Samuel Barber's Letter to His Mother

Sorry for not posting in so long.  I've been in-between states and practicing for auditions and seeing friends I haven't seen in years.  I'll start posting again, but for now I'd like to share a 'coming-out' letter that Samuel Barber wrote to his mother when he was 9.  It's one of the most adorable things ever.

NOTICE to Mother and nobody else
Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense.
...
To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing.— Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please— Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very),
Love,
Sam Barber II1 

Source: 
Nadia Hubbs' "A French Connection: Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet," GLQ 6:3, 2000.

Steve Reich's Dolly

These two videos are actually two separate scenes from the same work, "Dolly," which is itself only third act of a three-part 'opera' by Steve Reich.  The three movements of this opera, Hindenburg, Bikini, and Dolly, all explore the nature of technology in an ambivalent light.  The first excerpt, which opens the act, is about cloning, and the second posted/final excerpt is titled 'Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality.'  For the libretto/text, which you can read here, Reich collected interviews with some of the most prominent people working in the fields of robotics, cyborg sociology, technology theory, and genetics, including Richard Dawkins, James Watson, Sherry Tucker, and Ray Kurzweil.  Then, using a technique that he uses in several pieces, Reich splices, repeats, and otherwise messes with the interviews (but with minimal hard/destructive editing), and notates the natural pitch and rhythm of the voices so that the acoustic instruments can double/reinforce them.

One of the things that I think draws me to this work (honestly, Reich is sometimes hit-or-miss with me) is the fear and apprehension that frames this work.  He frames this act with a religious/spiritual mysticism that appears to be inevitably doomed for failure.  In the first part, Reich intersperses lines from Genesis, 'sung' by Kismet, a semi-intelligent robot designed by Cynthia Breazeal:

 "And placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it." 

Cyborg Alice in Wonderland, and What Donna Haraway Found There

So I'm taking an online course on coursera.org on 'Fantasy and Science Fiction,' and had to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. While I was reading, I started imagining Alice as if she were a cyborg.  Then I started thinking, that though she is clearly not intended to be a cyborg in the 'traditional' 'BIONIC' sense, she really does satisfy some of the same fears and desires as her techno-enhanced buddies.

OK, hear me out, please!

Indeed, Alice is sort of a 'stranger in a strange land,' if you will.  She struggles to make sense of her absurd encounters with the denizens of Wonderland and the looking glass country, while her own body literally unravels.  In her first adventure, Alice changes size and shape more rapidly than she can keep track of.  (My favorite part is when her neck grows like a giraffe's and she's accused of being a serpent [original sin, anyone?]).  As Alice attempts to control her own body, she loses control of the world around her.

Steampunk Alice, though, is another story.
(Picture taken from Rebelakemi, on devientart)

The pivotal cyborg moment, though, comes with the realization that these changes are literally a product of her own design and creation, as she is the creator of her own fantasy.  The cyborg as envisioned by Donna Haraway is equally a product of her own potential, who is limited not by her own abilities, but by the limitations and pressures put on by a society that cannot accept the individuality (read:deviance) of the cyborg's powers.

They Gave me Myth

They Gave me Myth

by Chase-Barthes

I’ve got a machine who is powerful

I’ve got a machine who is real

I’ve got a machine who needs me

Ooh the gave me myth

They gave me myth, myth, myth

They gave me myth

Yes, they gave me myth, myth, myth,

Yes, they gave me myth

In it I find him standing

In the next it he’s still

An ore his maching can show me

Oh they gave me myth

They got a hand on an end

Or a world on hand

Oooh, oooh, so on hand

Closed paradoxically

Or a man of power

But I’m represented as magic thought.

Because my machine’s functional

I’ve got a machine who is real

But I almost found my machine

After they gave me myth

Yes, they gave me myth, myth, myth

They gave me myth

They gave me myth, myth, myth,

Yes, they gave me myth.

I've been doing work archiving an old contemporary music magazine called The Ear.  I found this poem, and I liked it.

A Little Vivaldi with your Satanism- Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'Artifice

Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'Artifice.  I'm not exactly sure what the title means, since I speak pretty much no French.  I know from Debussy that Feu d'Artifice means 'fireworks,' and from high school french that Eaux means 'waters,' so is this a play on words that pretty much would mean 'water fireworks?' Anyways, it's a pretty evocative work.  Very surreal.  I especially like the soundtrack- Autumn from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which depicts a drunken peasant, his 'restful slumber' and a hunting sport, in which the animal seems to be chased until it collapses from exhaustion and dies.

Your Voice - Oliveros

XX. Your Voice
Think of the sound of your own voice. What is its fundamental pitch? What is its range? What is its quality? What does it express no matter what you might be verbalizing or singing? What was the original sound of your voice before you learned to sound the way you sound now?
- From Sonic Meditations by Pauline Oliveros

And here are some great words from a letter about her role as a feminist composer-

Actually I am not that interested in composers and musicians. I'm more interested in listening than in being listened to.  Eve's droppings. It's a time of reversals.  As composer I am the audience, as performer I am the critic, as critic I am the maker.  I don't want to lay a trip or an egg.  I want to take one or eat it.  I am the flying daughter who hears what she oughter.

