Monthly Archives for August 2008

Today (Sunday) at MACHINE in Echo Park

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Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213-483-8761

“Please join us from 1pm-3pm Sunday August 10th for a meeting of Tangible Exchange (tex), a sewing circle for people who like to sewing electronics into stuff. This casual meet up is for those seeking skills trade, collaboration, inspiration, techniques, and exposure to topics with an emphasis on fiber, physical computing, textiles, wearables, and all matters of materials.

“If you have experience in these topics and are interested in contributing a tutorial or presenting a topic, please email textopic@gmail.com with your idea. If you have no experience but are curious, come to meet other people who are interested in the same topic.

“If you have neither experience or interest, but are really thirsty or get confused and think something else is happening at Machine Sunday afternoon, come by anyway and we will give you a nice cool glass of water.”

Against iPodiphilia: Or, Cory Doctorow’s way of listening to music is freaking Erik Davis out (Arthur, 2008)

Art: M. Wartella

THE ANALOG LIFE: a column by ERIK DAVIS

“Archive Fever”

(originally published in Arthur No. 30, July 2008)

Last month Paul Miller—the avant-garde DJ, musician and theorist who always appends his name with “aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid”—finally released a collection of essays he has been editing for ages on digital and sampling culture, called Sound Unbound. It’s a cool book, and I’m not surprised. I first met Paul at the Village Voice in the early 90s, when I recognized the voodoo vévé for Legba that appeared on one of his stickers. Over the years, his DJ mixes, thoughts, and restless career represent a lot of what I continue to love about digital culture. Paul is relentlessly interconnected and multi-disciplinary, refuses to be locked into one career identity or scene, and restlessly moves between worlds. He thinks and acts like he spins, an endless collage that draws equally from high and low, here and there, old and new.

All this is reflected in the book, a somewhat amorphous but fascinating collection of essays by musicians (Steve Reich, Brian Eno), techies (Bruce Sterling, Jaron Lanier), edge academics (Ron Eglash, Manuel De Landa), and nomads like me. I contributed an essay I wrote over a decade ago called “Roots and Wires,” about dub music, polyrhythm, the African diaspora, and their digital mutation into drum’n’bass. (Today I would talk about dubstep, though I would be rather less enthusiastic.) In retrospect, I realize that my desire to uncover both the spiritual roots of the dub virus and its futuristic implications was another version of my concern with understanding the rapport—and conflict—between the digital and the analog, coding strategies that are also metaphors for much larger processes of understanding and experiencing culture and the world.

I like roots with my wires, but that’s not always how it goes. How much digital and analog can diverge was starkly brought home to me in the foreward to Paul’s book. The short piece was written by Cory Doctorow, a tireless electronic freedom fighter who writes science fiction and posts frequently at the popular group blog BoingBoing. The stark part came a few paragraphs into the piece where, after explaining that he can’t work without music, Doctorow describes how he manages the 10,000 tracks he keeps in iTunes:

“I’ve rated every track from 1 to 5. I start every day with my playlist of 4- to 5-star music that I haven’t heard in thirty days, like making sure that I visit all my friends at least once a month…After that, I listen to songs I haven’t rated, and rate them. Then it’s on to 4- to 5-star songs I’ve heard fewer than five times, total. I don’t want random shuffle: I want directed, optimized shuffle.”

There is no other way to say it: this vision of listening to music blew my mind. It seemed so alien to my way of listening, so alienating in general, that I had to write a column about it to figure out the source of my freaked-outedness.

Some caveats first. One is that Cory Doctorow seems like a prince among übernerds. His Boing Boing posts about the ongoing intellectual property wars are always sharp and informative, and they help insure that the website remains an exuberant if sometimes goofy bastion of old school counter-cultural net values. I haven’t read Doctorow’s SF, but I do admire what he does with it. For one thing, he gives it away for free online—as pure a gesture of ethical culture a professional author can make. And his new book, Little Brother, is a piece of tactical genius: a young-adult near-future novel about a group of kids in San Francisco who use a variety of real-world hacking and encryption tools to take on the Department of Homeland Security in an era of civil liberties crackdown. Lifting a page or two from Encyclopedia Brown, Doctorow includes actual tips and technologies so that kids reading the novel can get their cyberactivist groove on right away.

