Musicophilia; Tales of Music and The Brain

As we cupped our cold fingers around 20 oz containers of decaf and wished we'd thought to bring hats, I strained to see Rose and John in the ever growing line of people waiting over an hour in the wind and rain to hear Oliver Sacks read from his new book at the Seattle Central Library. He read to a greater-than-capacity crowd. He is as charming as you've imagined (if you've imagined what he'd be like in person).

You must all put his latest book on your reading lists. It's a nice mental shift (for me at least) to consider a passion from a neurological perspective. It's also fascinating to see the spectrum of just how far wrong our brains can go when it comes to something as intrigal to the human experience as music.

I'm only on page 66, but so far the book is typical Sacks: charming, kind, gracious and unendingly interesting. I'd offer to send you my copy when I finish, but my mom has already called "dibs". :)

The Inheritance of Loss- recommended by Kyle

Kyle, thanks for recommending The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I very much enjoyed it. The language was luscious, and I found the politics of the place interesting. I read much of it during my commute and today. I spent most of my Saturday reading--it was wonderful!
Speaking of politics, there's an essay by Mark Danner in the 2007 best essays called Iraq: The War of the Imagination which outlines the steps that led us into Iraq. It doesn't offer a solution or a suggest a solution (which was a disappointment), but I thought it was the most useful piece I've read on a what has been a confusing issue for me.
My next book in line is The Zoo Keeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman. I plan to read it on my plane ride to Denver. I have a work thing there this week. I am SO much looking forward to seeing Anne and my sister while I am there. And I very much like Denver.

And sadly, I missed Oliver Sacks visit to Seattle on Friday (I had a work event) and I missed Ann Patchett too b/c she read during the day, and I was at work then too. But I am anxious to get my hands on a copy of her new book, Run. I have seen Lynda, Jessica, Don, and Jim all quite recently- so count me the luckiest one of all! Aren't some of the rest of you overdue for a Seattle trip. It's raining....

Greetings from the new home of Cryptococcus gattii, the deadly tropical fungus just in from BC

I'm sure you'll all be jealous to know, I've just gone to (and procured 10 pounds of honeycrisp apples from) the Bellingham Farmer's Market. This time of year it's a little more scant than summer's fare, but still worth the walk for fresh vegetables and good bread (and a balloon animal from the weird clown dude, if you're into that kind of thing). I'm certain I saw more dreadlocks today than most of you have seen in months.

But, to be brief, I wanted to let you all know of a few places online my work has featured...

This week the new Front Porch Journal is out at www.frontporchjournal.com - I'm under Fiction, but it's all good stuff (regrettably, I'm the only one featured on the website that currently does not have a book, but I'm hoping to change this soon). Oh, and C and I submitted and were accepted entirely without the other's knowledge (or FPJ's knowledge of our coupledom). This, our first time in print together. Hoorah. Hopefully not the last.

Also, check me out at www.juked.com - I'm under September's selections, but it's probably still on the main page as well. And on 3:AM Magazine online. I think that was in September too: www.3ammagazine.com.

If I mention the print stuff you probably won't go out and buy it anyway, so...

testing

This is just a test; I invited myself so I'm posting to see if this shows up as a Lynda post...
and just so that this isn't an empty post, let me encourage all of you to see the film "The Lives of Others"...I thought it was really wonderful (we rented it at Blockbuster).

Curry & Conversation

Hello from Seattle!

I had the lovely opportunity to have dinner with Jessica, Don, Christine, Rose and John last evening. We talked about Inter-something-something currency (Don: that's my Homer Simpson immitation of a grad school fake. Whatcha think?), Oliver Sacks (who is reading here this Friday), work, vacations, whether or not we have permission to stop reading a book when we aren't enjoying it :) and shared stories from our lives.

I'm pleased to share with you that Don and Christine are both vibrant and delightful; full of stories of the pleasures and weirdnesses of attending the UW, Rose and John are as wonderful as ever (Rose looks particularly great these days) and Jessica is her charming, graceful self and seemed peaceful (she's the one on vacation).

