Canyon Cody

La Mesa del Contento (sic)

2009-10-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

ABSTRACT: Granada Doaba is a story about neighbors, immigration + confluence. Our music is a human process of borrowing, sharing and transformation. My writing is a work in progress -- an attempt to shed light [and historical context] on a improvised piece of art we created in the dark.

Chapter 1 : "Flamencología"
false dichotomies in spanish dance music

Folk vs. Classical
Vertical Borrowing
Party Music [part 1]
Indigenous Spanish guitar
meta-Historical Musicology
Gypsies + Class

Chapter 2 : "Bohemia Al-Andalus" war brings us together too

Military expansion & interpenetration
Ottoman Zurna vs. European Clarinet
Turkish Orientalism in Euro Art Music
Convivencia: living with friction
Gypsies + Religion

Chapter 3 : "La Senda del Abuelo"
connecting the margins like pacman

1492 (re)Conquista
Horizontal borrowing
Diversity of outcasts
Party Music [part 2]
Gypsies + Arabs

Chapter 4 : "Nunca Fui a Granada"
cuz you don't know what you got til its gone

Federico Garcia Lorca + the Spanish Civil War
Exile and Nostalgia
Colonial Oppression + Percussive Transgression
New Spain: La Movida [part 1]
Gypsies as Symbols

Chapter 5 : "No Te Rebeles"
suffering, and smiling

Flamenco: Birth and Evolution
Misery Sublime
Authenticity and Race
Gypsies and/or Andalusia

Chapter 6 : "Qanun Al-Tarab"
pan-Arab music

Islam and Music
Al-Andalus: Arabs (?) in Spain
Structured improvisation
Party Music [part 2]
Dancers & Luthiers

Chapter 7 : "Menudo Jaleo"
hip is the knowledge, hop is the movement

Digital Borrowing
Participatory Culture
Party Music [part 3]
Memory and Forgetting
Musical Environmentalism
The Internet [part 1]

Chapter 8 : "El Manisero de Potemkin"
is that song mine?

Colonial Imagination
Music in the Marketplace
Copyright vs Creative Commons
Africa [via Latin America]

Chapter 9 : "Calabazar de Sagua"
and the walls came down

New Spain [part 2]
Immigration: Ida y vuelta
Fusion: Cuban Flamenco
Party Music [part 4]

Chapter 10 : "Yerbaguena"
standing on the shoulders of giants

New Spain: Internacional [part 2]
Fusion: Arab Flamenco
Fusion: Jazz Flamenco
The Internet [part 2]
New Spain [part 3]

Chapter 11 : "La Lengua del Río"
mi manera de sentir ...

Habichuela family
Cultural Inheritances
Genius

Chapter 12 : "Perro Cruzado"
one two three four ...

Globalization & African-American music
Other Spanish music

Chapter 13 : "Juxtapotente"
the old and the new

Gypsies from India
Cultural Inheritances
Dance Music [part 5]

Chapter 14 : "El Arte de Escuchar"
keep your ears open and eyes moving

Learning to listen
Teachers and Students

Download Granada Doaba

2009-08-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Granada Doaba took me 4 years to produce. Special thanks to Sean Dwyer, Hidetomo Nambu, Juan Miguel Carmona, Uzman Almerabet, José Yañez, Jack Salt, Catherine Gomez, Raul Ruiz, Wayne Marshall, Dwight Reynolds, Carmen Abelleira and Dave White.

Time for a new beginning. My name is Canyon Cody.

In Praise of Local Music

2009-01-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

Back home in Ojai California USA (pop. 8202), I've swandoven back into the digital realm: twittering and blogging and googleReadering and mySpace bombing and facebooking and rapidsharing and and and . . . I find myself quite physically isolated, and yet über-connected.

The Internet is not a very important tool for social interaction in Granada; even most college students still spent 1 euro/hour to check their emails at an Internet café instead of paying for broadband at home. Granada has a diverse community of global immigrants, and yet the town remains astoundingly provincial, self-absorbed, local.

Moving back to my small boring town has re-broadened my horizons. I'm more engaged with international news and global dialogues than I was while living in Granada, where my immediate physical surroundings were sufficiently diverse and dynamic to keep my attention rapt. In Spain, we were collaborating almost every day with physically-present musicians, sharing sandwiches + recording songs. Global music (which is to say "far away music") had little appeal.

"people used to make records
as in a record of an event
the event of people playing music in a room" [ani difranco]

Back in Ojai, I heard (somewhere, somehow) "ABCs", the lead single from Somalian-Canadian rapper Knaan's new album Troubadour. I was struck by the intermittent pauses in Chubb Rock's flow [kinda reminds me of Scottie Pippen on a fast break] and thought it would sound tight over our instrumental "La Senda del Abuelo" from Granada Doaba. I googled Knaan's song, found the torrent for the CDS, dropped it into Azureus, made a sandwich for myself and soon had the acapella. Opened Ableton LIVE and time-stretched his 120bpm words to fit our song @ 141.5

Knaan - ABCs (Gnawledge Remix) by elcanyonazo

It's funny when you talk to someone from outside the garden walls. My dad asked me, "Did Knaan give you permission to remix his song?" Well, not in so many words, but why else would they release the damn acapella? It's like selling Rizzlas and banning spliffs. My boss asked me, "Can you monetize this?" Well, not exacting. I don't "own" various components of the remix, in particular the guitar from our instrumental, which is sampled from flamenco guitarist (and Granada local hero) Juan Habichuela's song "Coge la Senda." We've chopped up the original enough that I would personally consider it a transformative work, but we also included 10 unedited seconds of singer Marina Heredia's voice at the end (just cuz it's pretty).

But we didn't just reorganize pre-existing material -- we also planted a few new seeds. Gnawledge bredren Afro DZ ak played a new trumpet line for the chorus (which fits rather nicely with Knaan's children chorus) and Mohammed Dominguez tapped out live darbuka over the entire track, adding a fresh element of inconsistency to a rhythm track otherwise structured on an electronic grid. For the video, I used about half of the original music vid, and then spliced in new footage of us in Granada, Afro in Boston and my little brother in Ojai.

After I bounced the final draft mp3 of our new mashup, my momma asked me, "So now what are you going to do with it?" Share it, of course. "Why?" Because it makes me feel engaged, because it helps me meet new musicians and new fans, because it doesn't do any good idling on my desktop. Ideally, a DJ would play it at a party somewhere and people would dance. That would be awesome.

So here I am, assembling a song that incorporates musicians from Somalia, New Jersey, Venezuela, Seattle and Spain. In Granada, this was local music, but now it's global music, simply because I got on an airplane. What does local Ojai music sound like? I'd never actually given it much thought, maybe because our culture is so young that I didn't think it worth my attention. But back home, eyes moving and ears open, I've encountered lots of different musicians -- and even if I like the actual music they play less than what I was hearing in Spain, I certainly *enjoy* their physical/local presence much more than even the funkengroovenest mp3 I download from wayneandwax or babe(b)logue or globalgroovers or loolo or or or or

Perfect example: these 5 elementary school kids from Ojai strumming and tooting for change on the side of the road. They were either some jazz geniuses, or they were actually just playing 5 totally different songs, but either way, their energy made me feel good all day. Especially the kid in the middle, who plays the trombone but left it at home, so just did handstands instead.

Farmer and the Cook is the essence of local. The all-organic restaurant features a menu of delish veggies grown locally and hosts small concerts on the weekends with Ojai musicians. This week was Johnathan McEuen (guitar center), who lives next door. They also host art exhibitions by local painters and poetry readings by local farmers.

So what's my point? I like local music more than global music. Listening to my friends (above) rehearse for their upcoming Led Zeppelin tribute concert is more fulfilling that listening to Knaan's new album, unless of course I get to participate with his music through the act of remixing, at which point a global/local transformation occurs. What does local Ojai music sound like? Download and find out.

Biters or Writers? MLK, Obama + Jay-Z

2009-01-21T18:33:00.000-08:00

"This brother's creative. I'm not gonna say it's plagiarism, but he's creative."

POP QUIZ: The quotation above refers to _______?

A. Barack Obama
B. Martin Luther King
C. Jay-Z
D. Bollywood

For one answer, watch my video©® of an interview with Clarence Jones, who helped write [and copyright] the "I Have A Dream" speech. Jones points out the obvious similarities between the political language of Barack Obama and Dr. Matin Luther King, specifically Obama's "urgency of the moment" vs. MLK's "fierce urgency of now."

