Digital Fear Part I (or 001101101)

I've come to the realization that some of my comments on other blogs are longer and more cogent than my blog entries. Not that this comes as much of a shock; it's easier for me (for most people, I should think) to get excited about the work of others before their own. Occasionally, however, I look back on a comment and wonder if there isn't a surreptitious blog post hiding in there somewhere...

Case in point, my colleague Erich Kuersten -- a blogger par excellence if there ever was one -- typed out earlier in the week a 1000+/- word tour de force maligning the modern movie malaise that is craftsmanship. One significant tidbit:

I think you know what I mean - craftsmanship means films where you spend a lot of time looking around the room, noticing the light and stuff, because nobody onscreen is saying or doing anything.... People with a lot of money and skill and time and nothing to say, that's what "Craftsmanship" is-- it's the difference between the Bob Moss kind of art and the Jackson Pollock kind of art, the Rolling Stone Magazine, Hard Rock Cafe American Idol kind of art Vs. the fall-down piss in your pants reality of CBGBs or the drag queens on the dirty boulevard.

I think the aesthetic intentions here are worth applauding quite vigorously, but I found the dichotomy a little forced (and what follows here is essentially a rewritten version of the first comment I posted there). I cringe at films with punctilious technique, all of which seems like subterfuge obscuring the pilot-less, Arkadin-like cockpit of the artpiece's airplane. But I think it's also a sign o the times. Now every new piece of digital technology seduces the global hipsters who couldn't tell from real "content" if it bit them in their glacial nether zone. We're watching movies on blu ray now simply for the staggering clarity of the image! It's a techhead's nocturnal emission.

My comment continued, bringing in the example of Brian Eno, a mercurial god and studio genius who could pass freely between the semi-permeable membrane dividing the poppy faux-rock Rolling Stone scene and the genuine proto-punk innovation of the CGGB's crowd (ie Talking Heds, Devo, etc). And, speaking personally, I'll always take Brian Eno's digital craftsmanship over Iggy Pop's raw power. Why? Because Eno is understands that he can have it both ways -- the techhead's nocturnal emission with muscular substance (see Before and After Science, the songs on which manage to sound both lifeless and vivacious, not to mention obliquely lascivious, at the same time). Also, the Stooges can be hard to listen to after a while -- it's like aural assault. Ditto Velvet Undergound around the White Heat era. I'll always prefer the plaintively 70mm Lou Reed of Berlin: genuine pain matched (or rather bled) with genuine professionalism.

I'm a little defensive with such situations coz I could never really embrace punk wholesale. When Sid Vicious was asked what he was rebelling against, he suppressed the urge to quote Brando's infamous retort and instead blurted out "Steely Dan". But now, is that rigid distinction really fair? The Sex Pistols were arguably more influential, had more provocative stage presence, and helped codify a new social attitude. They also sucked as musicians. The Dan were cold, callous, caustic, and fascinated with the mechanics of jazz, pop, rock, and blues, and the traditions therein (craftsmanship, in other words). They also utilized professionals and cutting edge recording technology whenever possible, in some cases working intimately with engineers and designers at DBX and other overseas companies to ensure sonic perfection.

But you know what? In retrospect, to ears like mine musicians such as Steely Dan and Frank Zappa -- draconian, Hitchcockian muthafuckers who forced musicians to follow intricate, meticulously planned charts -- are far more rewarding than sloppy punksters. Because once upon a time craftsmen -- and this goes for film, too -- worked WITH raw artists and knew when to let them loose (cf Rick Derringer's solo in "Third World Man," Ian Underwood and Frank himself trading licks on "The Gumbo Variations," etc, etc). It's a balancing act. The point being...I think our problem now is that we've experienced a kind of craftsman/raw artist divorce in culture, and the two rarely meet to collaborate on anything of value.

Later on in this thread, another esteemed colleague MovieMan0283 incited more discussion when he said:


[R]eal humanism - the one that takes a thrilled fascination in people, in sensations - has been effaced by an obsession with cleverness, polish, and empty style. That's the aesthetic of this decade.

Yes, the iPod's convenient but doesn't it ultimately feel a little soulless next to a scratched-up vinyl record?


The last note about the iPod is an interesting one -- it more or less completes the circle I began when I noted that some folks are watching blu-ray for the image and not the content. But what got obfuscated in my original message is that it's not blu-ray's fault: it's ours for placing the cart before the horse (or the technology, the means of codifying and transmitting the art, before the art itself). I replied to MovieMan that it irritates me to no end when we indulge in romantic nostalgia for the media of yesteryear instead of trying to invest some soul in the ultimately more useful and furthermore pervasive technology that we have (although I wasn't necessarily accusing my bloggy companion of this trespass). We could get into a grand argument about whether or not vinyl "sounds" better with its trademark warmth and more versatile waveform accuracy (and it's indisputable, certainly, that analog better matches the original sound "event").

But aren't mp3s just as prone to imperfection? As Daft Punk once said, "we just like the sound of digital compression." What makes a physical scratch more "soulful" than a compression artifact? Why all this digital fear?

