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September 30, 2004
Asshole Surfers
It really makes my day when I check my referral log and find I'm getting hits from searches like this.
Home Slice
My homeboy John Vanderslice is playing in Chicago this weekend, doing a couple different shows with the Mountain Goats. Here's an orphaned clip I wrote for the shows... John Vanderslice makes art rock—not in the sense of distended avant-garde rock, but in the sense of ambitious songcraft that has at its heights the ring of universal truth. 2002’s Life and Death of an American Fourtracker was a complex bildungsroman about lost love, lost technology, and lost childhood, but it was also a devastatingly catchy pop record of Revolver-esque proportions, a concept album not overshadowed by the concept. The vivid parables on Cellar Door (Barsuk), his newest album, reveal a storytelling instinct that’s become as sharply honed as his always impressive songwriting and production skills. That’s because Vanderslice now puts his FM-radio sensibility and tasteful psychedelic flourishes to the service of vivid character-driven fables—disquieting vignettes that are compassionate where lesser songwriters might romanticize or glibly moralize. As a guard whose job is to lead prisoners into a Gitmo torture chamber in “Heated Pool and Bar,” Vanderslice projects himself into the soldier’s frayed moral universe like an indie rock Nathaniel Hawthorne (or maybe an indie rock CIA operative.) And on “June July,” muted Mellotron flutes and painterly drumming set the stage for the opening line: “June July I went home to live with my mom”—and in less than half a minute you not only know the character, you care what happens to him. It’s a finesse many modern novelists lack, much less modern rock bands. But Vanderslice’s likeable voice, elegant melodies, and lean n’ mean rhythm section more than support the weight of his mythical aspirations and inspired studio tweakery, besting indie-poppers and paisley revivalists at their respective games in one fell swoop with energy and intelligence to spare. So, yeah, I pretty much love this guy. If you're not doing anything this weekend, check him out.
September 27, 2004
The Venus Fly-Trap That Sighs
Haven't heard the rest of this record, but I am sure digging The Concretes' "Warm Night," yessir'am.
September 23, 2004
September 19, 2004
Lee Krasner 1949
To Live and Shave in L.A. played last week, I missed them, this didn't run, here's to Hawaiian shirts, which don't need to be unbuttoned: Even among the myriad purveyors of “extreme” noise, To Live and Shave in L.A. have a particular talent for drawing a line in the sand – and then blasting the sand into charred glass. By the end of one headlining set at Lounge Ax ten years ago, they had cleared the entire room (even some of the bartenders punched out.) Some might say that’s real easy, to which band conceptualist and all-around psycho Tom Smith – whose stage persona is like a tanner, beefier Iggy Pop ca. 1970 – might counter and fun, too. But Smith is entitled to be a jerk: he’s blessed with a formidable ear for ultra-dense studio fuckery (citing Lee Perry’s Super Ape as an early revelation), coupled with a full-contact live aesthetic that’s continually pushed audiences beyond the passive spectatorship of psychedelia, or tame voyeurism, shock value’s inseparable Siamese twin. Been there, done your girlfriend: the suave 48-year-old was an early member of Pussy Galore (and put out their first record), spent time with Athens, GA experimentalists Boat Of (which featured the pre-R.E.M. acid recitations of Michael Stipe), and played in the Velvet Monkeys alongside high school friend and famed record producer Don Fleming, all the while penning smart, acerbic criticism for every ‘zine that seemed to matter. Now, after a four-year hiatus, Smith has regrouped TLASILA with Fleming on guitar, original members Rat Bastard and Mark Morgan on bass and electronics, and old pal Andrew W.K. behind the drums (whose recent “Top 12 CDs” feature in Entertainment Weekly listed TLASILA albums in its #2 and #3 spots.) Deservedly so – the band’s “free glam” is more exciting on albums like last year’s The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg (Menlo Park) than most noise bands are in the flesh on a good night. Maybe Sub Pop should sign them up as an opening act for Wolf Eyes – wait, scratch that idea.
Make tonight a wonderful year (and that's an order, a tall order)
Damn, Steely Dan entered the paraliterary and became William Gibson's Other, the conscience of a third sex, or a metallic dildo of fissionable material that can't even blow up a supermarket let alone your girlfriend. Just proves you don't want to be a member of any frat you can't invent in words. I'd hold up a coke line in a toast to the early days of blog painspotting, but the powder sifts thru my fingers and is gone and expensive like finely aged current from the past.