Is the reason we don't charge Obama with plagiarism because he's not trying to be deceitful and pass off others' work as his own, but instead making a popular reference that his audience should recognize? That's how rappers usually defend themselves against charges of biterism after recycling an old Rakim or BDK lyric, though (ironically) when Jones actually explains the original source of Obama's catchphrase, in the background of my video you can hear mi amigo Nick Marshall say, "I thought that was a Smashing Pumpkins reference."

How does Jones (or any of us) make this distinction between plagiarism and creativity? Obama didn't raise bunny-eared fingers to indicate his quotation, but he did slightly change a few words.

Even if he was going to add a footnote, who would Obama cite? Those words weren't invented by MLK, who was a powerful orator in large part because of his adept use of allusion, recycling phrases and language from important cultural texts, including the Bible, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Shakespeare.

When Dr. King said, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," he didn't pause to attribute those words to Amos. When Jay-Z ~~wrote~~ composed his verse for "My President is Black" he also borrowed heavily from a popular text, in this case a widely circulated e-mail message:

"Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk,
Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run,
Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly."

Is this plagiarism or creativity? Does the anonymity of the original author influence our judgment? How does someone other than Webster own words?

Accordind to Clayborne Carson, director of the Dr. King Papers Project at Stanford University, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in [Dr. King's] earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."

Clarence Jones noted a similar pattern in Barack Obama's campaign: "President-elect Obama, like a masterful musical composer with perfect pitch, successfully updated, translated and rearranged "We Shall Overcome" to a "Yes, We Can" surround-sound mantra for the cell phone, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Internet-blackberry generation."

This discussion is largely based on some unresolvable semantic issues: What do we mean by borrowing vs stealing, allusion vs appropriation, biting vs signifin'? Our judgment is of course totally skewed by the our biases, which is why Nas fans call Jay-Z a biter and racists call MLK a plagiarist for similarities between his "I Have a Dream" speech and Archibald Carey, Sr.'s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention.

[[The similarity is that both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America" (My Country ’Tis of Thee) composed in 1832, and both speeches share the Biblical exhortation "Let freedom ring!"]]

Keith Miller, in Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources, argues that such "borrowing", which he terms "voice merging", follows in a long tradition of folk preaching, particularly in the African American church, and should not necessarily be termed plagiarism. On the contrary, he views King's skillful combination of language from different sources as an oratorical skill.

During their so-called "beef", Nas dissed Jay-Z as biter: "How much of Biggie's rhymes gonna come out your fat lips?" In the the "Trial of Jay-Z", the website hiphopdx assembled dozens of examples of Jay-Z songs where he re-uses old rhymes from previous rap songs.

Biting is as old as hip-hop itself. The very first, err ... second rap song ever [Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"] not only bites the rhythm + melody from Chic's popular disco track "Good Times", but MC Big Bank Hank's rhymes weren't even his. They "belonged" to Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, who in turn assembled them from a hodgepodge of couplets popularized by various toasters at different block parties.

On "What More Can I Say", Jay-Z toys with these ideas of artistic originality, showing how mercurial the situation really be:

These fucks, too lazy to make up shit, they crazy
They don't, paint pictures, they just, trace me
You know what?
Soon they forget where they plucked they whole style from,
they try to reverse the outcome
I'm like - TOUGH!
I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others
I say a B.I.G. verse, I'm only biggin up my brother
Biggin up my borough, I'm big enough to do it

In defending himself against charges of biterism, Jay-Z justifies his lyrical borrowings as his way of giving props to his deceased mentor Notorious BIG, a la "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

In hiphopdx's subsequent "Vindication of Jay-Z", J-23 writes "If you think Jay-Z is a biter, you are probably just uneducated in this game...or a hater. It's really as simple as that. Every rapper flips, borrows, or adopts rhymes from other rappers, it has been going on for a long time.

"There are about 40 bars in that audio clip that Jay-Z has been accused of biting. In his career I'll take an educated guess and say Jay has spit 12,000 bars, give or take. More importantly, most of those bars have been incredibly clever, witty and quotable. Does anyone ever claim Jay's best lines are those one's he has borrowed? No. So Jay has borrowed lines in about 0.4% of the bars he has spit ."

So the question, it seems to me, is not copyright vs copywrong, but copygood or copybad? For the record, plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. While both terms may apply to a particular act, they are different transgressions. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of a copyright holder -- when material protected by copyright is used without consent. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned boost to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.

What constitutes wack biterism in the creative arena is a subjective judgment, but in the realm of academia, plagiarism is a pretty well-defined transgression. In 1991, a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that the dissertation Martin Luther King presented for his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University was largely plagiarized, with a good deal of material taken verbatim from a variety of other sources without proper attribution.

They decided not to revoke his degree, the committee found that King "is responsible for knowingly misappropriating the borrowed materials that he failed to cite or to cite adequately. . . a straightforward breach of academic norms that constitutes plagiarism as commonly understood."

As far as I'm concerned, Martin Luther King's academic plagiarism is basically irrelevant wrt his character as a preacher, Civil Rights leader or a human being. But academia, unlike church or hip-hop, has very strict rules on proper citation and they need to be respected if you're going to participate. This blog post would not pass the scrutiny of academic research, since I've copied entire phrases from Wikipedia and other websites.

In reviewing King's academic career, historian Ralph Luker concluded, "What became clear was that they were a patchwork of his own language and the language of scholars, often without clear attribution." When I copy language from another website, especially something anonymously or collaboratively written like Wikipedia, I might use 60% of the sentence the way I found it, but change a phase here, add a word there, and make it mine. Instead of putting the new sentence in quotation marks, I try to make at least the slightest wink of attribution, but the idea is to work the authorities' words into a seamless construct of [my] own creation.

In her NY Times op-ed "Why we now Iraq is lying", Condoleeza Rice accuses Saddam Huseein of "unabashed plagiarism" as part of her argument for pre-emptive self-defense. A young Helen Keller was accused in 1892 of plagiarizing a short story and was brought before a tribunal of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she was acquitted by a single vote. She claimed to have never read the original text she was accused of copying, though admitted she may have read and forgotten it. Keller "remained paranoid about plagiarism ever after" ^[37]^[38] and said that the experience led her to write the one thing she knew for certain to be original: an autobiography .

In the case of Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music,^[2] Harrison was found to have unintentionally copied his song "My Sweet Lord" from another songs called "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons, to whom he was forced to surrender royalties until Harrison eventually bought the rights to the original tune.

A Mathematical Look at Musical Plagiarism
By FRANK BEHRENS / ART TIMES May, 2004

A famous composer was once accused of plagiarizing from a far inferior one. His answer was (tongue-in-cheek, no doubt) something like, "After all, there are only 12 notes." Now this led me to wonder what the chances are of a melody being plagiarized by sheer chance rather than by design. So let us do some classy calculations.

We will assume that the melody in question lies within a single octave, which is to say it consists of only the 7 white and 5 black keys on a piano, 12 possible notes in all. The simplest scenario is that the melody consists of 12 notes, no two the same. If you remember your high school math, the answer is 12!—for which read, "twelve factorial."

You see, the first note can be any one of the 12, the second note any of the remaining 11, the third note any of the remaining 10, and so on. By the laws of what we call "counting" (or "permutations," if you will), that gives us 12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 or 479,001,600 possible sequences of 12 different notes, each played only once. So the probability of repeating those 12 notes by chance is 1 out of 12! or approximately .0000002%.

so what's my point? that plagiarism's not cool, but copying is. that biting is wack, but biggin up your borough is not. that the internet makes it even easier to control-c but it's embarrassing when you get caught.

but the most important thing is to keep moving forward.

MLK's "I Have A Dream" (Copyright 1963)

2009-01-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

Full 17-minute video of MLK's "I Have A Dream"

Read the full text online or download the PDF.

On Monday, I saw Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech in its entirety for the first time in my life. How can something so constitutional to our nationhood remain so obscure? Why didn't my school teachers play this for us every year? Because we the students don't own our history. The ideas behind MLK's dream might be our cultural patrimony, but the 17 minutes of his speech are owned and copywrit, which means they're not yours.

What's it mean to copyright a dream? If not the abstract idea, what about its specific articulation -- your (exclusive) version of the sueño? The 4fathers certainly did their darnedest trying to trademark The American Dream, even though it's basically just The Human Dream, re-branded as "life, liberty and the pursuit of ~~property~~ happiness." (ⓒ 1776 USA)

After CNN replayed the speech (which they presumably paid for), there was an interview with MLK's friend and lawyer Clarence Jones (above). In 1963, Jones had helped Dr. King write his "I Have A Dream Speech" -- I'll save my "it-takes-a-village" rant for mañana -- but what I found most interesting was his contribution of a single circled letter scribbled on the physical copies of the speech distributed to the press.

