monopolistic record labels that once commanded the industry. Artists are empowered to distribute their content directly and can communicate with their fanbase without a commercial intermediary. This artist-empowerment is expertly discussed by Amanda Palmer in her book, The Art of Asking (and in her TED Talk of the same name.)

Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking

In each of these milestones in the history of information freedom, the acts have been irreversible. Gutenberg’s printing press empowered the public good through democratization of information – making it inexpensive and readily-accessible. The web has been much the same, only exponentially more potent.

Still, small but persistent communities continue to prepare for a dystopian world war over information. They archive the Wikipedia daily and hypothesize alternate methods of mass-communication should the Web as we know it come under fire. Is their fear valid?

An eBook export of the Wikipedia

It is difficult to envision a scenario in which first-world governments could close the floodgates of the world-wide web without immediate and drastic reprisal from the public at large, who have come to view the internet as a right and a public utility. Furthermore, global commerce, banking, and the mechanics of industry could not likely stand to make such a sacrifice in the name of control. Shutting down the web would thrust the global economy into an instantaneous dark age and entire systems of utility, government and finance would collapse.

What are your thoughts? Is our access to information irreversibly free? Need we take measures to stockpile and protect the information we have today in preparation for a darker tomorrow?

Aux-In · 07-11-2015, 03:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by innerspaceboy

[COLOR="Gray"]What are your thoughts? Is our access to information irreversibly free? Need we take measures to stockpile and protect the information we have today in preparation for a darker tomorrow?

It might sound controversial, but I believe the Internet is absolutely a public utility now, and should be set up the same way as a utility company (legal monopoly). The Internet system needs to be built up the same way the roads system was. This would help modernize commerce as well. Perhaps a little more tricky to do as technology changes so rapidly, so it wouldn't be like patching pot holes whenever there's a need for an upgrade. I think at the very least the government could sponsor satellite Internet, since that is easier to upgrade (although not as fast and all that), but I guess that would be a political football that you'd have to get past the land-line lobbyists up at Pennsylvania Avenue, if you're living in the United States. And I don't mean giving away free Internet, I mean setting up the Internet providers as utilities. But that's just about access.

As far as control and regulation, I am not a doom-and-gloomer, since I've always been curious why the government gave Internet technology to the public to begin with. They didn't have to. For the most part, they have let it go unregulated (outside of illegal activity and all the copyright infringement stuff).

I come across this topic from time to time in net neutrality discussions. It's a really complicated topic, but I think you might find this video relevant or interesting. It was a discussion about open Internet as far as service providers creating tiered pricing based on speeds, but they also touch on some of the topics you mention about the FCC and government control:

Spoiler for video:

If you really think about it, governments controlled books here and there throughout history, but did they really? Nah. Books still got published and I think the future of the Internet will be the same: pockets of control here, pockets of control there, but largely, it will remain open.

innerspaceboy · 07-11-2015, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aux-in

It's a really complicated topic, but I think you might find this video relevant or interesting. It was a discussion about open Internet as far as service providers creating tiered pricing based on speeds, but they also touch on some of the topics you mention about the FCC and government control:

Spoiler for video:

Thanks for your input, AUX-in! I'll definitely check out the vid.

I don't yet take a concrete position regarding government-provided internet as a public utility. I'm not sure that a body as large and slow as government could effectively manage access to the web. (Senator Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" talk comes to mind.)

I do approach the subject from a biased position, given my propensity to favor deregulation and strong support of file sharing as the only viable means of acquisition for the content I enjoy.

Though I don't imagine that internet management by the US govt would have much (if any) impact on darknet activities, based upon the little effect that mass surveillance has had on the same.

innerspaceboy · 07-25-2015, 02:26 PM

Tom Waits has remained a mysterious character on the fringes of popular music for over 40 years. One of the small drawbacks to his personae is the lack of critical and analytical interview content of the strange and wonderful musician. Thankfully, the Under Review documentary series has produced two 80-minute films which offer a surprisingly in-depth examination of the man and his music.

The first segment is titled Tom Waits: Under Review 1971-1982: An Independent Critical Analysis, and the second bears the same title replacing the years with 1983-2006. The films feature rare interviews, footage, unusual photographs and criticism from many different experts and acquaintances of Tom Waits.

The most revealing insight is presented in the first of the two films, which examines the context and collaborations resulting in Waits' always unique but ever-changing sound. Speaking about his earliest downtrodden troubadour era:

Quote:

If you were the kind of person who was going to walk into the seedy bar and say, "oh... there's a drunken bum over there," and walk out, you weren't going to be sitting there listening to Tom Waits.

But if you were the kind of person whose imagination started to think, "Well what was that guy's life like? How did he end up here? What happened here?"... if there was an element of "who washed up on the shore of the promised land... L.A. being the ultimate destination and the final burying place of western culture... Tom Waits is interested in finding out where the body is buried. And that's where those guys were."

There is also a detailed analysis of Waits' atypical approach to lyricism which favored narrative over confession.