My other caveat is that listening to recorded music is a matter of pleasure, and it seems silly to spend much time worrying about other people’s pleasures. I think its fine to judge music, and to judge other judgments as well—part of the enjoyment of music for many of us is the pleasure in discussing it, describing it, even arguing about it, although I believe the depth of those conversations are not weathering the Internet well. In any case, it’s hard to overturn the core wisdom of chacun à son gout. Doctorow clearly enjoys music, and I enjoy the enthusiasm. But his pleasure also seems deeply bound up with the process he has created to manage, filter, and tag all those MP3s. This is where we part ways, because all this algorithmic fiddling seems less like listening to music that doing something that, for most of us, is much less fun: data-processing.

Here’s the nub: the more we deal with recorded music in the form of digital files, the more that music takes on the characteristics of data, and the more its specific qualities as music melt into that multimedia torrent of bits that keep us chained to our screens. From a new media perspective, this breakdown sounds kind of cool and futuristic, and it certainly opens up new possibilities of expression and intervention. But I’m not sure these transformations really support deep and engaged listening. Amidst the endless brouhaha over downloading and the radical shake-up of the music market, we have yet to come to terms with this massive transformation in the culture of collecting and engaging recorded music.

Recordings have always been a form of data of course. The music itself can be quantified by wonks as a species of information, while covers and labels come printed with all sorts of words and numbers. Vinyl hoarders face issues of organization as well as physical storage, while the records not yet in one’s collection are also forms of data that hover around your music. Collectors of, say, deeply obscure R&B singles trade lists of recordings so obscure that even almighty Google does not know they exist. But recordings become much more data-like once they go digital. With the severing of music from vinyl discs, magnetic tape, and increasingly compact discs, recorded music does not transend the body but takes on a new one—a body furnished by binary code, the new vehicle of song.

The simple equation of these new bodies is more for less: more tracks cost less money and require much less storage. At the same time, collections always expand to fill all available space—hard discs fill up as reliably as physical bookshelves do. As the capacity of digital memory increases—in inverse proportion to its price—our compulsion to gather bits is compounded, and we hoard. I held off from mp3s so long that I missed the great Napster potlatch, but when I did start hunting and gathering I could not stop, and amassed hundreds of gigabytes in a very short period of time. This is just my experience, but it is hardly unusual. Once touched with archive fever, the forest grows more important than the trees, and the forest keeps growing.

It grows in part because our field of attention is constantly being seeded with information about further recordings, which are themselves multiplying like mad. Your older sister or Spin or the cool guy at the record store has been replaced with a myriad of online environments designed to expose and communicate commentary or links or streams directly to fans: social networks, listservs, collaborative filters like Pandora, online stores with samples, emusic, the blogosphere, myspace. Behind a lot of this proliferating metadata—information about information, in this case, musical information—is the urge to share. This is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with listening. Music becomes a chip in a game—a sign rather than a sound, or even—in the case of closed file-sharing communities that demand uploads—an entrance fee. Perhaps the cultural Darwinists are right, and music is just a selfish gene—restless sonic DNA seeking to reproduce itself within this dank hothouse environment of copying and transmission. But I think the aptness of this evolutionary metaphor says more about the environment than the thing itself.

Within this environment, our collections take on the sprawling hairiness of the databases that everywhere process and capture our lives and labors. We are inevitably faced with the problem of organizing, managing, and processing the material, not to mention figuring out a way to extract pleasure from it. Every music fan becomes her own sysadmin. I often ask people how they deal with their mp3s, and am amazed with the ingenious and obsessive systems of rating, tagging, categorizing, and file shuffling that some develop. Others throw up their hands, resist the endless fiddling that technology demands, and allow the mysterious algorithms of the Apple corporation to determine the programming on their portable radio stations. Because I court synchronicity, this is often my method. Doctorow’s system, in this light, is ingenious, as it balances the need to process (rating tunes), and to enjoy, and to enjoy in a quasi-controlled, quasi-random manner that maximizes the efficient delivery of pleasure.