Bjork Again- Her TV

This is one of my favorite Bjork videos. It's silly, but I love it when she takes apart the TV.  I also get this pang of discomfort when she does this because it's not something we're supposed to do.  When we buy a product like a TV, we buy a complete object.  But Bjork is so comfortable tearing it apart, examining the inside for herself, that she breaches a boundary between consumer and manufacturer in a really playful way.  In the end, she gets the most joy from her TV through the exploration of it's insides, not its projected images.  And I think the ending is hilarious!

Cyborg Music Video Mondays- Bjork's "All is Full of Love"

Sorry for the long post, they won't all be this ridiculous!

Bjork's music video for her song, "All is Full of Love" was one of the  first music videos that I became absolutely obsessed with as a kid.  This song, from Bjork's 1997 album Homogenic (so named because Bjork wasn't fluent in English and invented a word that pretty much is supposed to mean 'homogeneous') is about being 'given love' as long as you're receptive to it.  One of the things that fascinates me with the minimalist lyrics is the almost ominous passive construction ("you'll be given") which leaves you to ask... by whom? 

The music suggests a similar ambiguity.  After a brief and stagnant introduction of synthesized middle-register stings, the rhythmic ostinato is introduced.  This ostinato is a little bit unsettling, emphasizing the back beat with a mechanized grinding sound, almost a scream.  When Bjork starts singing, she seems to be competing with this pulse.  Her line emphasizes the first beats, and her long, sinewy lines seem unrestrained by the mechanical grind underneath.  While most people who I talk to about this song say that Bjork's melody sounds timeless, or at least adrift, but I've always thought that her melody was maybe unaware of the machinations that frame her voice.  I guess I've always been a little bit of a morbid child, but I was absolutely obsessed with the incoherence between Bjork's line and the rhythmic backdrop.  This, in addition to my 12 year-old self still not totally comfortable with being 'given' love (cooties, anyone?), made listening to this song a pretty uncomfortable experience for me, and it still sort of is.  

Looking at the music video again, I'm starting to think that scared-puppy childhood Sam may have been on to something... but first, a little background.  This music video, which was released a year later was a collaboration between Bjork and Chris Cunningham, who is perhaps most well-regarded for his videos with Aphex Twin.  In a really fascinating "making of" video, Bjork explains that her original concept was that she wanted to "describe some sort of heaven," with the caveat that "there would be lust" and that the clean white surface of the figures would melt away into the passions of this eroticism.  Interestingly, her original concept of the figures were China dolls, not androids.  those were Chris's idea, as he studied industrial robotics as a kid.  The process involved programming real robotics, and using video editing in order to impose Bjork's lips onto the robots, making this video the result of an awesomely collaborative cyborg experience.  In the end, what's 'real' robotics, what's heavily edited CGI, and what's Bjork's essence all become blurred by the very nature of this process.

One of Chris Cunningham's Sketches

But, for those of you who don't know, Chris Cunningham is basically Satan.  I mean, he's absolutely brilliant, but he's made some of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen, and he definitely highlights some of the tensions that I explained earlier in this post.  In this video, a white female-bodied android is constructed by a machine.  Everything is very white and sterile, resembling a sort of Heaven, but also a Hospital.  This song is basically a love story, as two female-bodied androids encounter each other in this sterile womb and fall in love with each other.  Behind the love story between the two droids, we get the ominous presence of the machine, the mother creator.  The two androids do not seem to notice that they are being constructed at the very same time that they are falling in love.  They are being programmed to love each other, and they are unaware of this process. 

This of course, supports the ambivalence I felt regarding the lyrics and the music.  There is in fact an important disconnect here between the conscious and the unconscious.  Bjork sings in the passive voice, because she is not able to be truly aware of who is actually the giver of love, but in the diegesis of the music video, we get to see it.  The machine-creator completes its task unnoticed to the androids, but is very obvious to us as viewers, similar to the interaction between the mechanical backbeat and Bjork's freeflowing melody.  

But in the end, why was I so morbidly uncomfortable with this idea?  I think it was because this video questions the nature of freewill in a very powerful way, but also in a very beautiful one.  It is only through ignorance of the machine that these two bots can fall in love.  ("You aren't receiving... Your phone is off the hook... your door is shut").    But I think that that reflected my anxieties as a kid more than it does now.  In the end, there's something very poignant about machines falling in love.  More, machines being created to fall in love.  I mean, the line between machine and human is a very fragile one, and this video can give hope that love for love's sake can still exist in the age of machines.  This is not a love about procreation, it's about being free of all anxieties and loving without resistance.  Love for the sake of pleasure, not procreation.  Creation.  If only Chris Cunningham didn't have to make everything at least a little bit fucked up.  But if we can make life only a little bit fucked up, I'd take it.

Robert Longo- "Machines in Love"

All You Zombies- Truth Before God

I came across this sculpture in Jennifer Gonzales' article, "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes From Current Research" and I thought that I should share it.  It's a piece titled "All You Zombies: Truth Before God" by Robert Longo.

