Strategic Naivete, a work in progress (one of several)

[This was meant as my opening gambit for a Sound Studies roundtable at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting this year, which I was unable to attend.]

Andy Warhol called his cassette tape recorder his “wife,” and after he obtained it in 1965 it was his constant companion, always faithful, always turned on. In the history of audio technologies, this queer-in-every-sense-of-the-word version of matrimonial bliss stands out dramatically from the historically concurrent, masculine cult of high fidelity, not to mention the production wizardry going into albums like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper. His work as a record producer with the Velvet Underground, as Lou Reed and others have recounted, involved no knowledge of the sound board or microphones; it consisted solely in telling the band to keep it simple, to sound the way they did while rehearsing. Yet despite this apparent dilletantism, he was also one of the first people to own a cassette recorder, because of his strong relationship with the Norelco/Philips company, which also manufactured film and video equipment. This was Warhol’s standard approach to technology—a well-connected expert-insider performing naivete—strategic naivete.

As we know from punk, Dada, and elsewhere, to approach technology naively can in be a radically creative act, resisting the accumulating layers of expertise that both develop and constrain the possible uses of devices like those that reproduce sound. In a historical framework, the naïve approach stalls, reverses, or disorients the triumphalist evolutionary narratives that get told about many aspects of media and how technological “advances” make them better and better able to realize the uses that appear inherent in them and that obscure the ideological and economic forces (among others) that play a central role in shaping media histories. Warhol’s relationship to his cassette recorder was queer, and at the same time it demonstrated his penchant for reanimating the dynamics of a medium’s early historical stages, before its cultural form has taken shape—before, that is, the cultural understanding of what it is for and what it can do have fully concretized. For example, much of this work proceeds as if indifferent to, or only haphazardly dictated by, the principles of selection as to what does and does not “deserve” to be represented.
This historically revisionary aspect of his work is embodied in the content and overall tone of this exchange with interviewer David Ehrenreich in 1966:

DE: Do you like Edison?

AW: I like Edison. Oh, do I like Edison!

DE: Has Edison had a big influence on you?

AW: Oh, yes.

I’m fascinated by how the naïve and the queer undo the ways we understand mediation. I’m fascinated by how they re-orient our understanding of our relationships with technologies. And I’m also fascinated by the ways this depends on undoings of sequential, teleological history, perhaps another embodiment of the queer approaches to historicism and temporality that Beth Freeman, Valerie Rohy and others have developed so richly in recent years.

Thus, in a current project, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, the musicians who make up the electronic/sound-collage band Matmos, are re-invigorating the spirit of the word “medium” as it meant in the 19th century. In a fifteen-minute session with a collaborating non-band member, Daniel attempts to telepathically transmit his ideas for a song to appear on the band’s next album. (they are bringing this piece to Haverford next term). The collaborators then tells the band what s/he thinks the song will sound like. After a series of these sessions, the band and the collaborators produce and perform the music. This project rekindles a far earlier notion of media than the one we are familiar with, a notion that was particularly vibrant in the late 19th century as modern electronic media were emerging under the direction of Edison and others—that is, of course the notion of the psychic medium—the person, usually a woman, who transmits invisible, all but unknowable signals into the real world. The project externalizes the composition process, undermining modernist notions of genius interiority. Given our historical distance from a pre-modernist moment, and the post-modern skepticism toward psychic phenomena, the project relies on a kind of naive faith—a word that also speaks to the issue of fidelity—that something has taken place, that a relationship has been formed, even in a state of inarticulation.
Both Warhol and Matmos illustrate an intensely canny application of naivete, and that’s what I’m trying to get at here, not the type of naivete that disavows knowledge and expertise, that fuels primitivism and the normative romanticism surrounding children and childhood. But what I also want to put out on the table is the question of how such approaches might become a model for critical thought and writing, for us as scholars, intellectuals and academics: how do we make disciplinary forms of knowledge engage productively with naivete? How do we de-familiarize objects of study that we have spent months and years with? How do we come to hear our own writing and thinking habits, the phrases and conceptual routes we use over and over that not only annoy readers but limit us as writers and thinkers? How do we make the canny uncanny?

On My Distaste for Will Ladislaw

I'm delighted to find that Henry James, in his young and cocky review of Middlemarch, calls the long, blonde-tressed Will an "eminent failure":

The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely-completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure. It is the only eminent failure in the book, and its defects are therefore the more striking. It lacks sharpness of outline and depth of color; we have not found ourselves believing in Ladislaw as we believe in Dorothea, in Mary garth, in Rosamond, in Lydgate, in Mr. Brooke and Mr. Cauaubon. He is meant, indeed, to be a light creature (with a large capacity for gravity, for he finally gets into Parliament), and a light creature certainly should not be heavily drawn. The author, who is evidently very fond of him, has found for him here and there some charming and eloquent touches; but in spite of these he remains vague and impalpable to the end. He is, we may say, the one figure which a masculine intellect of the same power as George Eliot's would not have conceived with the same complacency; he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman's man.