September 16, 2004
Shaaah! Or, Blowing In The 80's
I'm quite fond of '80s pop songs where the singer yells Shaaah! in a kind of vocal imitation of a backwards snare drum effect or something, as featured in such hits as "In a Big Country" by Big Country or "Secret" by OMD. I ask you, where is the Shaaah! these days? Show us your Shaaah!
September 11, 2004
Cultural Transmission and the “Cliché Meme” in Adaptation
Just for kicks (and because I haven't actually written anything on this blog in like six months), I thought I'd post an academic paper I wrote earlier this year about evolutionary tropes in the movie Adaptation. If you've seen the movie, perhaps you'll find it interesting. Here 'tis: Cultural Transmission and the “Cliché Meme” in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation Introduction The film Adaptation opens with a black screen and a lone, downtrodden voice, asking, “Do I have an original thought in my head?” It’s spoken as if there is doubt that there is even such a thing as an original idea; the voice seems to imply that the audience should be asking itself the same question. The voice belongs to Charlie Kaufman, a Hollywood screenwriter who has forgotten how to write, and wonders if he ever knew in the first place, or if he is just another hack in an industry of hacks, recombining and regurgitating movie clichés for an audience who never tires of them. Kaufman is becoming aware that his contempt for Hollywood script-writing conventions, as mindless entities that seem to propagate independent of individual writers’ identities, is something deeper than mere creative frustration. How he comes to this awareness, and what he does about it, can be explained through the evolutionary concept of the meme. Meme Theory Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe cultural entities that replicate in a manner paralleling that of genes. Dawkins’ book takes a “gene’s-eye view” of evolution: in his perspective, the process of natural selection ultimately furthers the “interests” of genes (i.e., self-replication) rather than the interests of the species, who function more as vehicles for genes than beneficiaries of them (Dawkins 1976). Dawkins’ book is primarily about biological evolution, but he seeks to emphasize the broadly applicable nature of Darwinian mechanics—also known as “Universal Darwinism”—by introducing the concept of the meme as an example of a non-biological replicator that operates by Darwinian principles in order to perpetuate cultural material, as opposed to genetic material. In the view of Universal Darwinism, the evolutionary process is an algorithm that is “substrate-neutral,” or able to be carried out in the same way in different mediums (Dennett 1995). Memes adhere to the same evolutionary processes as genes: they are heritable, exhibit variation, and are subject to selection. While genes are “instructions for making proteins, stored in the cells of the body and passed on in reproduction,” memes are “instructions for carrying out behavior, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation” (Blackmore 1999). From a Universal Darwinism perspective, memetics is not merely an analogy or metaphor for evolution, but a full-fledged evolutionary process for which the biological realm is but one of many possible arenas (Durham 1991). Memetics borrows Dawkins’ “gene’s-eye view” of biology to propose a “meme’s-eye view” of culture: the idea that as human hosts, we serve the “selfish” interests of cultural replicators, which can take any form, from religious doctrine to the annoying pop songs that get stuck in your head from time to time. Rather than being the producers of culture, humans are the vessels through which culture travels via a gene-like reproductive imperative: the “fittest” memes are passed from person to person, and are thus sustained as a part of a society’s culture. In Adaptation, memes take the form of movie plot conventions. Movies are comprised of plot-memes in the way that the self, in the view of memetic philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, is comprised of cultural memes. Background Adaptation, released in 2002, is the second film by the director-screenwriter team of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, who first collaborated on 1999’s Being John Malkovich. Similar to that film, in which actor John Malkovich plays a fictionalized version of himself, Adaptation is a kind of existential postmodern farce. In this case, the main character is Charlie Kaufman himself (portrayed by actor Nicholas Cage), and the fragmented plot revolves around Kaufman’s struggle to finish the movie’s script. In the film, Kaufman is at work on a screen adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, but is stricken with a writer’s block fueled by his crippling idealism regarding the kinds of Hollywood “clichés” he refuses to indulge in as a “respectable” writer—car chases, sex scenes, emotional epiphanies, and character growth. Kaufman believes that such conventions are empty gimmicks that fail to reflect the complexity, and banality, of