Ever since 1802, until quite recently, US law required that all physical copies of a published work must include an explicit notice of copyright, typically the symbol ⓒ. In March 1989, the Berne Convention ended this requirement in the US, which means that copyright protection is no longer subject to any (stupid) formality. Nowadays, as soon as you transform ( sublimate or reify?) an idea into physical reality, as soon as it's "fixed in a tangible medium of expression [and] its embodiment ... is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration," then the expression of that idea automatically becomes legally yours. Though this change became effective in 1989, all works published before that date are still governed by the prior law, including MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech.

As he explains it in the video above (which btw I recorded with a FlipVid from a saved TiVo session, imported+edited with iMovie and then upload to YouTube, where it was again re-encoded), Clarence Jones [lawyer] re-opened the mimeograph copies of the speech, which were going to be distributed to the press, and scribbled circled c's on every copy. This proved important when, soon thereafter, 20th Century Fox Records released an unauthorized commercial recording of the speech on vinyl. The utter silliness of physically writing little ⓒs, like some magic word, ended up protecting MLK's copyright in court.

But back then, copyright law also required registration with the government, not just the ⓒ. In MLK's day, the rules were still based on the 1909 Copyright Act, which stipulated that publishing a new work without first registering it with the government meant the complete forfeiture of copyright protection.

The single, decisive act of publishing no longer occupies the prominent place it once did in determining copyright. From 1909 until 1976, the law guaranteed automatic copyright protection for works-in-progress, but upon publication, a work was required to be registered with proper notice or else it was just thrown into the public domain.

During MLK's court case with 20th Century Fox Records (and also in a later, similar case with CBS), the question of whether or not his speech was "published" became the important legal distinction. Delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, Martin Luther King's speech was heard by more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington DC, and countless more on TV and radio. A few days later, The New York Post published the complete text of the speech and later offered reprints for sale. Most importantly, MLK's own organization distributed physical copies to the press, and even though they were marked with the magic ⓒ, they didn't actually register the text with the government until a month after the speech.

The (possibly) legally legitamate argument for CBS + 20th Century Fox Records was that Dr. King lost his right to copyright protection because he "published" the speech before obtaining copyright, thereby placing the text in the public domain.

Though the 1909 Act wasn't untirely re-written until the 1976 Act (which de-emphasized the impact of the moment of publication wrt copyright protection), there were in the interim certain legal decision that gave the law certain shades of gray which MLK used to defend his copyright. First of all, his argument was based on the well-established precedent that a performance, no matter how broad the audience, is not a publication. In defending MLK's position, the court of appeals expressed concern that "an author whose message happens to be newsworthy" should not be forced "to choose between obtaining news coverage for his work and preserving his common-law copyright."

The second significant fact is that the physical copies of the speech were distributed only to the press. This means they were not released directly to the public, but instead to a specific group for a specific purpose. This distinction between a limited, as opposed to a general, publication eventually convinced the court to grant MLK exclusive legal ownership of his dream.

Of course, these days it's not actually Dr. King wielding legal control of his words, but his heirs. Clayborne Carson, director of the MLK Research & Education Institute has said he "would like to make [the "I Have A Dream" speech] as widely available as possible. However, I respect the King family's point of view that this is private property and there has to be a balancing of the public need versus the family need." President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address is in the public domain, and it's not because he forgot to register with the Feds, but it's well-worth remembering that the King family certainly doesn't enjoy the financial privilege of the Kennedy clan.

Critics of the King family's decision not to put the speech in the public domain say the poorest children are the most deprived: "The more elite the institution, the easier it is to pay the mandatory fee," explains David J. Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning MLK biography.

(The Internet, of course, has made this somewhat of a moot point, since illegal pirates have upload an unauthorized version of the entire speech onto YouTube and the full text is available both online or as a PDF download.)

In his 1971 academic article "Protection of Original Material," the former President of Berkelee College of Music, Lee Eliot Berk, connects the lessons from MLK's "I Have A Dream" copyright issues and the problems faced by musical educators with regard to their original works used for teaching and research purposes. Of course, I haven't actually read anything past the first page, because I don't pay tuition = I'm no longer an official academic = I don't have access privilege to JSTOR. I recognize (abstractly) that JSTOR offers a service and deserves remuneration for their efforts, not to mention the original author's work, but IMHO the market of ideas just shouldn't be governed by supply n' demand. That it would cost me $19.00 USD to read this article is just rediculous.

In the (beginning of the) article, Berk raises questions concerning "how the teacher's sole rights to the material he creates are to be preserve for his exclusive benefit." He advises teachers to "consider the legal significance of showing the material to a colleague, delivering it verbally in class lecture format, having it performed, recording it, or distributing copies of it". It should be noted that this was written before the law was revised by the Copyright Act of 1978, which means these were more practical concerns than they are today, but I think they demonstrate how copyright concerns can stifle collaboration in an attempt to protect the exclusivity of authorship.

Harvard University recently adopted a policy that requires faculty members to make their scholarly articles available free online and MIT has free online course materials for the autodidact. Many academics, such as ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, have posted their work on their personal blogs, where he takes it a step further and licenses his works copyleft so that others can share + remix.

But in general, academic journals are still just ivory echo chambers. I take much less umbrage with Disney fighting for an exclusive perpetual trademark of Mickey Mouse because they're in the business of making money. As an organization, that is their primary purpose and they're doing what they can to fulfil 'that role.

But the role of the education system and Civil Rights movement is different: the goal is affecting positive social change. Money is needed for operating costs, but profit should be a concern only insofar as it nurtures that goal.

it was all a dream, i used to read ethno-remix magazine

Part II mañana will explore borrowing/stealing/copying in the rhetoric and writing of Barack Obama, Jay-Z and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Who's dream was it? And where'd the dream come from?

Ralph Ellison and Flamenco

2009-01-16T00:29:00.000-08:00

"'Flamenco', Ralph Ellison's first published music essay, evokes his debt to Ernest Hemingway: the sweat-on-wine-bottle detail, the strings of independent clauses, the deadpan tone that is nonetheless full of passion."

Ralph Ellison's album review of the Third Anthology of Cante Flamenco was published in the Saturday Review on 11 December 1954. He had been traveling and living in Europe ever since the release of his first novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. One of the best undergrad courses I took at Boston College was dedicated exclusively to Invisible Man, a book I've returned to periodically and found new depth in every reading.

As the story goes, a major fire at Ellison's home in Massachussetts destroyed 300 pages of his second novel in 1967 -- though, according to his new "definitive biography" by Arnold Rampersad, the story is not actually true. Regardless, Ellison did eventually write over 2000 pages of a second novel, but it was never completed. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison's second novel Juneteenth was published as 368-page condensation of his unfinished work.

Ellison studied trumpet and piano as a young man and attended the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. His later writing has the rhythm and cadence of a jazz genius and the passages about music in Invisible Man are some of my favorites, particularly the introduction quoted below, in which the nameless narrator describes listening to a Louis Armstrong record after "accidentally" smoking some reefer:

"It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around."

Which, of course, makes me think of Afrika Bambaataa. As part of the founding trilogy of hip-hop, along with Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, Bambaataa was the godfather of meta-physical philosophizing about slipping into breakbeats and lookin round. Under the spell of marijuana, the Invisible Man discovers a new way of listening to music:

"The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music, but descended, like Dante, into its depths."

I remember reading this in high school, thinking it wasn't exactly an anti-pot PSA. Ellison then moves into italics for the next section, a powerful sermon about the "Blackness of Blackness". But just before the preacher begins his speech, Ellison finishes his description of the IM's herbally-enhanced listening session:

"And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looking around and heard and old woman singing a spiritual as full of Welschmerz as flamenco."