What he said.

Or to render it more from my own, un-young and un-cocky perspective, Ladislaw is tiresome because unlike every other character, there is nothing petty or contradictory about him. There is no "blot" in his self. Eliot, narrator, and Dorothea are apparently united when he is described in this way at the end of Chapter 50: ". . .he was a creature who entered into everyone's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance." But to me what this novel is so expert at, and what James likely took from it, is portraying the resistances between people, particularly people trying to become intimate with one another.

The Clientele @ World's Best Rock Venue

I saw the Clientele last night at Johnny Brenda’s. It was my first time at the club, and the great things I’ve been hearing were all true, and in full effect. They serve excellent food and beers; their owners are also proprietors of the Standard Tap, a Northern Liberties staple. The small size is ideal, and the stage is high—more to the point, they have a balcony that looks almost directly down on the performers, and this is a great angle to watch the musicians—you can really see the way all of them are playing, working with their instruments.

I was particularly happy with this because I wanted to watch Alisdair MacLean play guitar. He’s one of the rare figures of the past 20 years of rock who has managed to do something original with the electric guitar. In fact, he’s managed to do something with that very staple of college rock guitar, the “jangle.” In his playing, jangling is full of detail, and drawn out into blurry, dreamlike clouds of sound. He plays a lot of major 7 chords, but they never sound loungey. The main thing I was able to glean with my less than acute eyes was that he finger picks everything. I could see a pick sitting on top of his Fender Deluxe Twin Reverb. But he never touched it, that I noticed. This is extremely rare in rock and roll. And while he’s playing using a folky method, the music is still always clearly sounding pop. A few years ago a friend told me that when they play live they sound just like on their recordings—his point was, essentially, so why go see them. But it was actually impressive to see how effectively they created the sound with just four musicians; and Maclean's voice was pitch-perfect, with the exact same hushing reverb treatment that the band is probably best known for. Another aspect of the JB’s experience: the sound is excellent. Rock clubs have come such a long way since when I started going to shows over 20 years ago. That’s a form of gentrification I’ll take—a lot of the grit of the old days was simply pretention, anyways.

New Yorker Tea Party article

I didn't read it very closely, admittedly, but the Ben McGrath piece in last week's New Yorker seems entirely puffy to me, and dangerously legitimizing of a deeply corrupt and insidious movement in US politics. He lets one kind of loony guy represent the fringiness of the "party," instead of asking questions like, "How does a movement claim to be populist and fight for working class people *not* to receive medical care?" Or "Why is it any more possible to associate the term socialism with Barack Obama than it is to say two plus two is five?" Such questions have just become too obvious to ask for most US journalists. Which is to say, they're so obvious, so deathly deserving of being asked, that they have to be written off immediately, or else the hours and hours of coverage given to these people would suddenly seem wholly unjustified.

A Solution?

If I had a kid, then I'd have an excuse for the shortness of my attention span, and for how little work I get done, at this ripe old middle age.

Why?

Why does the Blue Man Group make me so angry?

However, there's this, from wikipedia:

In the 12th season episode Trilogy of Error Homer describes the Blue Man Group as "a total rip off of The Smurfs". Also, in "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner", Homer - on the verge of being arrested - desperately babbles "Don't tell my kids I'm going to jail. Tell them I joined the Blue Man Group. I'm the fat one!"

Big Star box

Emusic just posted the Big Star box set, which I've been debating whether to buy for weeks now. You can download as much as you want--at least none of the rarities are marked "album only." I've had a big revival in listening to this band lately. Alex Chilton's voice is so sublimely sweet on their records. And I've developed a rather obsessive relationship to the song "Daisy Glaze," in particular, with its lovely elongated and slurred vocals over a barely continuous beat--not to mention the direness of the lyrics, wherein the narrator, upon seeing his lost love with another in a bar, intones, "And I'm thinking, Christ, nullify my life..."

In other news, I just ate a copious amount of corned beef.

And now back to the sunlight...

When I listen to Dennis Wilson's solo work I feel like I'm listening to records made by Jeff Lebowski. Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) on now, and it's pretty much unlistenable. I would love to hear from anyone with a cogent way of describing why it's not.

Perhaps I should start another blog to talk about the experience of writing this one. I have to say I cringed as I typed the word "experience." Right now, though, this blog is feeling like a place to write slightly longer status updates than Facebook allows.