 
ReSent-Message-ID: 
ReSent-Date: Wed,  2 Sep 1992 12:41:08 -0400 (EDT)
ReSent-From: "Jon C. Slenk" 
ReSent-To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
To: js9b+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Cc: je10+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Subject: Alternatives to Mass Culture
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 92 11:17:07 -0400
Message-Id: <7114.715447027@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU

Jon --

for the CAMC mailing list.

******************

Hi all. I've recently read Jon's CAMC archives and had a few things I'd
like to say about them, but this is a thought I had last night which might
be a better introduction for us all to each other. This post is very long.

I decided that recorded music is bad. Maybe I can't justify it fully but
now I've had a confluence of feelings with my thoughts such that a world
in which recorded music is bad -- or "inferior", let's not say bad --
is a plausible one, you know? And I think I like this world.

Furthermore, there crystalized, around these thoughts and feelings, an idea 
about alternatives to mass culture which I'll explain right afterwards because 
all this recorded music jazz makes a good example.

Here, listen: The music industry is bad. Its marketing strategies require that
only a comparatively few bands become well-known. Fame and access to resources
(including social and intellectual resources) are distributed for reasons
largely unrelated to issues of artistry; it might as well be a lottery.

This results from the distillation of musicians' creativity and skill 
into 40-minute commodities, marketed and sold like any other commodities. 

The ten or fifteen such commodities I am likely to make as a musician
under the very best of circumstances aren't going to be adequate as the
total production of my career. If I were to look back at the end of my life
and see a day and a half's worth of recording time -- is that going to do it?
I think not.

Now you interrupt and say, But Tom, take a well-respected recording star
like Eric Clapton. He'll look back and think of his hundreds of live shows
and his friends and the other guitarists whom he has known and who have
studied with him; they've appreciated him. Bingo.

The real value of Eric Clapton's life as a musician lies within his live
shows and friends and students and the community of guitarists, who appreciate
him. Clapton's recordings have a very subordinate relationship to all of
this.

However, they are the source of his wealth, and they also function as the
percieved value of his life as a musician for most of the people who have 
heard of him. This delusion has got to be stopped. Eric Clapton's musical
worth is inaccessible to me and I've got to quit thinking otherwise. I'm
not a guitarist, I've never seen him play live, I'm not a member of any 
community to which Eric contributes as a human being. I've just bought some
commodities produced by him. (And I like them a lot.) 

In sum, Eric Clapton's (or any musician's) value, his success as a musician,
the meaning of his career -- however you wish to put it -- exists only for
members of communities to which he contributes as a human being. People who
see his live shows regularly; people who know him; people who are musicians
themselves and can really appreciate him. Not me.

(Dogma: the meaning of a human life can only be understood wholistically.
If Eric Clapton dies being a despicable, sour, unhappy, unloved bastard, he 
blew it. I'll still make use of his albums.)

If I were a musician and wished to act in accordance with the explosion of
the delusion as described above, I would find a place to live and work, and
then proceed to live and work there. I'd build up an audience and a 
community. All of my new compositions and arrangements would go into live 
performance, to be appreciated by people who see me face-to-face and know me 
somewhat. I wouldn't kid myself that anything else was going on -- although 
I'd like to cut an album or two for the money.

What does this have to do with CAMC? Here's what: Now we've got a model
for an alternative to mass culture. Ordinarily mass culture is conceived to
be opposed by "elite" culture, and to follow it -- one's task is to figure
out what elite culture is and consume it before everybody else does, or
to contribute to it and move on before it becomes consumable by the masses.

How about if, instead of mass culture, we think of "local culture." Instead of
consuming the products of mass culture and dreaming of contributing to them
(read: not contributing anywhere) -- actually, instead of consuming anything --
I *participate*  in the culture of my city or local area. (If I "consume" 
anything it's the great works of my heritage -- we're all reading Kierkegaard 
and Joyce and Cummings in our spare time, right? And that all provides a basis
for our local culture.) To return to the early example: If I'm a musician I
don't try to get my demo tape cut, I try to work within the community of 
musicians in my city, I try to contribute through my live performances to
the cultural life of my city. The marketing of commodities is replaced by
word-of-mouth about, and experience of, art. If I'm a non-musician I patronize
the local musicians instead of buying mass-marketed albums.

Dig this! This is facilitated to an incredible degree by technology! 
You and your friends, and the members of your local cultural community, have
access to so much information that you can actually do a good job of
this! At most times throughout history, anybody trying to do what I just
described would automatically condemn themselves to a sucky level of culture,
unless they identified one aspect of culture (like moving to St. Louis in
1910 to be with all the ragtime composers) and left behind all the rest,
or were so incredibly lucky as to be born into Periclean Athens or Renaissance
Florence or Elizabethan England. But now we've got so much information
available that it's unbelievable! The raw materials necessary for a high
level of culture are practically lying in the streets! We have access to 
virtually every work of art, every tradition, ever known to man, along with
detailed criticism and analysis. Why? 'Cos this is America! :-) 

Think about Athens or Florence or England. In each of the above examples 
there was a group of people making a big impact. How big was the earth's 
population during each of those periods of great contribution? How many times
bigger is it now? Four? Five? Maybe eight or more, in the case of Athens? 
That means that we've got enough raw human material for the Cultural 
Production of Eight Simultaneous Periclean Athenses!! The trick is to bring 
the people together so that they can form a community and work ... gee, it's a 
communications problem ... holy cow, we've got the Internet! We've got 
world-wide snail mail! We can fly anywhere we want and kiss people on both 
cheeks if we have to, for ~one week's wages! What a world!

Say I'm working on something in Pittsburgh, with my friends, and we're drawing
on all sorts of books and resources, and I hear that there's somebody in
Penn State with congenial interests. We correspond, or I hop onto my ic-engine
powered motorcycle and convey myself to there, etc. We're very mobile due to
our technological prowess. We're also kind of rootless due to our technological
prowess and related sociological phenomena: what I'm suggesting is that we
use the freedom of our rootlessness as a tool to root ourselves in the best
possible way.

Since this mailing list is a spinoff of alt.cyberpunk, I'm sure that I
gave some people the heebie-jeebies with my talk about face-to-face community
and how a live performance has precedence over a recording. True, my views
aren't biggerbetterwhizzierfastersuperer-electronicalpsychowanky.
Technology should be a servant, not a master. I've got a clear, developing
view of what it means to be humane and to live a complete human life, and 
I'm eager to use the "technology of the cybernetic age" to advance *that*, 
no matter how large the seeming break from tradition might be -- but I'm not 
about to let technology lead me around by the nose for its own sake. Just 
because I could someday upload my consciousness into a Ms. Pac-Man doesn't mean
that I should.

And now I find that I've said one of the things I thought after reading the
CAMC archives after all. I'm leery of people who regard the technological
possibilities as ends in themselves. 

If you've read this far, thanks! Looking forward to discussion.

Tom

******************************************************************************
	 Tom Price  |  tp0x@cs.cmu.edu  |  Simplicity, simplicity
******************************************************************************


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