MovieMan replies: My point was more about the iPod and the vinyl record as objects, not as musical delivery systems, which is a separate issue though one I could also make a case for vinyl on.... But there is something tactile and immediate about older technology that will forever be lacking in modern, sleek, but totally digital media - be it film or music. They will remain superior delivery systems, but whereas delivery and content could both be part of a certain romanticism in the past I think now that burden falls almost entirely on the latter. That was always the importance place for the romanticism to derive from, so I'm not complaining but it's a little sad to see the romance of the cinematheque, the vinyl record (on which you can actually SEE the album cover, but I digress) disappear...not that I ever partook of either in their prime (being unborn) so perhaps my nostalgia's unwarranted...


Let's first take the "tactile and immediate" comment. As I stated before, as "musical delivery" systems both analog and digital have advantages and shortcomings, but analog is far more efficient at capturing and reproducing the physical manifestation of a sonic event (actual sound waves). But records as objects...is it that they're larger? Is it that there's a visceral thrill from watching a needle scrape the edge of a plastic waffle and the palpable phenomenon that somehow the amplification of this delivers Louis Armstrong or The Mighty Sparrow directly to your living room (this is perhaps the most inherently romantic thing about vinyl -- as it entertains it's being slowly decimated, ruined, groove by groove via the process...they're so epically sacrificial, LPs!)? I'm of the ontological camp that all matter and organizational theorems thereof are arbitrary and devoid of any meaning aside from that which we invest (ie, is it that a right triangle naturally possesses some basic, primordial orderliness or that we've trained ourselves to structure our manner of perception -- the rules by which we perceive -- according to the same rules that a right triangle plays by? And wouldn't it make sense, therefore, that we'd observe, or rather create, right triangles in external stimuli whenever possible?).

The point being: why can't something that's sleek and modern be tactile and immediate, too? Don't get me wrong. Modern art can be rather cold and stoic. But the digital hating of the contemporary day sounds awful close to the arguments folks made about the synthesizer and synclavier when they emerged -- they'll never match the beauty or timbre of "real" instruments (whatever "real" means). Programmed music does not = played music. Well, no. But was precise simulation ever the point? Frank Zappa did more with orchestral samples in a synclavier than some conductors and composers have done with entire symphonies. There's a story, possible apocryphal, about how Frank once programmed a synclavier with meticulously calibrated patches and pumped the sound through a PA system at an orchestra performance while the musicians sat and fingers their axes without blowing. No one in the audience noticed.

It may not be true, it reeks of Frank's delightfully smarmy but occasionally self-defeating equivocation. But the basic moral is, I think, as veracious as you can get: beauty is in the eye of the audience, not only in regards to art but also the manner in which art is presented, packaged, and distributed (which often gets assessed with equal gusto and fastidiousness). And when given the fair opportunity, anything can seem -- can, indeed, be -- authentic. "Real".

My ethos is (hopefully) clearly embodied in the logo of this blog: handmade but digitized. Forward thinking but backwards minded. Using modern tools to glorify and accentuate rather than eradicate the charm of human error. I'm a shitty sketch artist; so what? I taught myself how to animate using Flash, which I've used to manipulate and vitalize a series of crude pencil droppings. I'll let you in on an additional secret: my subpar and raggedy piano solos, all of which are recorded via MIDI language, are about half-improvised and half-programmed. Even my guitar work is frequently edited and spliced. I'm a post-production tinkerer by nature, and what's wrong with that? The digital tweaks always enhance rather than dilute the final product, because I recognize them as means to an end (ie, the artist's vision, ie MY vision) and not the other way around. I firmly believe that the Ginsbergian attitude of "first thought best thought" (the flip side of which is the Ionic "frenzied" artist) is best applicable to prodigies like Keith Jarrett whose real knack will always be the intimacy of live performance with as little as possible obscuring the path between the man's fingers on the keys and the anticipatory cochleas (I'm not suggesting, by the way, that non-digital art should be put to death...I'm just arguing for a more equal opportunity mindset across mediums and venues). Folks like me sink their teeth into mechanics, deconstructing and reassembling endlessly; for us the digital world is the monolith from the extraterrestrial gods we've been waiting for since the dawn of time.

We hip folks tend to project sentimentality onto art-bearing objects for the most nonsensical of reasons, and why this can't occur with computerized gadgetry is a bit of a mystery. I am waiting rather impatiently for the romanticism of the cinematheque to cleanly metamorphose to the sweetness of the bit-torrent forum, or even better, the crowd of passersby who halt on their daily commute to watch a homemade music video on one's iPod Touch (hasn't happened yet to me, but I'll let you know when it does).

You're bound to say: well, Jon, it just won't be the same.

Of course it won't. It will be better. Because it will be ours, for all of us living in the here and now of the 21st century. It'll be the shit that makes folks in 2060 tearfully nostalgic for the mp3 player and Youtube. "Things had such poetry then," they'll say. "Such soul."



Post-script: Erich also has a great post at Acidemic about the crossing of the "Uncanny Valley" in animation (a more cinematic example to counter all the music references above). His alarmist take on this is that if we can't tell mechanical avatars from real human beings, even in film, we're f-u-c-k-e-d. I think this all jibes with the digital fear I'm desperately attempting to ameliorate, but it's a lot to digest at once...I may respond to that post later in the week.