February 2009

Feel a bit bad for posting a link on the Rhizome.org chatboards to a recent Paddy Johnson thread.
Mentioned that she and her commenters had reservations about a project the Rhizomers were high fiving.
So they promptly dispatched one of their worst trolls--a real piece of work--to ask Johnson "how many angels can dance on a pinhead" type questions, to wear her down and punish her for having a contrary opinion.

Arguing on Rhizome has a similar air of futility.
The house style there, especially when one is on the down side of an argument, is to provoke an exchange of personal insults, hoping one's opponent cracks and says something that sounds "too harsh." The one who didn't crack then claims the moral high ground and gets to lecture the one who did about Internet manners. Arguing this way is...challenging...and very little gets accomplished.

A moderator would help.

Underlying some of these battles are real philosophical differences, what could be broadly termed an art-for-art's-sake mindset vs an activist mindset. Also academic vs non-academic, artist vs programmer, artist vs designer, etc.

But mostly it's just people being territorial about their friends and "home turf."

Disquiet's Marc Weidenbaum wrote 16 Albums That Changed My Life in response to a Facebook query. Fortunately he didn't put the answers there but shared them outside the gated community, that is to say, on his blog on the open Internet.

The post is a choice example of first person writing that is fun to read and uses autobiography to clearly and honestly stake out a critic's longstanding themes. It was interesting to learn this:

From 1989 through 1996 I was employed full time as an editor at Pulse!, the music magazine of the now defunct Tower Records. It was an amazing experience, to be that drenched in music on a daily basis. I wanted to work at Pulse! when I got out of college because it was the one magazine I knew of that took all music as its subject. These records, though, aren’t the reason I stayed at Pulse!; they’re the reason I eventually felt I was able to leave. I realized that for all my interest in a broad range of music — in a given year, I could interview Anthony Braxton and Billy Childish, Glenn Danzig and Depeche Mode, Aphex Twin and Rob Zombie — the following music made me wake up to the knowledge that electronically mediated (and, in a more fundamental way, meditative) music was where my head was at: [followed by discussions of John Fahey’s The Essential John Fahey, Deep Listening Band’s Deep Listening, Oval’s 94 Diskont, DJ Krush’s Strictly Turntablized, Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic, Cliff Martinez’s score to sex, lies, and videotape]

On the Oval CD, this is great:

Oval’s 94 Diskont: Of all the records listed here, this is probably the one most consumed by what succeeded it, the one that will hold up least — not because it was less great, but because its breakthroughs (the glitch, the desiccated quietude, the sense of process-as-content) have been so thoroughly absorbed, quantified, and codified, in the same way that the once radical lessons of the Velvet Underground, and Thelonious Monk, and Igor Stravinsky, just to name a few, have been normalized over time. Still, after hearing it, I never looked at my CD player the same way again.

Assignment for hypothetical journalism or fiction writing class:

Rewrite this New York Times story, The Great Divide, from the perspective of a reporter biased in favor of the South Asian immigrants to a Queens neighborhood. Try to include as many slurs and negative quotes as possible against the white ethnic holdouts in the area.