I don't remember this brief reference to flamenco from the first time I read the book -- I probably just skipped past it because I didn't know what "Welchmerz" was either. Coined by German author Jean Paul in 1820, Welchmerz literally means world-pain or world-weariness. It's often described as the sadness felt as a result of the difference between physical reality and the ideal state. It's a perfect word to describe the soul-crushing wail of flamenco singing, called "llantos" or "lamentos ahogados" in Spanish. To a foreign ear, it can sound like a shrieking injured animal, but Ellison recognized flamenco as a "tradition that contains many elements which the West has dismissed as 'primitive,' that epithet so facile for demolishing all things cultural which Westerners do not understand or wish to contemplate." The all-too-common description of flamenco as "animalistic" ignores its highly organized and rigid structure, which because it doesn't correspond to European art music's scales or rhythms, is often dismissed as "primitive". That Ellison had the vision to recognize that flamenco is actually an extremely subtle art of great refinements is a testament to his sharp, open ears. (All mixed metaphors dedicated to Wayne&Wax)

Ellison's writing on flamenco begins with his characterization of Spain as "neither Europe nor Africa but a blend of both." He continues:

"Cante Flamenco is the very ancient folk music of the Andalusian gypsies of southern Spain. Its origins are as mysterious as those of the gypsies themselves, but in it are heard Byzantine, Arabic, Hebraic, and Moorish elements fused and given the violent, rhythmical expressiveness of the gypsies. Cante Flamenco, or cante hondo (deep song, as the purer, less florid form is called), is a unique blending of Eastern and Western modes and as such it often baffles when it most intrigues the Western ear. In our own culture the closest music to it in feeling is the Negro blues, early jazz, and the slave songs (now euphemistically termed "spirituals")."

The discussion of whether flamenco is ancient or modern is a tricky one. Ethnomusicologists usually give the mid 19th century as the birth date for flamenco, though most scholars admit the music's roots go back much further than that. At what point a genre "becomes itself" is a murky game of taxonomy, but there's a good argument that flamenco is not ancient, but actually quite intertwined with the emergence of modernity.

It's also funny that Ellison writes that flamenco's origins are as mysterious as the gypsies themselves, because the gypsy's origins have been proved linguistically to originate in India, particularly the northern Punjab/Doaba regions. He does list the usual suspects for flamenco influencers (Byzantine, Arabic, Hebraic, and Moorish), though he leaves out Afro-Latino. He does make explicit its parallels with African-American music, a point which he goes on to develop further:

"Like Negro folk music, Cante Flamenco (which recognizes no complete separation between dance and song, the basic mood, the guitar and castanets, hold all together) is a communal art. In the small rooms in which it is performed there are no "squares" sitting around just to be entertained, everyone participates very much as during a noncommercial jam session or a Southern jazz dance. It can be just as noisy and sweaty and drunken as a Birmingham "breakdown"; while one singer "riffs" (improvises) of the dancers "go to town" the others assist by classing their hands in the intricate percussive manner called palmada and by stamping our the rhythms with their feet. When a singer, guitarist of dancer has negotiated a particularly subtle passage (and this is an art of great refinements) the shouts of Olé! arise to express appreciation of his art, to agree with the sentiments expressed, and to encourage him on to even greater eloquence... the cantes con baile (dance songs) sound like a revivalists' congregation saying "Amen!" to the preacher"

Flamenco is not a spectator sport. Flamenco's natural habitat (la juerga) is a circle of musicians and aficionados interacting, not a "two-way (performers and audience) ritual of a concert", to use a recent phrase from NY Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff. The participation and encouragement of the crowd (called "jaleos") is integral to the performance. Nothing betrays an hither-to unnoticed square in the room like a misplaced "Ole!" Ellison also makes reference to the often inebriated nature of flamenco performance, an important theme for sure, though one that gets grossly exaggerated by Timothy Mitchell in his otherwise interesting book Flamenco Deep Song.

"Flamenco, while traditional in theme and choreography, allows a maximum of individual expression, and a democratic rivalry such as is typical of a jam session; for, like the blues and jazz, it is an art of improvisation, and like them it can be quite graphic. Even who one doesn't understand the lyrics will notes the uncanny ability of the singers presented here to produce pictorial effects with their voices. Great space, echoes, rolling slopes, the charging of bulls, and the prancing and galloping of horses flow in this sound much as animal cries, train whistles, and the loneliness of night sound through the blues. The nasal, harsh, anguished tones heard on these sides are not the results of ineptitude or "primitivism"; like the "dirty tone" of the jazz instrumentalist, they are the result of an esthetic which rejects the beautiful sound sought by classical Western music."

Flamenco isn't pretty. In fact, it can be quite grating, at times bordering on fingernails on a chalkboard, which is why I'm so confused by "Flamenco Chill" as a genre. Flamenco is gully, gritty music of lament and celebration, not insipid elevator music. To make flamenco palatable to the Western ear by transforming it into breezy electronic beats, marketed under cheesy names like Ibiza Sunset, neuters the music of its strength. Flamenco Chill isn't fusion, it's a eunuch.

"Perhaps what attracts us most to flamenco, as it does to the blues, is the note of unillusioned affirmation of humanity which it embodies. The gypsies, like the slaves, are an outcast through undefeated people who have never lost their awareness of the physical source of man most spiritual moments... In its more worldly phases the flamenco voice resembles the blues voice, which mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyrics, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth: that though we may be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again."

Flamenco, above all else, is human. And alive. It reconfirms things about yourself that you already knew. I really love Ellison's conclusion, though the issue of irony in flamenco is complicated. Flamenco rarely reveals it's tongue-in-cheek, but when you catch a glimpse of it, you can't help but laugh with God at the great human joke.

"Flamenco"
Ralph Ellison
Download the PDF

i hear pdfs = the new mp3s

El Niño de las Pinturas + the Aftermath of Altamira

2009-01-12T14:42:00.000-08:00

I've always found museums abit prisonish. Keep that art locked up where it can't hurt nobody. Limited visiting hours. Bad food on plastic trays. Guards + cameras everywhere.

One of the greatest parts about living in Granada is the grafitti. I could almost allow myself to use the word "yü-ˈbi-kwə-təs" without feeling like a hyperbolic snob, but just to be safe, let's go with "almost everywhere / constantly encountered."

[tangentially: ubiquitous computing or "everyware" is crazyscarycool].

There seems to be two interrelated reasons why there's so much graf on the streets of Granada. The first is a vibrant street culture where the people actually occupy the public spaces. It's the only urban space on Earth where I haven't felt like a temporarily tolerated traspasser on government property. Street music bumps, street spliffs are passed, street flirting leads indoors. So it's little suprise that all this loitering leeds to grafitti. And certainly, much of it is nothing more than names scrawled on walls, but when enough people declare themselves in different colors, the results can be beautiful.

And the walls are never done. Museums are where finished art goes to retire, whereas grafitti evolves. [unrelated: "to retire" en espanyol = "jubilar", which sounds way more joyous than "lying down"]. Someone else will eventually come and paint over your masterpeice, and then you'll gotta put your hoodie back on and bomb back. (kinda like wikipedia?)

I've never really enjoyed grafitti expositions in art galleries -- it all seems so unnatural -- somethin akin to takin Pigmy voices out the forest and turning it into background musak at Starbucks. In 1981, radical-chic galleries started to market grafitti as the next Big Thing, replanting graf from the streets in a controlled downtown environment to delite the elites.

But artists gotta eat and graf [unlike crime] don't pay. In fact, if you're any good, you'll eventually catch the cops' attention and then you'll end up paying to paint, which brings me to the second reason why graffiti thrives in Granada: the cops don't seem to care. That's an exaggeration of course, because it's definitely still a criminal act and the granadino grafiteros still complain about gettin fined, but the five-oh in Granada seem to have achieved a relatively sane perspective on policing priorities. Fighting/stealing = bad, grafitti/marijuana = less bad.

According to the historians, modern graffiti began in Philadelphia in the early sixties. By the late sixties, it was popular throughout Washington Heights, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The New York Times took notice in July 1971 with a small profile of a graffiti artist named TAKI 183. The modifying clause "modern" is important, because Altamira is hecka old, and some dude named Kilroy has been here for a minute too.

Grafitti can exist without hip-hop, but not the other way around. Breakdancing, turntabling, beatboxing, rapping and graffiti are twined like rope and together they've survived an organized governmental effort to eradicate hip-hop culture. From Reagan's perspective, grafitti was a symbol of urban decay. In fact, it was more than a symptom of society's ills -- graffiti itself was considered a cause and catalyst for deliquency.

The so-called "broken windows theory" -- first proposed in 1982 by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson -- contends that people are more likely to commit crimes in neighborhoods that appear uncared for by residents or unwatched by local authorities. Criminals, according to Kelling, are ''emboldened by the lack of social control."

Convinced that the mere appearance of disorder begets actual disorder, New York City Mayor John Lindsay declared the first war on graffiti in 1972. Three years later, Mayor Abe Beam repainted every single subway car in NYC, which solved his problem for about 3 seconds. Jeff Chang explains, "The MTA’s attempts to whitewash the trains only further intensified the process of stylistic change, because there were many more potential targets, and they’re all clean canvases."