But there’s the rub, at least for me. The efficient delivery of pleasure is not what I want out of listening to music. In fact, the technical cult of efficiency, of developing algorithms to maximize pleasure, is part and parcel of the calculating, over-processed and data-saturated world that I turn to good music to escape, to interrupt, or to buffer. I don’t want to listen to what Heidegger, in his famous essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” called a “standing reserve.” What bothered Heidegger was not machines themselves, but the way that machines turn everything into a reserve of potential usefulness. Once you create a hydro-electric dam, then the rushing stream that inspired poets or musicians or hippie trippers becomes, inevitably, a “standing reserve” of power, another item in civilization’s immense calculus of extraction.

While all music collections can be seen as standing reserves in a sense, the dynamics of digital collections invites that number-crunching calculus much more intimately into the heart of the experience. When I review records, I am sometimes forced to assign a rating, and I understand the value of such consumer guidance. But if I tried to rate every single track as I listened to it, I would feel like a foot-soldier of the machine, because one of the core moves of the machine is to quantify quality, to take fuzzy values and translate them into numerical values. Listening itself becomes processing rather than process, an endless taxonomical twitch mediated by yet another window on yet another screen. And not even a very useful one at that, at least according to my own hedonic calculus. A lot of my favorite music bugged me or flew over my head the first half dozen times I listened to it, while a lot of the pop gems that instantly floated my boat lost their glamour after two or three listens. How do you rate that?

In a way I envy übergeeks like Doctorow. They take the bull by the horns, and tweak the systems that other übergeeks have developed to manage the glorious excess still other übergeeks have helped create. Their engines of musical discovery and pleasure seem like crisp, smoothly oiled machines, controlling the uncontrolled, managing the mania. I look at my collection and my listening habits and just see a big fucking mess. My stereo is in a room without computers, where I love listening to vinyl I still buy because it sounds better and is really fun to shop for. But I don’t have any room for it so it seems kinda stupid too. I am way too lazy and cheap to do lossless rips of the thousands of CDs I have. Besides, even though these pieces of plastic hog my office, I prefer to have my digital memory externalized in a three-dimensional world of objects and colors and images. But of course now I also possess lots of burned CD-Rs and tons and tons of mp3s, which reside on various pods and drives split between my office, my car, and my home. I don’t know where to begin and where to end, but somehow, lumbering around like a dinosaur, I am blessed with an abundance of marvelous encounters.

Army Recruiter Threatens High School Student with Jail Time

Army Recruiter Threatens High School Student with Jail Time
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted August 7, 2008.

A Texas army recruiter was recently suspended for telling a teenager he would be sent to jail if he chose college over the military.

Amy Goodman: As the wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is increasingly desperate to get recruits. A story involving an Army recruiter in Texas last week has now led to a bipartisan call for an investigation.

The recruiter from the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston was suspended last week after a recording of his threats aired on a local CBS affiliate, KHOU. The recruiter, Sergeant Glenn Marquette, warned 18-year-old Irving Gonzalez that he would be sent to jail if he decided to go to college instead of joining the military, even though Gonzalez had signed a non-binding contract that left him free to change his mind before basic training.

Republican Congress member Ted Poe told the CBS affiliate that “We don’t want the government, military, the Army, deceiving American citizens” and suggested that Congress might have to get involved if the Army did not react to the incident.

Last year, Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez signed up for the non-binding delayed enlistment program in high school. But earlier this summer, when 17-year-old Eric Martinez told his recruiters he had decided to go to college instead of the military, his mother was told Eric had no choice and could face jail time if he resisted joining. Irving Gonzalez helped get Eric out of enlistment hours before he was to be shipped out of Houston for training. He knew he was next in line. He decided to record his next conversation with his recruiters. This is a part of what Sergeant Marquette told Irving Gonzalez in that recorded conversation.

Irving Gonzalez: The main thing is, I want out. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to go to the Army.