real life. However, given the journalistic tack of Orlean’s book, there isn’t much left from which to make an appealing Hollywood movie, and Charlie rapidly drives himself to the brink of desperation wrestling with his identity as a writer and as a human being. The process of writing the film itself, then, is the ostensive subject of the film. As the story line progresses, the line between the real Kaufman and the fictionalized Kaufman becomes increasingly blurred. To add to the film’s surreal nature, Nicholas Cage also plays Donald, Kaufman’s “twin brother,” who may or may not be based on a real-life person. The Orchid Thief sub-plot of the film does have a verifiable basis in reality. In Orlean’s book, the New Yorker journalist (played in the film by Meryl Streep) travels to south Florida to investigate the story of wild orchid poacher John Laroche (played in the film by Chris Cooper) and his controversial arrest in 1994 for removing endangered plants from a state wildlife preserve. Laroche’s Holy Grail is the elusive Ghost Orchid, a rare species he hopes to cultivate by exploiting an obscure loophole in Florida’s state regulations preserving Indian rights to native plants. The wild Ghost Orchid also becomes an avatar for Orlean’s search for meaning and fulfillment. In the book, she never finds it. Evolutionary Tropes Formally, the deconstructive quality of the film is a function of the plot: Kaufman’s solution to his writer’s block is to write about what he knows best – himself – thus the necessity to write himself into the script. The film’s formal structure allows for a multifaceted thematic meditation on its real subject—finding one’s place in a sometimes hostile world, a literary spin on Darwinian ideas of adaptation. This is done through a number of interconnecting tropes on evolution, beginning with the double-meaning of the film’s title: the adaptation of entities to their environment, as well as the adaptation of a book into a movie. The biological symbolism in the film sets the stage for the film’s subtextual conflicts: the Darwinistic competition between memes, the question of free will in a meme-constructed reality, and the struggle to define notions of authorship and originality. Laroche, a self-taught botanist, delivers the first references to Darwinian evolution in the film. When we first encounter him, he’s driving to the swamp in his van, listening to a cassette tape of Charles Darwin’s writings on natural selection, and the first words he utters are Latin, as he identifies a Ghost Orchid by its taxonomic name. Later on in the film, while walking through a flower show with Orlean, he stops to examine an exotic-looking plant: “Darwin hypothesized a moth with a nose twelve inches long could pollinate it. Everyone thought he was a loon. Then, sure enough, they found this moth with a twelve-inch proboscis…The point is that what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. Its double, its soul mate.” He then waxes rhapsodically on the almost romantic harmony sustained by nature through adaptation—a metaphorical device that illuminates Orlean’s increasingly symbiotic journalist/subject relationship with Laroche, as well as her growing feelings of alienation about her life back in New York. The film also represents the social world on biological terms in the way it portrays Kaufman, which again provides background for an evaluation of culture in terms of evolutionary mechanics. Kaufman is not only hunched, balding, and overweight, he’s also socially inept, and his voice-over self-criticisms throughout the movie let us know he’s aware of it. Kaufman sees himself as a poor example of his species, one probably not favored for sexual selection. In one painfully awkward scene, his romantic ineptitude ruins his chances with an attractive woman he’s just begun to date. Kaufman’s physical appearance is a kind of mixed metaphor, a physical phenotype for his memetic composition—that of a stubborn “mutant” who refuses to climb the professional ladder by writing crowd-pleasing Hollywood blockbusters. Kaufman’s dually “disfavored” status (both in terms of his chosen career and his not-chosen biology) is highlighted in an early scene in the movie. He sits in a posh L.A. restaurant—his furrowed expression and sloppy flannel shirt contrasted amid the crowd of svelte industry professionals—haltingly trying to explain to his elegant-looking production company representative why he can’t write a conventionally popular screenplay. The Two Sides of the Cliché-Meme Coin While Kaufman detests Hollywood-cliché memes, his brother Donald, who is also an aspiring screenwriter, embraces them. Donald is taking Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar (also a real-life person, played by actor Brian Cox in the film), where Kaufman’s troubling craft is taught like a mechanistic pseudo-science to anyone who pays the registration fee. Kaufman negatively compares McKee’s cult of screen-craft to organized religion – an example Dawkins (1976) also uses to explain the mechanics of memes in his book, and which