We had fun remembering stories from school and it was both encouraging (in terms of validating what a great group we are) and discouraging (in terms of ever wanting to go back for my PhD) to hear Don's stories about the degree of community with his peers at the U.

We forgot to bring a camera; so no picture, sorry. Next time, I promise to take mine.

~Lynda

Laughing with Jim & Kyle

I need to make dinner before I pass out from hunger, so I can't respond to anything but the first line of Kyle's post.

I can't laugh at that, but it did remind me of going for whiskey afterward and THAT was fun! :)

From Lynda (I give up trying to be clever with blog titles :) )

Kyle, OF COURSE you're allowed typos. I have typos all the time and I don't have a Regan era computer (I'm just lazy). I wanted to clarify because your typo significantly altered the meaning of your sentence and I genuinely didn't know what you meant. :)

I don't CLING to that primary assumption, but I do filter with it...and it seems to serve me rather reliably.

So, what do you understand as "intellectual work".

I realized, after I posted that there are those among us who work in the field of marketing, and I do not mean to imply that they don't do intellectual work at work - what I meant to say is that I'm not convinced that it's a conscious conspiracy of hegemonic forces to pass out bread and circus tickets, I think what drives marketing is the race for the almighty dollar. I think the fact that it ends up being bread and circus tickets is secondary to the race for a larger share of the target demographic...which is why they have the partidge family theme to sell a van to drive your family around in: people my age have families they need to drive around and need room to put the patio bricks from home depot so they can renovate their back yard (ok, I don't have a family or a back yard, but you know what I'm saying). They use hip hop music to sell Scions because the target demographic for that car is the twenty somethings. (and Ford has a history of using generations to sell their trucks. Does anyone beside me remember the old commercial with four generations of a family who owned ford trucks because their dad had one? the last was an old dude in a rocking chair next to a model T ford: "My dad came across in a covered wagon, I had to learn about ford trucks all by myself. I'm a smart old bird ain't I? Heh heh heh." Now they use Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs to sell their trucks; which I see as being along the same lines; Dirty jobs is a show that crosses generational boundaries: kids and adults like watching that show...)

Now I'm going to tabulate bids on a sewer pump station renovation and think about what Jim said. (Jim! I'm so glad you've joined us!)

There JJ goes doing his media thing again!

Can we laugh about that yet?

I agree with almost all of your points except one: that the 90's isn't getting re-articulated in pop-culture. Think, for example, of the "surreal life" on VH1 whose cast is a veritable cornucopia of boy-band members, has-been rappers/rockers, old-models and wwf wrestlers (sure, there are 80's folk in there too!).

I think the decade will be remembered as the grunge/gangsta rap/boyband/desert storm/Clinton scandal/big dollar movie budget era (ah the good ole' days). In fact, I think there is plenty already circulating in the datasphere to suggest that the 90's is in play and ready to be appropriated.

I guess I should confess, too, that I am not inclined to read power the same way you are - referring to it as "the hierarchy" - its a little too base/superstructure for my taste, but I take your point if by hierarchy you are referring to the monopolization of the media, which I suspect you are.

Anyway, its nice to have you around to argue with again, I miss you sorely. Hope all is well!
KJ

Ah, what the hell

I feel like I’m coming so late to the conversation, clambering my way up the list of emails then posts, stopping to catch a vista and formulate a witty aside response that is immediately lost in the effort of further climbing.

So, fuck it, I’ll just dive in with some thoughts.

I don’t think nostalgia is a static phenomena, but one that has always existed and has radically evolved.

And I think it is always a tool of hierarchy. It provides the structural anchor for manipulations of narrative, can always postulate the past as in some way “ideal” and harness the association to support the hierarchical structure.