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Well, you need to talk to my company commander.

Irving Gonzalez: To your company commander?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Mm-hmm. You need to come in here, and I need to bring you to my company commander.

Irving Gonzalez: But is there a way out? Is there a way for me to get out, because I don’t want to go in there if you are just going to like…

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: No, there is not a way out. You signed a binding contract.

Irving Gonzalez: There’s no way out?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: No. When you sign a contract…

Irving Gonzalez: But I’d probably be able to get scholarships.

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: You need a full ride scholarship, full ride, to a state university — UT, AM. Full ride. That means everything is paid for — classes, books, you know, lodging, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner — all paid for, not no partial scholarship, not no FAA scholarship, not no First Citizen Bank scholarship. No, we’re talking full ride scholarship, because there ain’t no partial scholarship out there that even comes close to what the Army’s giving you for college. It’s forty-plus thousand dollars.

Irving Gonzalez: Yeah, I know, but, I mean, it’s kind of like a family thing, too. I’d rather just stay here. What if I just don’t show up?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Then, guess what. You’re AWOL, absent without leave, punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 86: Deserter. It’s in your contract. Read it. It’s clear as day. So then, guess what happens.

Irving Gonzalez: What’s that?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Guess what happens to you, I’ll tell you what happens to you, OK? This is what will happen. You want to go to school? You will not get no loans, because all college loans are federal and government loans. So you’ll be black-marked from that. As soon as you get pulled over for a speeding ticket or anything with the law, they’re gonna see that you’re a deserter. Then they’re going to apprehend you, take you to jail. They’re going to call up the military police, the nearest military installation, and they will come down there, correctional officers, 31-series in the Army, pick you up, detain you, put you on a plane and take you to Fort [inaudible], Missouri, where you will do your time, as you deserve. So guess what. All that lovey-dovey “I want to go to college” and all this? Guess what. You just threw it out the window, because you just screwed your life. There’s a right way to do things, and there’s a wrong way to do things.

Irving Gonzalez: OK. Well, I mean, [inaudible] —

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: If you get into basic training and you don’t like it, tell the chaplain you don’t like it. That’s the right way to get out of the Army. Then they’ll process you out of the Army, and they’ll tell you to adapt, and there’s nothing against your record.

Irving Gonzalez: That would be the right way to do it?

Sgt. Glenn Marquette: Yeah, and you can come back home and do your thing. And then, also, guess what. If you do it that way, if you do it that way, maybe they’ll even want you in the future. You may say, “Well, damn, I’m coming to join the Army this time.” Then, guess what. You can. You can join then, because you got out of the Army the right way. You at least got to go to basic training and try it.

Amy Goodman: U.S. Army recruiter Sergeant Glenn Marquette, threatening 18-year-old Irving Gonzalez. Gonzalez and Eric Martinez now are joining us from Houston, Texas. We’re also joined in Houston by Democratic Congress member Gene Green, who is calling on the Department of Defense to look into the incident, and by community organizer Maureen Haver. She is the founder of Not Even One, a website to disseminate information and take action against illegal military recruiting practices. Douglas Smith is also on the phone with us. He’s the public affairs officer at the U.S. Military Recruiting Command, joining us on the phone from Louisville, Kentucky.

Irving Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. You had this conversation with the Army recruiter. Explain how this all came about, beginning actually with Eric being threatened.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Irving Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. You had this conversation with the Army recruiter. Explain how this all came about, beginning actually with Eric being threatened.

Irving Gonzalez: Well, it started around a year before — a year ago. I was still 17, and when I got in, Eric was already thinking about it before I was. But, you know, right after I got in, like two weeks later, he decided to go ahead and join the DEP program, too. And from there, that’s how it started. And, I mean, we didn’t think it was going to get this far, but they started — for a while, whenever we were thinking upon not joining, they started calling us and telling us that we didn’t have a choice, you know, that we could say all we want, we don’t have a choice to go or not, if we want to or not.

Amy Goodman: Eric, if you could explain how far this went; how did you meet the military recruiter? Talk about what you understood, what you signed, and how, eventually, you end up basically escaping from a hotel.