Susan Blackmore discusses at length in her book on memetics, The Meme Machine (Blackmore 1999). Among the memes that Donald uses in the screenplay for his serial killer-cop-movie-in-progress: a leitmotif of broken mirrors (to symbolize his script’s “split personality” theme); a high-speed chase sequence (a cliché that particularly disgusts Kaufman); and an idea for an incongruous scene in which the characters dance in pajamas to The Turtles’ bubblegum pop hit “Happy Together” (in order to “break the tension,” as Donald explains, because one of McKee’s “principles” is to “mix genres” at times.) The details, genres, and “principles” that Donald plans to employ in his movie function together in what Blackmore calls a memeplex—the memetic equivalent of a coevolved gene complex, where single gene units are difficult to isolate because their phenotypes are expressed in varying interconnected levels of complexity, along the hierarchy from physical attributes to behaviors. Donald’s plot conventions are nested memes that are often connected in a manner similar to the pairing of different-functioning alleles; e.g., a car-chase scene is often found in a cop movie, just as albino cats are often deaf. Dawkins’ meme theory proposes that gene-selected evolution eventually gives rise to meme-selected evolution, but that once meme-selected evolution is in place, memes and genes can affect one another in ways that are mutually reinforcing, or in ways that create opposition (Dawkins 1976). In Adaptation, memetic evolution and genetic evolution are parallels: while they operate independently, they are also metaphors for one another that happen to be mutually reinforcing, as successful meme replication is coupled with biological success in the film. Meme-Gene Coevolution The meme-gene parallel is explored further when Donald’s meme-filled screenplay is a success, while Kaufman’s remains unfinished. Donald seems well on his way to becoming the antithesis of his brother: a well-paid mainstream Hollywood player who not only woos the gorgeous women who spurned Kaufman during the making of Being John Malkovich, he also manages to woo Kaufman’s own agent (who remarks to a humiliated Kaufman, “Maybe you could bring [Donald] around to help you with the script.”) Donald does in fact try to help Kaufman, taping a copy of McKee’s pompous “Ten Commandments of Screenwriting” over Kaufman’s typewriter (the first of which is “Thou shalt respect thine audience”; Kaufman crumples it up and tosses it aside, to which Donald replies, ominously, “You shouldn’t have done that.”) The success of Donald’s screenplay has effected the replication of the Hollywood-cliché memes, which then imparted a sexual selection advantage to Donald by virtue of his increased attractiveness to the opposite sex in light of his professional triumph. The Tail Starts to Wag the Dog At this point, Kaufman gives up, admits that his script is going nowhere, and capitulates to Donald’s advice, enrolling in McKee’s scriptwriting seminar. After class, Kaufman approaches McKee, desperate for help in salvaging his script. Kaufman reiterates his dilemma—he wants to adapt Orlean’s book, but without the plot memes of “big character arcs” and “sensationalizing [of] the story.” He tells McKee, “I want to show flowers as God’s miracles. Orlean never saw the blooming Ghost Orchid. [Orlean’s book] was about disappointment.” McKee’s advice is portentous: “That’s not a movie. Let me tell you a secret. Wild ‘em in the end, and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems. Find an ending, but don’t cheat, and don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina.” McKee’s seemingly cynical views reflect the idea that memes can use humans as well as written and mechanical-electronic media as their hosts, and that in order for a movie to be a success, plot memes must be transmitted through all three types of host. Kaufman’s meeting with McKee is the turning point that transforms the rest of the film. Kaufman begins breaking his own rules, and consequently the movie begins to replicate one plot meme after another as it self-consciously veers straight into the realm of Hollywood cliché. In one scene, Donald sings “Happy Together” as the brothers sit in a hotel room, trying to reconstruct what Kaufman must have missed in the book’s story. A flashback sequence then narrates the alternate, Hollywood-cliché-memetic version of the Orlean/Laroche story, sequentially violating each of Kaufman’s “rules” as the film “devolves” into absurdist satire. Orlean did see the Ghost Orchid in the swamps of Florida after all; the result, of course, was a trite epiphany: “It’s just a flower.” We also learn that Laroche was hunting the Ghost Orchid because it’s in fact a potent psychedelic, to which Orlean has become addicted. Orlean and Laroche engage in a gratuitous sex scene, interrupted by their discovery of the Kaufmans spying on them—which results in a suspenseful hunt through the swamps, replete with scary alligators and snakes and corny cop-movie music, as Orlean and Laroche chase after them waving