The power in the equation is the postulation, is the manipulation of the narrative of the past. It would have been a more clumsy weapon to wield when nostalgia couldn’t be defined by a decade, when it was the amorphous “before” time, where the stories of oral cultures lived. Those stories evolve glacially. And yet they still operate as the moral foundation for control.

As media (here including the oral tradition and maybe best understood, just for my purpose at the moment, as that with which we share stories) evolved, the stories were written, coded, and easier to hack than a storyteller’s brain.

The process speeds up with each advance in media technology. The printing press spread a (relatively) singular account of the Biblical times, to which the less-powered could be pointed. The birth of the novel allowed periods of time to be more clearly defined, provided even finer targets for the backward search for wish-fulfillment. At some point, a nearly wholly-fictitious American West was created, perhaps the first narrative of nostalgic control cut of whole cloth.

But, it has reached some critical mass in the last forty years. While the counter-culture was brewing up in the 60’s, mainstream media narratives were still dominated by social models from the 50’s. The 70’s? Three words. Happy-fucking-Days. The Glory Days were holding on for dear life.

The 80’s aren’t a bad place for the start of the fracturing. I wonder if anything of huge cultural significance happened early on in that decade? Wait, wait, that channel that used to play music videos. I’d even go so far as to argue that the shift was so huge it took the beings of hierarchy to figure out how to hack it. Maybe eight years or so. And seeds of regional narrative development took hold.

By the end of the 80s and into the early 90s, pop culture stopped being quite so monolithic. To say “the 90’s” carries less clear significance than any of the previous back to the 20s.

Anyway, here we are now, 17 years into an array of narrative-creating devices, all of the most potent in the hands of the hierarchy, who use those devices to brand decades, to create nostalgic feelings in those they want to look back so as to prevent them looking forward. Kids appropriate because they’ve been chasing the cool for so long, and the marketers so deft at manipulating the leading edge of it, cultural appropriation is easier than the chase, they stop trying to define because they’ve seen meaning constantly mutated, never without a mediating anchor.

That’s why it pisses us off and we call it inauthentic. We believe our personal feeling of nostalgia is unmediated. Maybe it is. Pot, the short-circuiter of short-term memory, which grounds you in the moment while making universal archetypes of everything, is an anti-heirarchical drug, maligned by every power structure ever, perhaps because it hacks the mediation.

Wait, where was I?

Sorry, I haven’t gotten to do this kind of thing in a long time. So forgive the rambling and, perhaps, utter lack of a central point or coherent idea. I'm not going to back to read all this nonsense to find out.

JJ

Illinois, the land of broken technology . . .

[sigh] I typed that post using a computer in my office that was outdated in the Reagan era. I literally type and 5 minutes later it catches up, plus I had to go teach. Am I not allowed a typo?

a_subversive should be the *correct* phrase

Although, I feel like the first sentence of your post sounds like a line from Rocky I (from the 80's!) as in "Yo, Adrianne."

My answer to your question would be, no, but I have a very different understanding of what constitutes "intellectual" work.

When you ask "what about our social structure isn't about bread loaves and circus tickets?" I think "primary assumptions are dangerous"

asubversive WHAT?!

:)

Yo! Kyle my bro! is that a typo?

Do you mean asubversive as in: totally lacking subversion or do you mean a subversive as in: a type of subversive politics of replication?

And then to tweak our minds just a little further I have to ask you this; do you mean to say that you think there is actual intellectual work that goes into marketing for television shows and commercials and it isn't just the handing out of bread and circus tickets? (in fact just last night during a commercial break my sweetheart said to me: "do you ever get the feeling that this is all there to distract us from actual ISSUES?" to which my response was: "I don't just occasionally have that feeling, it is my primary assumption." What about our social structure ISN'T free loaves of bread and circus tickets? That's what I wonder.

Also, in case anyone is keeping track: I saw a commercial last night for a van (chevy maybe?) with the Partridge Family theme song as the background music. We laughed when it came on and sang along. (and just to tie this in to my bread and circus comments: everyone who knows the song, sing along with me: "Everyone get happy!!")