This cyborg/monster is a really powerful representation of cyborg resistance.  Gonzales points out some important things, such as the fact that this monster has both a phallus (with wings instead of testes) as well as a single developed breast and a feminine hand reaching out of its chest.  She also points out that its stance resembles Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People"-

What I find most interesting with this buddy is its ability to be violent and challenging to binaries just by existing.  I'll admit that it sort of scares me, but I have faith that it's fighting for autonomy, not for power.  This little guy is a nightmare from the imagination, caught within the frame of multiple gender, temporal, and class subjectivities that make it totally unique but also maybe sort of relatable. Ze (yes I went there) is really sort of beautiful when you get down to it.  Unlike Liberty, ze is alone, or rather on a stage, naked to the public gaze.  Who is being rallied?  I don't know about you, but whenever I think about this sculpture, I feel like I'm personally being called to arms, that I'm one of the zombies (or not one of the zombies) that this creature is fighting.  I don't know if I'd go so far as to call hir my muse, but why the hell not?

Music Video Mondays - Intro

Once a week, I'm going to look at popular music videos and how musicians work with the cyborg.  It's not really surprising that cyborgs have been popping up all over the place in music videos, especially with female musicians such as Lady Gaga, Janelle Monae, Nicki Minaj, et al.  As drum machines and synthesizers continue to replace live band members, technology such as autotune and even amplification enhances the voice, and female pop musicians are sexualized and constructed by their audiences/producers, the life of a pop musician is already pretty cyborgian.  Presenting the body as a mechanical construction can be a pretty empowering thing, because, to me, the cyborg is rendered and constructed, true, but it is also powerful, enhanced, potentially glamorous, and incredibly versatile.  At the same time, revealing oneself as a cyborg can be the new peep show, creating a sort of dialectic between the erotic and the freakish, made-man and struggling for autonomy.

Bionic, or erotic?

Basically, I think that that it's actually pretty difficult to use the cyborg in a music video and not introduce complicated questions about ownership, individuality, the erotic body, desire, and the nature of plasticity of the body.  I believe that surveying music videos will be a good exercise in looking for the diverse ways that pop musicians use the concept of the mechanical body, and can give insight into the ways that these representations can be subversive... or not.

Glenn Gould, as an Android

I just stumbled upon an article on a music blog that describes a collaborative project between the University of Memphis' Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Glenn Gould Foundation, which is to create a reactive Philip K. Dick-style android to recreate Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (which was so famous to have its own Wikipedia page).  This android will be created using patented "Frubber," a patented skin-like polymer, and will able to process external stimuli known to have affected Gould, including numerology, in order to create micro adjustments to the performance. No I'm not kidding.

What I find most fascinating about this is the way that this android, if it is ever actualized (I do have my doubts) would be caught within a web of discourses surrounding genius, the inherent worth of music, and especially control of the mythological past. This android emerges as a figuration, a kind of artifact or relic, in the center of a romanticized, untenable past on one end and a hopeful, boundless, future on the other.  To me, that Glennbot doesn't exist yet is less important, than the fact that we are seeing a coalition (can I say collusion?) of multiple institutional forces, all of whom are willing to devote, I assume, enormous amounts of capital for the creation of this android for the sake of 'art.'

Now part of me wants to go be happy and get a beer or something, because we are using technology for good.  We're not spending all of our money on weapons, iPhones, and sustaining slave-labor in China, but we're also spending money on Art.  I mean, art can be problematic (see Plato)... but come on- this is really cool art!  Our own real life Glenn Gould.

That was tongue-in-cheek, by the way.  Though I was telling the truth, I find it disheartening, and even a little bit disturbing that we're creating the future by... recreating the past.  And as you know, the act of creating is never a passive activity.  Instead, this android privileges the rhetoric of genius and the eighteenth-century Classical tradition, both of which are basically created and sustained through language of hetero-masculine hegemonies, instead of investing in the ways that technology can be advanced to allow living artists to create something new, and as of yet unimaginable.

As a living, breathing musician who loves Bach as much as the next guy, I want people to focus on expanding boundaries and exploring the limits.  I do hope that this Frubbery friend is only a flaccid premonition (to misuse Donna Haraway) of things to come.  I want to see technology continue to expand art, overflow so that life, imagination, and art become one beautiful tripartition.  Like I said earlier, this guy is a pretty cool toy, but not a whole lot more.

First Post

This is my first post on my first blog.  I would like this blog to be about a lot of things... technology, gender, music, pop culture, and politics.  This will be a place for me to sort through things and maybe share some of my favorite music, poetry, and art.  I guess to start out, I'll post a poem by Ursula le Guin.  I'll let it speak for itself for now.


For Karl and Jean


Consider the action of writing
short lines as the action
of grabbing at straws, of drawing
as hoping you draw the long straw,
of carving as bringing the world
to be by short hard repeated
blows; consider the act
of considering as will to continue
to be. The old violinist
has crossed the gulf of the decades
on a highwire of catgut. Consider
the lovely devices of living
to which we are driven, driven.


-From Hard Words (1981)