Eric Martinez: Well, I met her at Irving’s house, because the day he went to go enlist for the DEP, I was at his house. And I talked to her and told her I was interested in the military. And then, she says, like, “Well, what branch?” And I wasn’t too sure yet. And she talked to me about it. And I was like, “OK, well, let me get back to you on that.” And it took me about two weeks before I decided to actually join the DEP. And —

Amy Goodman: DEP means delayed enlistment program?

Eric Martinez: Yes. And from what I understood, is that i
t’s just there so you can save a spot, so, you know, you can have the job you want as soon as you get there and so you won’t have a problem with it later on. And then, as things went further, I decided not to go. And when I told her that, she said I had no choice and that I had to go. So I believed her, and I went to the hotel. They took me to the hotel. And that’s whenever Irving’s little brother contacted me. And then I told him I was leaving —

Amy Goodman: The hotel was preparing to leave?

Eric Martinez: Well, they keep you at the hotel until the morning. And from the — in the morning, you go down to the office, and you do a few more tests. And then from there, you leave to the fort you’re supposed to go to.

Amy Goodman: Did they approach your family, like your mother?

Eric Martinez: Well, yeah. Whenever I didn’t want to go, my mom’s like, “OK, well, then just go stay at your sister’s house, and we’ll tell them you left to San Antonio.” And I was like, OK. We did that. And my shipment date came, and my recruiter went to my house, and my mom says, like, “Well, he left to San Antonio.” And he’s all, like, well — she’s all, like, “Well, you’ve got to tell us where. Give us an address, so we can go pick him up.” And my mom’s like, “Well, he don’t want to go. What don’t you understand about that?” And then she told her that I signed a binding contract and that I had to go. So, my mom was like, “Well, let’s go talk to your boss. I’ll meet you down at your office.”

So my mom went, and she talked to Sergeant Marquette and told him that I didn’t want to go, and that’s it. And Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn’t, that I’d have a warrant for my arrest and I wouldn’t be able to get no government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn’t really know anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me. And I believed it, too, because I didn’t know much about it either. So they extended my time until that Friday. And then, Thursday, they went to get me, so I can go to the hotel.

Amy Goodman: Irving Gonzalez, once Eric went to the hotel, how did your little brother get involved?

Irving Gonzalez: Well, I talked to Eric on the Wednesday before, before anything happened, and I told him that he wasn’t going to have to go, but I didn’t keep in contact with him that morning or that afternoon. And around nighttime, like around 10:00 or 11:00, I told my brother, “Call Eric. See what he’s doing.” And when he called him, Eric just seemed like really low-pitch voice. He didn’t say — it took him a while until he finally told us that he was already at the hotel, and he didn’t want to tell nobody bye, because he was just going to get sad. So, we’re like, “You’re at the hotel?” And we’re like, “You don’t have to go. I don’t know why you think you need to go. You don’t need to go.” And Eric was like, “No, I need to go, and you’re going to need to go, too. They’re going to go get you, too. This isn’t a game. You can’t play with them.” And I was like, “Well, just hold on. I’ll call you back.”

And that’s when I decided to call Maureen and Dwight, and I told them about the situation. And they started helping us by contacting anti-recruiters from Washington and people that know more information about it to talk to Eric, because he was kind of like in a state of not knowing who to trust. And we put him on three-way, and we talked to him. And finally, we were able to get everything straight, you know, where it will be good, and we should go get him and stuff.

So, Eric was like, “OK, come pick me up.” But Eric didn’t know where he was at. They just dropped him off at a — he just knew he was at a hotel. He looks out the window. He said all he saw was an Olive Garden. So, I mean, that’s the only thing we knew where to look for him at. And he finally called downstairs, the main office, and they told him the address. And it was like an hour away from our house, to an area I had never been to in Houston. But finally, we went down there.