Quote:

This was a guy creating theater pieces in a way, in a song. These were characters he was either inventing or finding and expanding upon in his own mind. This was not the kind of diary writing that a lot of singer/songwriters were doing. This was more like short story writing - there was a highly theatrical - an element of artifice (used neutrally) in his music that was not what the singer/songwriters were supposed to be about.

Tom has always maintained a style unlike any of the artists of his day. What was particularly fascinating about the album Swordfishtrombones was that a listener couldn't point to other records from that decade and say, "I see where he got that from." And that unlike his contemporaries of the 1980s, the album hasn't become embarrassingly dated to its decade.

Still, there are more subtle stylistic influences to Waits' work. His music mirrors the wit of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, and Kerouac. His songs also embrace the atonalism and avant-garde compositional form of Harry Partch, Captain Beefheart, and most certainly German composer Kurt Weill. But perhaps most apparent are the vocal influences of Howlin Wolf. The film humorously describes his more self-parodic songs as falling "somewhere between an imitation of Louie Armstrong and Oscar the Grouch."

This outlandish and extreme vocal quality was met with criticism from the listening public.

Speaking about Nighthawks at the Diner, the film observes:

Quote:

I think it's more about authenticity. People began to wonder whether this bohemian bar stool philosopher was a real character or whether it was just a theatrical construct.

Until you got to know Waits and you started to really believe in the character and see the depth of what he was doing, it kind of looked liked a pastiche. There was initially some suspicion that it seemed a bit phony. [But really] all artists are self-created in some form or another.

They go on to examine his vocal characteristic further, noting that "Nighthawks was almost self-parodic, but with Small Change Waits transcended his own influence."

They described the peak of the boho barstool character thusly:

Quote:

It's like an anti-operatic, opposite of belle canto - the opposite of beautiful singing and we understand it. And it's certainly not natural - it's an assumed voice - it;s a put on vocal persona. But it's the key to why the [sentimental] / schmaltzy things work.

But it is Waits' juxtaposition of innocent lyrics and melodies with his nighthawk performance that really makes the whole character work.

A key analysis presented in segment one outlines the importance of this quality:

Quote:

When Tom Waits plays around with songs like Waltzing Matilda and Silent Night - those songs represent a communality and sense of you in the famiy bossom and the bossom of your community and faith - all of which has been lost to his character. So when his character is groaning out Waltzing Matilda and growling Silent Night - that is their [Samuel] Beckett style poignant memory of what once seemed possible. They stir the emotions that those songs typically do but only by way of trying to demonstrate their absence. And that's what's so affecting about it.
It's a way of re-contextualizing that music to dramatize the desperation of the characters who are singing it.

And finally, another layer of context is added to Waits music when the culture of his listeners, (particularly American audiences) is added to the mix. Speaking on the value of the album Heartattack and Vine -

Quote:

Only American capitalism could have produced the songs of Tom Waits. There's a sense of this human debt detritus - these people who are just cast off by the system here that I don't think exists in most other industrialized countries where there's more of a social net.
...
Those characters could only exist here. This is the anti-story - the other story of America that he's interested in. And not from a social protest, Woody Guthrie standpoint but from a human narrative
standpoint. Who was that person? What was possible for that person? What was his/her dream? There's not a lot of tolerance in America for losers. Tom Waits made art of that possibility.

Under Review expertly illustrates the depth and consistent quality of Waits' music throughout his career with this fantastic critical analysis. For any listener growing bored of the superficiality of taking music at face value, Under Review will be an inspiring breath of fresh air.

Trollheart · 07-26-2015, 06:36 AM

If you have those movies available and can send them to me somehow or know where I can get them, I would love to see them. Sound really interesting. Have you read "Big time"?

I also have, somewhere in my collection, an actual interview on vinyl. All I remember is this: he was I think attending an album signing or doing something public anyway, and this lady came up to him. "Is this where they sell the clocks?" she asked. Waits looked at her blearily for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure", he said, "this is where they sell the clocks!"

innerspaceboy · 07-26-2015, 07:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

If you have those movies available and can send them to me somehow or know where I can get them, I would love to see them.

Sure thing. The first film is available in full on YouTube. Here's the playlist -

Quote:

Sound really interesting. Have you read "Big time"?

I have not - I'll add it to my list! I do own a copy of the Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits hardcover.

Quote:

I also have, somewhere in my collection, an actual interview on vinyl.

Wild! The only vinyl-issued interviews I know of are the following. Is it one of these?

A Conversation With Tom Waits (Island - TW 1 1983)

Tom Waits Limited Edition Interview Picture Disc (Baktabak ‎– BAK 2141 1989)

On The Scene '73 KPFK Folk Scene Broadcast 2LP (Let Them Eat Vinyl ‎– LETV057LP 2012)

07-26-2015, 06:36 AM	#119 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,992	If you have those movies available and can send them to me somehow or know where I can get them, I would love to see them. Sound really interesting. Have you read "Big time"? I also have, somewhere in my collection, an actual interview on vinyl. All I remember is this: he was I think attending an album signing or doing something public anyway, and this lady came up to him. "Is this where they sell the clocks?" she asked. Waits looked at her blearily for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure", he said, "this is where they sell the clocks!" __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018