New York Mayor Ed Koch declared victory in the "War on Graffiti" [sans Mission Accomplished banner] in May 1989, when the last graffitied train was removed from service. When running for mayor of New York in 1993, Rudy Giuliani quoted Kelling and Wilson's broken windows theory, arguing that aggressive panhandlers and squeegee men were not nuisances; they were criminals.

Despite criticism form the left that his policies amounted to the criminalization of poverty, overall violent crime in New York was cut in half and the murder rate went down 70 percent during Guiluani's tenure as mayor, though plenty of other explanations [such as legalizing abortion] have been suggested.

Despite the fact that some local smarty-pants from Harvard have argued against the real-world results of the broken windows theory, Boston Mayor Tom Menino was still shaking his fist at the hoodlums in 2006: "Today we are addressing what may sometimes appear to be smaller issues, but for those of us familiar with the 'broken windows' theory and reality, we know that these kinds of community disorder issues are the precursors to the violent crimes that may follow."

"Después de Altamira, todo parece decadente"
Pablo Picasso

Granada grafitti got a Bob Marley problem. Old Robert was so damn talented that every reggae artist in his wake has been forced to live in his shadow (how's that for a mixed metaphor!).

I mean this as no diss to the other artists in Granada, but El Niño de las Pinturas [aka Sex, aka Raul] is so damn mind-blowingly talented that really he's got no one to play with.

He's got a style so unique that he really doesn't need to sign his peices -- there's no mistaking his characteristic Arabesque typography or his trademark crescent bicycle gears. Even frumpy abuelos en Granada appreciate his "vandalism" -- what he's doing is quite literally the opposite of "defacing" public property.

El Niño's art is simply beautiful. His control of color, shade, depth and perspective is just astounding, especially when you consider the time-constraints inherent to grafitti composition. His art certainly deserves to be in a gallery, not because it's radical-chic, but because it's classic. But he idn't some Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Herring pretend-bomber. He's actually out in the streets, finding new rincones to tag. And he's damn prolific, with peices all over Granada, sobre todo the Realejo neighborhood.

IMHO, he's got no superiors in the contemporary art scene, those he's got a few peers: Os Gêmeos, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Carmen Abelleira -- but I'm not biased or anything.

[Full disclosure: El Niño is doing the cover art for Granada Doaba, but it's been delayed because he was hanging a new exhibit. In a gallery. Hrmph]

And we're back . . . where am I?

2009-01-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

Whats the dilly? I just touched grounds down in Philly for a brief lay-over during a long trip back home to California from Granada. I got to my abuela's house at 11:45pm on New Years Eve, with just enough time for our Noche Vieja tradiciones (eating 12 grapes and tossing a bucket a water out the front door).

Leaving the cuna de flamenco, I was met with two bizarre bits of quasi-flamenquito here at home in Hollywood. The first was Antonio Carmona, former member of Ketama and son of flamenco guitar legend Pepe Habichuela, playing electric guitar on the Spanish TV channel piped into my grandma's house. Number #2 was the Gipsy Kings, who I'd damn near forgotten about during my Andalucian tenure. They played a New Year's eve show here in Hollywood, with a well-received review by Reed Johnson in the LA Times, which (god-thank-you) only mentions "flamenco" tangentially and in passing.

I've forgotten what it's like to not be submerged en el cante jondo. Are these the international faces of flamenco? If so, I have a lot of explaining to do. Where does my the story begin?

Mañana.

You Start All Over Again

2008-10-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

Follow your own advice, or else you'll end up like me.

I'm quick to remind others to back-up their data, and yet there I was, caught with my pants down when my MacBook's hard drive fried last week. I still have a terabyte of musical zeros and ones saved on my external, but I lost a full year's worth of as-of-yet unpublished academic research.

In retrospect, I should have followed through with my previous commitment to blog everyday while we recorded the album, but I was frustrated with how un-conclusive my words were at the time. I still wrote everyday, but instead of posting my half-thoughts online, I let them incubate and evolve privately in TextEdit. Then my computer crashed, and now I'm staring at blank page.

"What happens when you lose everything? /
You just start again / You start all over again"

My name is Canyon Cody. In 2007, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to explore the multicultural roots of the "indigenous" music of Andalucía. My project began with a childhood curiosity about my family's path to California, which I retraced backwards from the US to Cuba and then to Spain. Since immigrants (particularly refugees) tend to travel light, our histories are preserved through the collective memory of intangible patrimonies such as language, cuisine and music. Rice and beans, rhymes and beats connected my past to my present and formed the foundation of my identity as a first generation American. When I begin to think of who I am and who 'we' is, I think of my grandfather's wedding ring tapping the 3:2 son clave rhythm against his coffee mug.

I chose Andalucía in particular because of its dynamic history of immigration. As the point of convergence between Europe, Africa and the New World, the Iberian Peninsula has been considered "home" by a diverse range of cultures over the past few thousand years, which for the sake of my project, I've partitioned in three general periods:

First, I studied musicians' role in the "convivencia" of Christian, Jews and Muslims in Al-Andalus between 711 and 1492. Standing on the shoulder of giants, my project was largely based on previous research by Dwight Reynolds, an Ethnomusicology and Religious Studies professor at UCSB who recently finished a sabbatical year in Granada researching this very topic.

Second, I explored Andalusian music(s) during its period of (relative) isolation, between the "reconquista" in 1492 and Spain's incorporation into the EU in 1986. This period begins with both the expulsion of the Moors and the arrival of gitanos (Spanish gypsies), and eventually leads to the development of flamenco and the re-plantation of Arab-Andalusian music in Algeria and Morocco.

Third, I experimented with the (post)-modern fusion of musical cultures, collaborating with the diverse community of immigrant musicians currently living in Granada to record an sample-based hip-hop album that builds on the rich history of multiculturalism in Andalusía.

... then my computer crashed. Take 2!

Day 19 . . . Sunny Marley White

2008-04-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

In the midst of yesterday's Gibson debacle, I logged into Skype and called my little brother Sunny Marley White to wish him a happy 13th birthday. He answered his cell phone and we chatted for a few brief minutes -- he did not inherit his garrulous older brother's chatty phone habits -- then he mumbled, "I'm actually in class right now and the teacher's looking at me kinda funny, so I guess I should go."

Contrary to how I remember it, 7th grade doesn't seem all that stressful to Sunny. He's got a wonderful Southern Californian fluidity -- he just roles from one thing to the next, always with minimal friction. Never flustered, Sunny is blessed with great balance, both physical and emotional.

Despite his vibrant energy for kinetic activity, Sunny also has an old-soul calmness, like a monk's zazen. On my 13th birthday, I took a sleeping bag and hiked into the hills, started a small fire, sat contemplative under the stars by myself for the night. Sunny would never do something so artificial as a self-fabricated rites-of-passage exercise. He doesn't exaggerate, over-compensate or engage with the unnecessary. He aways seems to be present and content where he is, yet he's almost always on move to his next destination. He's parsimonious with his words, but not shy. And despite being too damn cute for words, there's not an ounce of arrogance in his angelic smile. I've never heard him make a joke at someone else's expense, yet he seems completely unbothered when others (mostly me) make fun of him. He just smiles.

13 years ago, our mom Carmen Abelleira (pictured left) woke me up to say her water had broke. Our dad David Robert White drove us 13.3 miles from our house in Troy to the hospital in Moscow, Idaho.

At the time it seemed like the most natural decision in the world, but people are surprised when I tell them I was in the room when Sunny was born. I was 11 years old and in charge of noting the exact time of birth (two seconds before 10:31pm).

Watching my little brother's birth was a beautiful, terrifying, life-changing experience -- the rupture point in my development from a childhood to adulthood.

I was the first person to hold lil sunny after the doctor and my parents. We've been best friends for 13 years, but I've been mostly gone for the last 6, first in Boston and now in Spain. I'd go home in a second if I thought he needed me there, but everyone who knows him repeats the same verdict: he's just a wonderfully happy little kid.

And little he his. Like his brother before him, Sunny is by far the shortest kid in his class. But unlike his sulky big bro, it doesn't seem to bother him. Like everything else, he takes his puniness in stride.

Other than the fact that all the girlies in his class are about a foot taller than him, Sunny has very little to complain about. Not only does he live in the epically beautiful East End of the Ojai Valley, but he's got more stamps on his passport than 007.

When he was 9 years old, Sunny came to visit me at Boston College and lived in the dorm with us for a week. He's twice been to Cuba to visit our family in Calabazar de Sagua and thrice (or more) to Scotland to visit our family in Aberdeen. Last summer, he went to Indonesia for a month with our dad, who was researching sustainable environmental design in Bali as part of his work with the Ojai Center for Regenerative Agriculture.