guns. Discussion These later scenes form an interesting paradox. Kaufman lets us know that respect for the audience has been suspended for the duration of the film when he symbolically crumples up the script “commandments.” Subsequently, the audience is “given the movie they paid for” (in the meme-transmitting, McKee-sense), but it’s as if to say that the way to “respect thine audience” is to allow them to complete the Hollywood-cliché meme replication cycle. The way to respect the audience, in other words, is to disrespect them—to deny them the free will to be anything but a meme host in a chain of meme hosts. Another notable irony is that Donald, the meme advocate and primary meme-host throughout the film, is in the end killed by one of his memes: a car-chase scene—which is a pun on the deus ex machina that McKee himself warned against. The meme-gene coevolution that was once favorable and mutually reinforcing has now become adversarial in the narrative resolution of the film, and the car-chase meme has been successfully passed on culturally at the expense of its character-host. This illustrates the idea of the selfish meme as an entity that uses human hosts to further its own interests. In fact, it turns out that Kaufman’s anti-cliché value system is itself a meme, one that could be called the “myth of originality” meme. Kaufman’s myth-of-originality meme is selected against given the “limited resource” of time in the film, as competition for limited resources is one of Darwin’s stated factors in the process of natural selection (Darwin 1964). As the denouement of the film unfolds, Kaufman’s anti-meme meme proves not to have the advantage of usefulness in resolving the script problems. It is selected against in favor of McKee’s big ending meme, which is then replicated whenever Adaptation is screened (as the film proved to be a popular and critical success.) Adaptation closes with a memeplex tour de force to drive the point home: a triumphant Kaufman kisses the woman he had earlier lost (the “Hollywood ending” meme), reflecting on his newly learned life lessons (the “character growth” meme mentioned earlier) to the strains of, of course, “Happy Together.” Conclusion Kaufman’s decision to weave the Hollywood-cliché memes in with his own anti-meme meme demonstrates that while human hosts have a degree of agency in terms of the memes they choose to harbor and propagate, in the end the cultural material we produce as “original” art is often just a variation, in the Darwinian sense, of material we’ve received memetically to begin with. The message that the film delivers about authorship and free will is a dismal one: if we are to accept the view that we exercise a degree of biological will within the constraints of genetics (in other words, that we can guide the expression of our genotypic composition but not transcend it or pass it on in a Lamarckian sense), the film seems to be saying the same for our degree of free will as producers of culture. We don’t so much create culture as replicate it with minor variations, and we do so within a finite “design space” (Dennett 1995), or to extend the analogy, a limited “meme pool.” Meme selection is an a priori condition that occurs before any mutations we may impart to those memes. Despite the film’s cynical overtones (and purposefully maudlin ending), from a functional perspective, the film succeeds at what it sets out to do. The tone of disappointment in Orlean’s book is manifested in the “failure” of Kaufman to find a cliché-free way to realize his adaptation. But “God’s miracle”—the adaptive powers of orchids—is iterated in Kaufman’s realization that he, too, is capable of a miraculous adaptation to a culture that is seemingly hostile toward his idiosyncratic strain of creativity. In fact, from a memetic perspective, the choice is out of his hands—a notion that from a creative standpoint can be seen as either comforting or troubling. Postscript One final example of memetic transmission: when I left the movie theater after having seen Adaptation for the first time, I filed out into the parking lot with the other theater patrons, some of whom could be faintly heard humming “Happy Together.” I found myself humming the song even as I was trying to fall asleep that night, as a lot of other people probably did, too. In fact, I’m humming it right now as I finish this writing this paper. Whether or not I want to is beside the point—another meme has fulfilled its function. [end]
September 04, 2004
The Cryptic Semaphore's long season-between-stations: All other people's content, all the time!
Vice magazine is a sad joke, but this article does a bang-up job of demystifying the cult of the DJ while explaining some of the trade's essential "skills." Think this is all obvious? Try tuning in to the radio station where I DJ at around 3:45 am some time during the regular school year. Oh, yeah: today's my birthday. I am now officially in my mid-30's. My completely awesome girlfriend got me, among other things, a Shure DJ bag. (see above) 
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