So i got a little netbook. I am excited. It is a very gracious gift. I must admit though, it is quite difficult to type. You must adjust. 98% the traditional size is a bit smaller than the 2% would imply.
I do not know what to write about. I would say something about Black Swan, a movie that is either brilliant or clumsy and cliché. I have yet to decide. Or I might write about how it seems that there are three things about which the world seems to rotate. At least human life. I might write about how I now have a legitimate reading list that should keep me occupied. I have a schedule at least. I might write how I feel lost.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
And then there was blogging
So it's been a while since Glasshouse and I have done one of these things, but better late or repeated than never again. I am much to blame. I am shit on keeping up with stuff and turning on my computer.
So he has sent me Jame Blake's "CMYK." Here, I'll but a link for you to listen to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQoQirZwxE4
Yes, I didn't know it either, but USA Tennis player James Blake was also interested in the London underground dubstep scene. Crazy right? We all have multiple interests though, so I give him kudos for trying to pursue his.
No. I'm kidding, this is some kid from England, as all the good ones should be who once studied at University the kind of disciplines that US doesn't put value in anymore. This guy, then takes his music knowledge and affinity for dubstep and churns out this really pop song with inspiration from dubstep.
These kind of songs are just difficult to write about. Is it dance music. No not really. It is more an exploration of where the sounds will take you. DJing without being a DJ that spins for the kids to dance nor for the art itself. They just spin and mix. And it's always kids in the basement.
So to the song. CMYK. Let's start there. What the fuck is that? Silly initials. It seems to have little to do with the refrain, "Look, I found her, red coat." Right? Well not quite. CMYK is a colour printing scheme that is extremely common. It operates on principles that the human eye cannot perceive the small dots that create a picture and how these dots of the cyan, magenta, yellow and key lay on one another. This produces a solid picture in different colours that the eye can perceive.
Okay, so turn to the song. Just like the title, the refrain, Look I found her red coat. Again and again this refrain. It echos like little dots, punctuating the beat itself. What is dictating the movement of the song, where is the message. It is dubstep electronic music. It doesn't have some kind of cohesive story to tell it is just this refrain this message over and over again being driven and driving again and again and again. Red coat, red coat, look, look, i found her, i found her, red coat, red coat.
This is precisely how the song operates. Just like the subtractive method that constitutes the colour scheme mentioned in the title of the song, the words drive the message. The color, red, look, look, as the listener of the song you must look and see the layers that form the musician complexity that the song creates. It is a layer. Not of just red. Red is just the sound you hear. Notice, red is not even in the CMYK color scheme. But it is red you hear. You hear it because it is part of the entire musical structure. It is being created and perceived by the listener by the dots, the layers and pulse of the music. We hear the sound "red" look. You found the red coat, but you did not see the entire structure which created the song. It is the dots that create the song. It is the sound waves of layers and layers that give content to the music and the message. There is not a message without the beats that are dubstep. The form creates the message.
Even when we move to the beat itself it echos the sounds of a printer. Tick tick tick tick tick tick....just likes the printing press.
So James Blake our brilliant brit is using a visual metaphor to create an aural message that reflects on both the aural and the visual. Wow. This kiddie is a smart one.
Or this is complete bullshit. It is perhaps then that he is not giving us a message at all. That he is merely mashing up some beats and tossing in some vocals. It sounds good. It is a great song.
I have to say though, there is definitely something behind this song. Why the title? Why the color reference? Why the reference to the visual? Is it some reference to Marry Poppins in her red coat and blue scarf? Is that who we are to find? Is this a call to Marry Poppins to give James a little more sugar with his medicine? I don't know and James does not need any more sugar given the history of the English dental profession (kidding, I know it is getting better. Slightly. All the MPs have great teeth. Okay, now I am lying).
Who knows? Who uses art for messages anyway. That would be silly.
So he has sent me Jame Blake's "CMYK." Here, I'll but a link for you to listen to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQoQirZwxE4
Yes, I didn't know it either, but USA Tennis player James Blake was also interested in the London underground dubstep scene. Crazy right? We all have multiple interests though, so I give him kudos for trying to pursue his.