And when we went down there, we saw that there was security going around the hotel, plus there was maybe like ten recruiters in the main office downstairs. And he was in the second floor, because when we got there, he was already on the balcony looking at us. It took us a while thinking about how we were going to get him out, because I was actually thinking of just walking in, just walking in and seeing what would happen. But it was just too many recruiters. I was like, no, we’re going to have to find another way, because they’re going to ask me questions. And it took us a while, and, I mean, the elevator didn’t want to go down. They had it programmed to where, like, if you were on the second floor, you couldn’t go down unless someone came up to get you. And he was actually thinking about jumping out the window. He actually climbed down to the first floor, and he was going to jump from there, but there was two beams sticking up, and it was just not going to be safe. That was like the last resort or something.

And my friend Junior, he was with us. It was me, my brother Ivan and Junior, and we were in the car. And he just decided to say, “Well, what about if I just walk in and try to get him out?” And he put on his iPod, and he walked in. And they were trying to catch his attention. They were screaming, screaming, trying to see who we was, like, “Eh, come here!” And he just kept walking, and he walked straight into the elevator, and when he got to the second floor, he held the door open so Eric could go in. And Eric was hiding on the second floor, because there was recruiters and security walking around the second floor also. So, when he got in the elevator, they went down, and they went out through the back exit, where we met them at.

And that’s when we’re like, “OK, he’s out. Let’s go home.” But we were completely lost. It took us a while to get home. But he was like an hour away, maybe less than an hour, from them actually taking him to the office to get everything taken care of. It was like 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, to where we actually got everything done and got him out of there.

Amy Goodman: Eric Martinez, were you scared?

Eric Martinez: Yeah, because they put you in a place where you’re doing something you don’t want to, and you just start thinking about everything that’s over there and everything you hear on the news. So, yeah, I was scared.

Amy Goodman: Why did you change your mind?

Eric Martinez: It’s just mostly like, what I want to do, I know that I don’t have to go to the Army to do it. And I don’t know. It’s just the stuff on the news, and I have people that we know that have been there, people who, like — people we know that have relatives or people that have gone there that just come back really messed up, either physically or emotionally.

Amy Goodman: I’d like to go to Democratic Congress member Gene Green. You represent Houston in the U.S. Congress. What Irving and Eric are describing, it sounds like they’re escaping from kidnappers. But this is the U.S. military. What is the legality of this? Eric is 17 years old. He is a kid. He’s a minor.

Rep. Gene Green: Well, you know, this is not something that, as a member of Congress, I want to hear about, because it’s not something that should be done. I represent the area where these young men went to high school. My children went to that high school, and my wife taught there for many years. Texas and Harris County has a great recruitment record.

I would hope we could recruit these young men and women without having to play games on them, keep them in some type of solitary confinement while we’re waiting to ship them off to somewhere. You know, the non-binding contract is a bottom line. If they signed with the ability to change their mind later on, that should be the bottom line, not that they play games with them. And that’s not what the military or the U.S. government should be proud of doing.

And this is the second time something like thi
s has happened at that particular recruiting station. And I have an office right close to that station. And I’d like the Department of Defense to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s do recruiting honestly.” Hopefully this is not happening in other parts of the country. But if it isn’t, then why is it happening at this one location?

This is a partial transcript. For the rest of the interview, visit Democracy Now.com.

RORY HAYES birthday/booklaunch/celebration/panel at DESERT ISLAND in Brooklyn

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“The controversial cartoonist Rory Hayes was a self-taught dynamo of the underground comics revolution. Attracting equal parts derision and praise, Hayes emerged as comics’ great primitive, drawing horror comics in a genuinely horrifying and hallucinatory manner. Hayes died in 1983 from a drug overdose at the tender age of 33.

“Finally, a book exists of his work. Where the Demented Wented: the Art and Comics of Rory Hayes (Fantagraphics) will see official release on Friday, August 8th (Rory’s birthday), and we’re having a party + panel discussion.

“The party starts at 7, and the panel begins at 8 p.m. with Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith & Geoffrey Hayes, moderated by Dan Nadel. Q&A to follow. A limited-edition silkscreen print will be available at the event for $20.”

DESERT ISLAND
comic + artist’s book store
540 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn NY 11211
(718)388-5087