Sunny unexpectedly found an amazing half-indoor skatepark in Kuta-Bali, where he filmed+edited a skate video with his digital cameral and bootleg editing software [insert pithy Web 2.0 comment about how the times they are a'changing]:

Later that same summer, Sunny worked at as counselor at the Ojai Valley School English-language camp, went to Baha California for the umpteenth time and (oh yeah, I almost forgot) went on tour and visited every West Coast skatepark from Ojai to Portland, Oregon -- ending at Burnside.

Over Christmas vacation this year, Sunny flew out to visit me in Spain. First we explored Barcelona, the contemporary Mecca of skateboarding. Though he'd never been there, Sunny knew where all the skate spots are -- and how to find them -- based on his vicarious life-experience from playing the Tony Hawk video game. He made another compilation video from this trip, with no help from big brother (other than musical consultation):

As if I wasn't already drowning in sibling jealousy, Sunny's also got a natural sense of rhythm (which I do not), though I don't think I've ever caught him dancing in public (which I do daily). It didn't take long for him to get loose on the Akai MPC drum machine in my bedroom:

He's never taken lessons, but he's always shown an innate facility with drums. While in Granada, he had the opportunity to practice with Richard Dudanksi, the drummer from Joe Strummer's (pre-The Clash) band The 101ers.

Today, Gnotes turned to me and asked half-worriedly, "Sunny likes the music we make, right?"

Of course he does (I hope), because that kid's got good taste.

Day 18 . . . John Jackson's Gibson J-45

2008-04-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

Gnotes met John Jackson in 1993 at the Port Townshead Country Blues Festival, where the 70-year-old country blues legend from Virginia was giving workshops in his trademark Piedmont style. Despite the age difference, Gnotes (age 13, still gnown as Sean, and "a better guitarist than I am today") and John became quick friends, jamming together after classes. The next year Mr. Jackson gifted his guitar to Sean -- the same round-shoulder, dreadnought acoustic Gibson J-45 he's playing in the video:

Since then, it's been Sean's guitar, through his high-school bands, his college year-abroad strumming over breakbeats in Florence, and his Boston singer-songwriter collaborations with Ryan Read (below).

In March 2008, Sean and his guitar crossed the Atlantic to record a flamenco/arab hip-hop album here in Granada. The first part of the process involves building the album's rhythmic skeleton using a turntable, an Akai MPC, ProTools and a pair of Rode NT2-A mics. When we're ready, we'll head into a full-studio to re-record the songs with live instrumentation. For now, the home studio set-up is ideal for experimentation, though the process produces a unruly mess of clothes, cords, and instruments:

Mi abuela tried to teach me to keep my room organized, to always put everything in its place, but that's just not how I work. My tempests of creativity devolve into material chaos, until I hit a tipping point that forces me to stop everything and completely clean the studio. Yesterday we hit that point, and then today it was too late.

Oww. It pains me to tell the story, but en breve: Due to lack of space, the guitar was perched overnight on a side-table. I woke up early to record with Castillo, a Granada MC who's renting our studio to record his demo. After grabando his last verse, he opens the window, and then CLANG!!! I turn around and the guitar's lying on the ground across the room. The air pressure change from opening the window somehow pulled the guitar off the table, sending it crashing on its neck, which cracked right at the masthead.

Introduced in 1942 with a list price of $45, the no-frills Gibson J-45 was known as "The Workhorse". Handcrafted in Bozeman (Montana USA), the J-45 is constructed of solid spruce wood for the top and solid mahogany for the neck, back and sides. Since wood was in short supply during World War II, the Gibson J-45 was made with imperfect raw materials and, as a result, was only offered with a sunburst finish that covered flaws in the timber.

John Jackson was born February 25, 1924, in Rappahannock County, Virginia. His father Suttee Jackson was a tenant farmer on what had been a slave plantation prior to the Civil War. Raised in a house peppered with 13 siblings, a mandolin, ukylele, homemade fife and banjo, Jackson started playing his father's $4.98 flat-top guitar when he was four years old.

When he was six, his mother Hattie Roberta Haneya, also a singer, bought a second-hand Victrola from a man who traveled door-to-door in a horse&buggy selling 78rpm records: blues, country, gospel, ragtime, and country hymns.

Later that year, Jackson got his own guitar, a $3.75 mail-order National Steel guitar his sister Mary "Tee" Jackson bought him with money earned "taking in washing". Unfortunately, the instrument suffered a premature dath: “My brother went out with it on Saturday night to play somewhere at a dance and he got into a fight and broke the guitar up and throwed it in the river, and I never did get that guitar back no more."

After his guitar was destroyed, Jackson was forced to learn new instruments, which included lessons from his mother's sister's new husband, an Indian (Native American) musician who played the banjo. Jackson didnt get another guitar again until 1960, when a friend sold him an old Gibson. "I never did make money at playing," Jackson said, "I just done it for my own pleasure, playing for parties and dances, some social gatherings, things like that."

Though he liked playing for free, Jackson had that old-school passion for working hard for his money. He found manual labor profoundly rewarding, and spent years working as a successful grave digger, a job he called his "holy calling". He was adamantly opposed to the common money-saving practice of other gravediggers: four foot trenches. "A man's entitled to his six feet," affirmed Jackson, who personally dug his mother's final resting place.

In 1964, Jackson was playing his Gibson guitar with a friend, the attendant at a Fairfax Amoco gas station, when he caught the attention of someone stopping in for gas. As Jackson tells it: "Hell, I don't know who he was, and he come running around the back of the station, wanting to know what we was playing. I told him, 'Nothing.' And he kept asking me, so I played him Mississippi John Hurt's 'Candy Man.' He asked me where did I learn that, and I said off a 78 record."

The man at the gas station turned out to be folklorist Charles Perdue, who took Jackson the very next night to see Mississippi John Hurt playing at a folk club nearby. Perdue went on to establish Jackson as a professional musician., started with an 11-hour recording session on April 19, 1965 that produced Jackson's debut record Blues And Country Dance Tunes From Virginia (Arhoolie Records) -- which was then followed by more than a dozen more records over the next 30 years.

In 1978, Jackson's son (John Jr.) was killed when accidentally shot by the police . On Labor Day 1980, Jackson performed on the White House lawn for President Carter, an ardent fan of his. In 1986 the National Endowment for the Arts gave John its National Heritage Fellowship, a "living treasure" award, the highest honor the nation offers a traditional artist. Jackson joined Bob Dylan's band on tour during the 90s, and appeared on Dylan's 1995 live album MTV Unplugged.

On the afternoon of January 20, 2002, John Jackson died of kidney failure in his Virginia home. (Obituary)

"An absolute master of the dauntingly intricate Piedmont style of finger picking, John could simultaneously supply a bass pattern (with his thumb), maintain rhythmical accompaniment, and select individual notes to carry the melody--all within a tight harmonic structure" Larry Benicewicz

"The most gentle and good hearted of men, John tends to become embarrassed when paid a compliment. He loves children and talks to them with an unwavering attention and focus that leads them to instantly accept him as a friend who should be taken into their confidence. He remembers names, hugs, friends, and is a careful listener." Imeem biography

Day 17 . . . Elemental Zazen

2008-04-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Elemental Zazen told me today that he planned on never having a guest appearance from another rapper on one of his records. We had 4 guest vocal appearances on Gnotes' 2007 album Rhymes and Beans: Noni Kai, Afro DZ ak, Kabir, and Elemental Zazen. We'd already worked with Afro and Kabir on Gnotes' previous album Inthrumental, and we knew Noni through Afro's affiliation with the Eclectic Collective. We knew of Zazen since back in 2004, when he and Gnotes both released their debut albums, The Adolescent Weapon and Broken Spoke.

The first time Gnotes and Zazen actually started politricking was at Kabir's birthday party in 2006, when Zazen said he was planning on starting a live band for his shows. At the time, Zazen was in re-building mode, trying to get his sophomore album back on track after his house burned down. Gnotes ended up playing guitar in Zazen's band, which also featured Eric Hagland on drums, Todd Thurheimer on bass, and DJ Slipwax. Though Zazen's record(ed) music is breakbeat boombap oldschool hip-hop, his concerts are bloody-nose moshpit bangers, like this one from the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, MA:

The fist time I met Zazen was in March 2007 at the Gnotes/Glue show in Brighton, right near my old Boston College stomping grounds. I was in town for a few weeks to finish-up Rhymes and Beats with Gnotes, who had just made a new beat he wanted to collabo with Zazen. They ended up recording the song ("Nemesis") during a Somerville power outage (apagón), racing to record Zazen's verse before they ran out of phantom power from the Mac's battery.