No. I'm kidding, this is some kid from England, as all the good ones should be who once studied at University the kind of disciplines that US doesn't put value in anymore. This guy, then takes his music knowledge and affinity for dubstep and churns out this really pop song with inspiration from dubstep.
These kind of songs are just difficult to write about. Is it dance music. No not really. It is more an exploration of where the sounds will take you. DJing without being a DJ that spins for the kids to dance nor for the art itself. They just spin and mix. And it's always kids in the basement.
So to the song. CMYK. Let's start there. What the fuck is that? Silly initials. It seems to have little to do with the refrain, "Look, I found her, red coat." Right? Well not quite. CMYK is a colour printing scheme that is extremely common. It operates on principles that the human eye cannot perceive the small dots that create a picture and how these dots of the cyan, magenta, yellow and key lay on one another. This produces a solid picture in different colours that the eye can perceive.
Okay, so turn to the song. Just like the title, the refrain, Look I found her red coat. Again and again this refrain. It echos like little dots, punctuating the beat itself. What is dictating the movement of the song, where is the message. It is dubstep electronic music. It doesn't have some kind of cohesive story to tell it is just this refrain this message over and over again being driven and driving again and again and again. Red coat, red coat, look, look, i found her, i found her, red coat, red coat.
This is precisely how the song operates. Just like the subtractive method that constitutes the colour scheme mentioned in the title of the song, the words drive the message. The color, red, look, look, as the listener of the song you must look and see the layers that form the musician complexity that the song creates. It is a layer. Not of just red. Red is just the sound you hear. Notice, red is not even in the CMYK color scheme. But it is red you hear. You hear it because it is part of the entire musical structure. It is being created and perceived by the listener by the dots, the layers and pulse of the music. We hear the sound "red" look. You found the red coat, but you did not see the entire structure which created the song. It is the dots that create the song. It is the sound waves of layers and layers that give content to the music and the message. There is not a message without the beats that are dubstep. The form creates the message.
Even when we move to the beat itself it echos the sounds of a printer. Tick tick tick tick tick tick....just likes the printing press.
So James Blake our brilliant brit is using a visual metaphor to create an aural message that reflects on both the aural and the visual. Wow. This kiddie is a smart one.
Or this is complete bullshit. It is perhaps then that he is not giving us a message at all. That he is merely mashing up some beats and tossing in some vocals. It sounds good. It is a great song.
I have to say though, there is definitely something behind this song. Why the title? Why the color reference? Why the reference to the visual? Is it some reference to Marry Poppins in her red coat and blue scarf? Is that who we are to find? Is this a call to Marry Poppins to give James a little more sugar with his medicine? I don't know and James does not need any more sugar given the history of the English dental profession (kidding, I know it is getting better. Slightly. All the MPs have great teeth. Okay, now I am lying).
Who knows? Who uses art for messages anyway. That would be silly.
Encounter with the Real
Wikileaks.
A point that is often discussed in psychoanalysis coming out of Freud and his notion of consciousness as a protective shell that protects the self from reality and later taken up by Lacan and then his bastard ideological son, Zizek, is that the real, reality is too powerful, too strong to be encountered in it's true form. We must then create fictions around ourselves in order to survive. Zizek then takes this idea a little further from it's Freudian and Lacanian interpreted origins and writies that it is the virtual, the fictions, that have become the read. That we cannot even encounter our own illusions for they have become the real. We continue to wrap ourselves in illusions that we cannot see. Thus, he often says, he looks for the reality in the virtual. That the virtual shows reality.
Herein lies Wikileaks. Wikileaks, that strange and hated website created by the even stranger and even more hated Julian Assange. Wikileaks, legally or not, though probably not, began to leaks documents, private and confidental documents to the press regarding first some atrocities and friendly fire incidents in the middle east and much more recently private cable messages from the US to it's embassies. What these documents released include:
-Sarkozy is a slightly neurotic, image obsessed man with an entourage and tendencies to autocracy
-Saudi Arabia funds terror and it a major destabilizing force in the middle east
-The US and Canada have a strained friendship
-Fears about China.
-Direction to state department official to gather low level information of other diplomats.