Response

Don't feel inadquate, you weren't then, you aren't now.

What if, instead of thinking about it in authentic/inauthentic terms, you thought of it in terms of how '80s content gets recycled to structure the very response you are having. Or, think of it in this way, two years ago, in an effort to commemorate 9/11 and to garner support for the war, a local newspaper published images from WWII in order to critique (polarize) the community for its lack of national pride. Surely, this move pissed off some people, namely veterans who view such image relics as sacred and belonging to a particular time period. How could they, one could presumably ask, use images that tried to stop something as Evil as Hitler in this type of self-indulgent war about oil and national security. But, you see, in making that move they negate the possibility that that replication is either 1) melancholic or 2) rhetorically functioning to produce that response in order to generate ancillary effects. As it turns out, I am more inclined (able) to read it the second way because I am a rhetorician, because in the second case, you can read the effects such moves have as restoring order. So, you adopt the subject position of someone from a past generation who argues that these teens just don't get it (whatever it is) and are thereby commodifying politically what was meaningful in context. Teens, in turn, can say "it's just a t-shirt" and identify themselves as different than you. In both cases, you are prevented from developing a community on the axis of authentic/inauthentic and thereby unable to harness political action. Except, and here is where Derrida comes in I think, by creating that point of contingency, you don't necessarily have to draw that conclusion. By re-articulating the point of contact, you could create disorder and thus exert some agency.

But you are right, Linda, the 80's was forged from a system of difference, just as the 70's, 60's, 50's and so on were. But, I don't hear you getting irritated about the tv show American Dreams, or remakes of I Dream of Genie. So, these melancholic repetitions are only noticed, in so far as you identify yourself as a part of a particular generation, which again, produces order, and in my view, thwarts political action.

It's all inauthentic, if by that we mean replicated. The goal becomes to figure out asubversive politics of replications, which, as it turns out, I am working on.

Ack!

Ok, I feel UTTERLY inadequate here...feels just like grad school!

But here's a distinction that I think you're missing Kyle, and which may be at the root of the reaction Jan, Andrew and I are expressing...in the 80's we moved away from the free love and peace movements of the 70's and 60's, we ABHORED the sterotype of the 50's subjugated housewife, we wore different clothes, listened to different music and ran after the almighty dollar as though money was all that would make us happy (or make us feel powerful). We crawled out from under the crippling fear of nuclear annhiliation, the wall came down, and Pink Floyd's music meant more, not less because of it. I'm sure I'm missing some of the cultural recycling that we did, but honestly, in a quick retrospective in my brain (which really ought to be figuring out master documents and styles for a development standard I'm writing) I just don't see it...we traded bell bottoms for peg leg jeans, we traded pencil skirts and blouses for trousers and shirts and ties like men wore. We said: that isn't us, THIS is us.

But the college freshmen are reaching back and saying: this is us too. But they don't have Floyd in them the way we have Floyd in us. The Wall was never up for them...and I just don't get it. In my head they're saying "this is us" without knowing what "this" is...it isn't a reaction against anything - or, more appropriately, I don't see what they're reacting against, it seems much more like a passive: "Huh, this looks cool, I think I'll wear it." or "It's got a good beat and you can dance to it." Or as a friend of mine once said: "That can't be their music: they haven't earned it, they don't deserve it." I don't know that I'm willing to go that far, but what I don't understand is how they can like it when they aren't anchored in it.

I liked Jan's comment about the defiling of music she used to get stoned to; there's a depth to that comment I don't want us to gloss over. That music became part of the tapestry of our lives. It was new when our thoughts and personalities were solidifying and now 18 year olds are cutting up that tapestry and taking bits and pieces and leaving the whole in tatters: I think that alone evokes a reaction, and at the same time I'm not opposed to them cutting up the tapestry, per se, but I get confused about what seems to me to be an attempt to make a collage out of various tapestries rather than weaving their own. It seems so passive to me; there seems to be so little action or even reaction...just this mindless, ipod wearing, sustained individuized personal entertainment.