Between recording "Nemesis" in June and the song's release in October, Zazen was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor which required immediate surgery. After losing most his worldly possessions in the house fire, Zazen was confronting his own imminent death at 24 years old. He survived the surgery and came home with an urgent appreciation of life, and a gnarly dome scar:

After his recovery, Zazen went back on tour with his band and back into the studio with his engineer/producer J.Ferra to finish the album, The Glass Should Be Full, which is being released through Gnawledge Records on May 22, 2008. Gnotes plays guitar and/or bass on 3 of the 11 tracks, as well as producing one of the beats, with the others coming from Kno (from the Cunninlynguists), Maker (from Glue), Joe Beats (from Non-Prophets), Scroll, J.Ferra, Confidence and Elemental Zazen.

Today I missed out on one of my favorite things in life: Zazen went to Framingham and picked up the first 1,000 CDs, which will get sent out to press and radio stations (and given to Mom). With our previous 4 releases, I rolled out to Nimbit with Gnotes and came home with a trunk kinda low with digipacks. But, alas, I'm stuck in Granada . . .

Day 8 . . . Mighty Om

2008-04-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

I met Will walking down Calle Elvira with a bottle of wine in my hands and dreams of pasta in my head. Usually I get tunnelvisioned when I'm hungry, but something caught my ear as I rushing home from the chino: a young guy sitting on the ground playing the keyboard and rapping, real quitelike, almost under his breath. What sparked my double-take was when I realized he wasn't busking, no upturned hat full of coins. He wasn't paying much attention to the passer-byers, so that he didn't notice me stop until I started playing along with him, tap-tap-tapping a Euro coin on mi botella de Ribera del Duero.

Mighty Om - Alphabet Yoga
He was singsonging an alphabet rhyme (ala Gift of Gab), which we re-recorded a few days later at our Damasqueros studio. Me and Will share an affinity for hip-hop wrt jazz, free will wrt sub-atomic physics, and global injustice wrt market economics.

On-stage, Will is the Mighty Om. We did a concert together at the Booga Club in Granada a few weeks back. In the video he's rapping over Dj Doble Gota's beat, sharing the mic with Kaya, an MC from France living in Granada.

As I type, we're cuttin up Antonio Machin . . .

Day 7 . . . El Cajonazo

2008-04-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

After last night's experience, I woke up early and went with JuanMi to finally buy a cajón. He thumped 5 or 6 of them before finding the boom he was looking for, and I walked out looking like a turtle.

It's the ideal power-outage hip-hop instrument. 2 years ago at the Havana Hip-Hop Festival, there was an apagón just before Anonimo Consejo was bout to hop on stage. With no power, our Technics went silent. 100 hip-hop heads and not 1 beatboxer. We just sat around, waiting for the electricity to come back. No one jumped on the piano sitting there in the corner, inútil like the rest of us.

The cajón sounds like a well-tuned cafeteria lunchtable; depending where you whack it, you can get a deep thuddy kick drum, a sharp crackin snare, or a metalic tamborine shiver. I remember seeing DJ Nu-Mark tappin out beats with his fist,n'palm on one of those school desks where the chair is attached, while Cut Chemist wandered/scracthed about with a portable turntable hanging from his neck. What's hip-hop sound like in a post-electric world? Or in communities that don't have access to high-tech music production gear? Or in jail?

Day 3 . . . DJ Doblegota

2008-04-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

Granada's got a strong hip-hop scene, bifurcated between the Fiddy fans and fundamentalist underground heads. Both crowds seem content to lurk around the mid-90s, the backpackers headbobbin to grimy New York boom-bap, while the other half continues to ask me to play "Insane in the Brain", "Gangsta's Paradise", and "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" when I'm DJing up en la 'teca.

Doblegota is of the former, a certified citizen of true-school hip-hop, born in Pamplona, currently residing in Granada. His apt looks just like the typical bedroom producer mess of vinyl and Japanese electronics you'd see in Behind the Beat. We performed with Doble a few weeks back at a concert for International Women's Day -- I'm on the MPC on the right, Doble on the 1200s and K (from Cuatro Esquinas) on the mic rapping the instrumental from my 12" (carried from California) of Immortal Technique's "Industrial Revolution". (ed. note: the beats sounds almost identical to its predecessor "Cake" from Pete Rock's 2001 album Petestrumentals. But the-breaks.com doesn't give the sample for either, and almost nobody has mentioned this on the shminternet. And while we're on the topic of internet poverty, why hasn't anyone typed out the lyrics to Edan + Mr. Lif's "Making Planets"??? "

When he came over today, Sean and I were chopping up a song by Rabih Abou-Khalil, an 'ud player from Beirut who's lived in Germany since leaving Lebanon in 1978 during the Civil War.

I ripped (using WireTap Pro) the audio the above YouTube interview with Abou-Khalil, imported his words into Serato and let Doble do his thing over our beat:

Doble y Rabih - Shifting Rhythms

Day 2 . . . Otman n' Sean

2008-04-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

Since I arrived in Granada last September, I've been recording la'ud with Otman Almerabet and emailing the tracks to Gnotes in Boston so he could prepare his ear for working on the album with Otman when he got here. Fresh off the boat, Gnotes had his first chance to meet Otman today, and despite the language barrier (gnotes todavia no habla español), they share a stringed-instrument naturalness in common. Communicating exclusively through music (and finger-pointing) can get you pretty far. As a lifelong guitar/bass player, I assumed Gnotes would pick up the la-ud, pluck around, quikget his bearings and start rippin. Turns out, despite their similar forms, the la-ud and the guitar are sufficiently different so that he couldn't really play it. Gnotes dice, "The neck was fretless, and I had difficulty staying in key. I think two pairs of the strings were tuned the same, but it was out of tune even when i just played it open."

Turns out, it was out of tune. Gnotes gave it a whack for about 10 minutes before passing it back to Otman, who tuned all 6 strings it, and then played:

(note: this is not actually a recording of that moment; it's from our January concert mentioned below, but its the same song he played today)

Gnotes: "I also naturally tried to play it like a guitar. Afterwards I saw Otman's hamering and pulling techniques, doubling with playing open notes."

Otman's quartet, Dar Ziryab, will be working with us on the album, recording pan-Arab music, with a focus on Al-Andalus between the 8th and 15th centuries. Of course, there's no recordings or even transcripts from this era, so it's hard to be certain that what we're (they're) playing is what they were playing 1,000 years ago (more to come on this issue).

The quikvid from my badcam taken at a Dar Ziryab concert that I tech'd the audio for in January. When setting up the mics I had to ask Yussef Mezgeldi (playing the kanun in te vid), "So.. where's the noise come out from?"

Tomorrow we're meeting up with DobleGota, Gnawledge's resident DJ in Granada, to send Otman's la'ud through Serato and a Technics 1200 Direct Drive Turntable. Part of the idea of the album is to reimagine an alternate history of Andalusian music which incorporates the methodology of hip-hop production.

I probably wouldn't have posted today if it wasn't for Wayne&Wax and his threat to hold me to my promise. Day 3 mañana

Day 1 . . . The Return of the Akai

2008-04-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

I met Otman thru Hide. I also met JuanMi through Hide, but that story is for next week. Otman Almerabet wrote a letter of support for my Fulbright application last year and has tried (patiently) to teach me about the music of Al-Andalus since I got to Granada. Born in Tetouan (Morroco) Otman has been playing the la'ud for 30 years, living in Spain since the 80s.

Like JuanMi, Otman is a builder and a player, guitarista/guitarero and laudista/laudetero, respectively. Otman runs the Dar Ziryab Cultural Center and head the Al-Tarab Ensemble, performing below at the Teatro Manuel de Falla in Granada.

Otman, like all good teachers, gives me books to read and music to listen to. Just before Sean moved out here from Boston, Otman gave me 2 burned CDs for us to study, in order to prepare ourselves for recording with him next week. The mixtapes featured laudistas from across the Arab musical world, recordings ranging from last 80 years.

Sean and I spent the first official day of work on the album listening to the mixes, sampling into the recently-arrived replacement MPC 2000xl (sad story, I'll explain later) and making beats. 6 skeleton beats in a 24hours, though just exersizes in practice, haphazardly cut+layered with Akai taps . . .

more to come... daily gnawledge bloggin for the month of april

On the 38th day of the 1,984th year

2008-02-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

The last heavyweight bare-knuckle boxing championship took place on February 7, 1882 in Mississippi City. Due to the biomechanics of a bare-fisted punch, the danger of fracturing the metacarpals of the hand from the impact of an unprotected punch is not as great as one might expect.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (born February 7, 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile) is a philosopher, director, mime, comic book writer, and psychotherapist.