Yikes. This news is both revelatory and shocking.
No, no it isn't.
For anyone who has ever read a newspaper and followed the course of events in these countries or read a spy novel, this news is by any means very du jour. Saudi Arabia is a dangerous nation that funds extremist with one hand while shunning it publicly. It is a country that is held together with religious beliefs despite a huge disparity in income. Canada and the US have many dividing points. China holds most of the US debt. Sarkozy, is well, Sarkozy. Diplomats have always spied on each other. That is the name of the game.
Thus what we have is another encounter with the real. The most shocking thing about the releases is that we know the truth. Everyone knew the truth, but no one "knew" the truth. The shallow surface of politics upon which the news channels floated and diplomancy worked has been revealed to the world. There are games which we thought occured that have been confirmed to us all.
At last, we have encountered the real. The under belly has been shown to us.
Or has it?
Funny, that this encounter with the real was brought to us through virtual means. It took virtual reality to leak this message to the public to expose the real. Then the new programs got a hold of it and started to investigate and show us more. But what did they show us? Words and documents that have never appeared in print, only as hacked bits of bytes from sources who we do not know. Where is the virtual now? Baudrillard once wrote about the speed of technology when he said that the virtual would outpace the events themselves, that the news would arrive before the events even occurred. Is that what we have here? We have been shown the truth, but is it really the truth? Have we been shown anything, or is this yet another virtual reality within a fiction within a fiction, a Borgesian maze with many rabbit holes with no exits.
A point that is often discussed in psychoanalysis coming out of Freud and his notion of consciousness as a protective shell that protects the self from reality and later taken up by Lacan and then his bastard ideological son, Zizek, is that the real, reality is too powerful, too strong to be encountered in it's true form. We must then create fictions around ourselves in order to survive. Zizek then takes this idea a little further from it's Freudian and Lacanian interpreted origins and writies that it is the virtual, the fictions, that have become the read. That we cannot even encounter our own illusions for they have become the real. We continue to wrap ourselves in illusions that we cannot see. Thus, he often says, he looks for the reality in the virtual. That the virtual shows reality.
Herein lies Wikileaks. Wikileaks, that strange and hated website created by the even stranger and even more hated Julian Assange. Wikileaks, legally or not, though probably not, began to leaks documents, private and confidental documents to the press regarding first some atrocities and friendly fire incidents in the middle east and much more recently private cable messages from the US to it's embassies. What these documents released include:
-Sarkozy is a slightly neurotic, image obsessed man with an entourage and tendencies to autocracy
-Saudi Arabia funds terror and it a major destabilizing force in the middle east
-The US and Canada have a strained friendship
-Fears about China.
-Direction to state department official to gather low level information of other diplomats.
Yikes. This news is both revelatory and shocking.
No, no it isn't.
For anyone who has ever read a newspaper and followed the course of events in these countries or read a spy novel, this news is by any means very du jour. Saudi Arabia is a dangerous nation that funds extremist with one hand while shunning it publicly. It is a country that is held together with religious beliefs despite a huge disparity in income. Canada and the US have many dividing points. China holds most of the US debt. Sarkozy, is well, Sarkozy. Diplomats have always spied on each other. That is the name of the game.
Thus what we have is another encounter with the real. The most shocking thing about the releases is that we know the truth. Everyone knew the truth, but no one "knew" the truth. The shallow surface of politics upon which the news channels floated and diplomancy worked has been revealed to the world. There are games which we thought occured that have been confirmed to us all.
At last, we have encountered the real. The under belly has been shown to us.
Or has it?
Funny, that this encounter with the real was brought to us through virtual means. It took virtual reality to leak this message to the public to expose the real. Then the new programs got a hold of it and started to investigate and show us more. But what did they show us? Words and documents that have never appeared in print, only as hacked bits of bytes from sources who we do not know. Where is the virtual now? Baudrillard once wrote about the speed of technology when he said that the virtual would outpace the events themselves, that the news would arrive before the events even occurred. Is that what we have here? We have been shown the truth, but is it really the truth? Have we been shown anything, or is this yet another virtual reality within a fiction within a fiction, a Borgesian maze with many rabbit holes with no exits.
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