I suppose I'm blending this notion with my (recent) personal interaction with high schoolers who were trained to follow rules and perform and follow through with tasks, who were celebrated for their mediocrity and who received no training in logic or reason in school. This is who I assume are the people appropriating the culture of the 80s. So to some degree, on a personal level, I'm reacting to that in my thought process.

Flippant Appropriation

Linda, I didn't interpret your comment as flip. I intended to surprise by pairing trauma and '80s impersonation/replication/imitation. And, while one could occupy a contrary position that Desert Storm wasn't a major war, I would argue it has/had traumatic effects. See, for instance, the sixth chapter in Megan Boler's book Feeling Power entitled "License to Feel."

Anyway. Jan's example struck a different chord (in contrast to Drew's anxiety) with me because it drew upon a figure like Lennon who seems situated in the 60's and 70's. So their absence of knowledge should not be conflated with a preoccupation with Cindi Lauper, for instance. To Jan's example, I would ask a quite different question: how the heck have your students not encountered John Lennon given the cultural preoccupation with the currency of his image as a generative peace symbol (see for example his Warholesque face on the recent Darfur-aid CD entitled "Instant Karma") but perhaps more interestingly, how have these students been interpellated to produce affective responses when presented with the contingencies his death? And, how do representations of his death produced affective effects in order to posit a particular trajectory for action and belief?

Ok, so back to the original question about college kids in the 80's . . . well, I wouldn't begin there. I read their fetish as a response to an already established rhetoric that values that type (retro) of articulation of popular culture. The preoccupation with prior "decades" as symptomatic of a different time is certainly not new, and so it seems more interesting to me how this subjectivity, looking retrospectively for what is "cool" and utilizing that past discourse (or representations of it) in order to produce rhetorical effects, continually recycles itself. But there is this curious, and simultaneously occuring, phenomenon where kids replicate the "look" of, for example, Fall Out Boy in order to contemporaneously dentify with them. My favorite is the Friends flashback where Chandler sports a Flock of Seagulls hairstyle. So, I don't know, I would expand the inquiry and begin to locate how commercial jingles and 80's gear is an effect of something more complex- as part of our cultural subjectivities that look backwards in fetishtic, maybe even melancholic ways. But, to be clear, this is all improvisationally and crudely drawn.

KJ

Lynda asks questions

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm delighted by this conversation!

And Kyle, let me apologize for being flip. I was genuinely surprised though by your phrase "the trauma we call the 80s" and part of why is because I lived through it, but part of it is because we were almost the generation who lived without a major war (and one could argue that the surgical precision of Desert Storm precludes it from being declared a major war; which I note only because living through the cold war what we as a cultural group thought of in terms of war was annihilation/nuclear war, and I do not in any way mean to belittle the trauma of those who endured Dessert Storm)

So Kyle, tell me more about identities being forged out of cultural moods...because I think that's precisely what confuses me about this whole phenomenon...I mean; I know the people picking lead-in music for tv shows are probably people in their 30s or 40s, but the college freshmen are who confuse me with their appropriation of a culture that they really don't know the first thing about (a la Jan's story).

Tell me more!

Kyle adds even more

Lynda,

I had something a bit larger than Rod Stewart and rose-colored glasses
in mind when I called attention to the possibility that retro-fetishes
were melancholic. Think of it more in terms of identities forged out
of cultural moods (or the other way around) and then when those moods
shift unexpectedly, you could even say violently, these moods return
in our subjectivities is uneven ways such as a jingle in the Ford
Truck commercials or wherever they are showing up.

That these instances of retro-fetish produce emotional effects such as
pleasure, anger, or anxiety should indicate clearly enough that they
are viable aspects of our subjectivities: we come to define ourselves
or are invited to define ourselves in terms of a decade so that we can
locate ourselves on a cultural spectrum and restore order. Our emails
are clear enough indications of that: if you are from the 80's then
you articulate revile at the appropriation, and thereby locate
yourself in a certain space. If you are born in the 80's you write
about the appropriation of gangsta rap as I did way back in our first
year together, and most recently in a review forthcoming in Computers
and Composition.

All of this is to say that yes, I agree that using trauma to read 80's
retro fetish is a bit reckless given the topics that trauma usually
deals with. However, how else could you explain the return, almost
melancholic presence of past era's in our media? I propose that we
either have to do it in terms of psychoanalysis (which I admittedly
know little about) or in terms of new media theory, which as I said
before, is interested in explaining new media in terms of its
relationship to prior media.

All of this needs to be on the Blog.
KJ

Jan adds to it too

You all have tapped into something that I groan about every time I
inadvertantly catch a commercial while grading my endless stack of papers.
I have found that I am fighting a middle-aged crisis early enough -
what with all the deaths in my family while at WWU and seeing the gray in
my hair and my newfound wrinkles flowing from the corners of my eyes.
To me, its simply a depressing reminder that everything I cherished once
upon a time is now the background noise to a f***ing commercial. To
me, it's as akin to being sinful as possible to desecrate decades of
things I used to get stoned to, simply to sell a friggin' pickup truck.

I graduated high school in 1980, so I have the most room to rant! Even
more depressing, I showed The U.S. vs John Lennon to a freshman class
at Campbell University last week and half of them not only did not know
who the man was, but when the shots fired out at the end of the film,
most of them jumped out of their seats. They had no idea he had been
gunned down and taken from us so early.

But, alas, I got them thinking.....

miss you guys and gals!
Jan

Kyle adds to it

Drew and Lynda - although Derrida would be proud of you (drew) for
generating the term "ghostmodernity," I think what you are discussing
is a necessary condition of remediation, the inscription of prior
media onto "new" media, which is material not spectral.

Of course, you could always go psychoanalytic and call it a
melancholic response to the trauma we call the 80's.

But I was a toddler then so I couldn't really say.

Andrew responds

We've departed from postmodernity only to enter
ghostmodernity!

Lynda responds...

Andrew,
I don't feel adequate to speak to the appropriation of
80's music by the media and college freshmen, but I
was staring at my unread books on my bookcases today
and grabbed Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death
and I think that it speaks to this issue...if only
insofar as it further complicates your question. What
does it say that today's culture is reaching back for
the things the amused previous generations rather than
(or while concurrently) create (creating) their own
amusements? (and what does it say about me that I'm
using someone else's intellectual work from the same
time period to address your question? ;) )
"Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada,
as a metaphor of our national character and
aspiration. . . . For Las Vegas is a city entirely
devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such
proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public
discourse increasingly takes the form of
entertainment. Our politics, religion, news,
athletics, education and commerce have been
transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business,
largely without protest or even much popular notice.
The result is that we are a people on the verge of
amusing ourselves to death." ~Neil Postman
. . . if, in the 80's, we were a people on the verge
of amusing ourselves to death: what's going on now?

Andrew's Delayed Email

the structure of feeling that inspired my initial
subject-heading seems to be growing, or is this just a
gen-x paraonoid reaction (Jim, Linda?)?

that structure is the resurfacing of 80s, and some
late 70s, tunes in the promotion of forthcoming season
premieres on tv: the cure for without a trace, cyndi
lauper for something, everybody wants to rule the
world for kid nation, and it goes on...thoughts??

also, i know this is one of the first signs of
schizophrenia, but it was as if owen wilson was
reading my mind/emails, leaving these millenial stars
to coke-car accidents and meditation retreats in rural
minnesota.

lastly, at rose's prompting, one of the best novels of
my past year:
*Christie Malry's Own Double Entry* by BS Johnson. A
rare gem indeed and certain to reenter circulation in
literature programs!!

A.