Though best known for his films, Jodorowsky began as a mime in Marcel Marceau's theatre troupe, co-founded El Panico (an artistic movement centered around terror, humor, and simultaneity), colloborated with Jean Giraud (aka Mœbius) on a series of graphic novels, and regularly conducts free lectures on psychotherapy in Parisian cafes.

His most famous movie, El Topo, an acid Western characterized by bizarre occurrences and maimed/dwarf performers, was released in 1970 with funding from John Lennon, who called it his favorite movie ever.

Jodorowsky then embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel Dune, which was to feature Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Mick Jagger, with Pink Floyd in charge of the soundtrack. Ultimately the film was never completed, in part due to Jodorowky's 14-hour script and Dalí's $100,000 per hour price-tag. It would take almost a decade before David Lynch directed Dune's first film adaptation, though many close to the Jodorowsky project claim that his never-used set designs later turned up in Star Wars.

On February 7, 1962, President Kennedy bans all Cuban imports and exports following Castro's expropriation of large-scale (mostly American-owned) land holdings. The compensation offered (based on 20-year bonds at 4.5% interest for the tax-declared value) was seen as inadequate by the US.

According to former aide Pierre Salinger, Kennedy asked him to purchase thousands of Cuban cigars for Kennedy's future use immediately before the US embargo was to come into effect.

JFK's doodle on White House stationary (left) continues a long tradition of absent-minded presidents.

On February 7, 1964, The Beatles arrive at JFK International Airport to begin their first tour of the United States. Mayhem ensues.

Carmen Abelleira (left) was at the beach in Ventura until she had to rush to North Hollywood, where her first son Canyon Cody (also left) was born on February 7, 1984, the very same day Michael Jackson was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for Thriller when it became the best selling LP of all time, only 11 days after the King of What's Poppin got burned filming a Pepsi commericial.

On his 6th birthday , Canyon was happy to learn that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to give up its monopoly of power. Over the next several weeks, the 15 constituent republics of the USSR held their first competitive elections. Reformers and ethnic nationalists won many of the seats.

Further good news on his 8th birthday: The Maastricht Treaty was signed in the Netherlands, creating the European Union. The treaty was the result of separate negotiations on monetary union and political union, considered the tipping point for European supranationalism. Article 2 affirms: "This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe..."

On February 7, 2007, philospher Terence McKenna's library of rare books and personal notes was destroyed, 7 years after his death, in a fire started in an Quizno's sandwich shop in Monterey, California.

On February 7, 2008 (Chinese New Years) Canyon turned 24 in Granada. Barack Obama gave a speech in New Orleans

Música Egypcia por Al Tarab

2008-01-22T22:33:00.000-08:00

Tonight I engineered a show with Otman Almerabet and his group Al Tarab. Audio underneath each picture.

Fotos y música del concierto del grupo Al Tarab en el 21 de enero, 2008.

Grabado por Canyon Cody, en directo en la Sala Vimaambi en Cuesta de San Gregorio de Granada, España.

Wikiwander #3 - "How vast a puzzle -- almost beyond the hand of man"

2007-12-12T01:26:00.000-08:00

A heuristic is the study of search, the art and science of steering your attention fruitfully when confronted with an unresolved problem. The word heuristic comes from the same Greek root as Eureka, which means "I am in a state of having found it."

The most basic, though usually least efficient, heuristic is the brute-force search, also known as exhaustive search, which involved checking every single point in the search space.

Hill-climbing is a heuristic in which one searches for the optimum combination within a set of variables by changing one at a time until the results cease to improve.

According to this method, once you are no longer able to climb any higher then you've arrived at the top of the hill. When searching for a summit (the optimum), you should continue climbing (changing variables) until you are no longer going up. That's how you know you've reached the peak: any further movement can only bring you back down.

For example, we use hill-climbing to search for the optimal settings of volume, treble, and bass on a boombox. By individually adjusting each knob until you arrive at the point where any further fiddling would only worsen the audio quality, then you've reached the optimal setting.

The Expand To Contract heuristic says that often you can find a solution by adding some new, arbitrary element to the problem. That is, make the problem more complicated, and it will often simplify itself.

Plopping down an arbitrary element increases the number of possible connections. Think of your start point and your end point as little squids with tentacles writhing about, looking to latch onto something. They only have a certain number of tentacles, and there's a small chance they'll ever connect. So put another squid down in between them. Now there are a lot more tentacles flapping about, an infrastructure of wormholes, which leads to a much greater probability of forging a link. This is the essence of brainstorming.

The opposite heuristic approach is Contract to Expand. Problems that appear difficult because of the vastness of possibility are actually hard because of unconscious constraints introduced by the problem solver. Form is liberating. Composition constrained by form, such as a sonnet or Oulipo, is actually much more conducive to creativity than a blank sheet of paper.

The underlying descriptive principle behind Contract To Expand is that only some goals are accessible to you right now. Pick something that you can do right now, and do it right now. It doesn't matter that it's not your ultimate goal and you can't quite see how the step right now will lead to the ultimate goal. Focusing on just one thing will open up new possibilities. A single, decisive success drives a spike into the unknown space

"Heuristics don’t guarantee you’ll find the optimal solution, nor do they generally guarantee a solution at all. But they do a good enough job of solving certain types of problems to be useful. Their strength is that they break the deadlock of indecision and get you into action.

As you take action you begin to explore the solution space, which deepens your understanding of the problem. As you gain knowledge about the problem, you can make course corrections along the way, gradually improving your chances of finding a solution. If you try to solve a problem you don’t initially know how to solve, you’ll often figure out a solution as you go, one you never could have imagined until you started moving." Steve Pavlina

Luz Aire y La Calle

2007-11-20T07:49:00.000-08:00

As part of the XXVIII Festival de Jazz, there's been live music in the streets of Granada every Saturday. The festival's organizers gave Gnawledge permission to record this week's performance, but while we set up in Plaza Nueva, the capricious ensemble rerouted themselves to Plaza Bib-Rambla instead.

Disappointed about a missed opportunity, me and my pair of Rode NT2-A mics caught the attention of a trio of musicians (below) who asked us if we'd be interested in recording their performance.

But Granada overprovides. Not 5 minutes later we met another group of musicians who were also performing in the street that afternoon. Stuck between a sofa and soft place, we decided to leave the didgeridoo and violin behind and record instead with Luzaire, who played a fusion of flamenco, arab, brasilian and afrocuban music.

The mp3s below were recorded live on the street on November 17, 2007.

Luzaire - "Guajirilla Ruborosa" (mp3)

Luzaire - "Mano Franca" (mp3)

The video has no sound, so play it with the audio clip below.

Luzaire - "Breve y Sincero" (mp3)

Luzaire - "Muy Triste El Mar" (mp3)

Luzaire - "Conventos Vacios" (mp3)

Again, the video has no sound, but check my brief appearance at the very end.

Luzaire - "La Palmera Airosa" (mp3)

Luzaire - "Mírame Madre" (mp3)

que bien rollo!: A sunny Saturday afternoon in the public domain, listening to borderfree music by the Rio Darro.

rightclik + download all 11 mp3s (zip = 53mb)
Also, check out Una Vuelta en Granada for more pictures.

Aprendizaje vicario de Graná

2007-10-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

Granada is not a shminternet town.

Physical posters pegados por paredes fill the streets with announcements of upcoming bullfights, single rooms for rent, flamenco classes, free lectures, anti-globalization protests, and weekly Erasmus parties...

The neverending feud between posterizers and basureros means clips get ganked down every night and re-stuckup every day. A colorful menagerie of taped-down poster corners are all that remains of last week's concerts. The ebb and flow of anuncios keeps the town up-to-date without descending into omni-advertisement.

If you wanna know what's going down around town, there's no Yelp to help you out. Instead, just head outside and open your eyes, because the writing's on the wall.

Nevertheless, here's a quick list of online guides to help familiarize yourself with our fare Verona from afar: Wikipedia is always a good place to start, with more details at Andalucia.com and AboutGranada.com. For restaurant reviews, check Salir.com. For a round-up of tapas bars, head to Calle Elvira

-----

Or, if you're more of a visual learner, check out the Granada webcam, beautiful panoramic shots from the Alhambra, a montage of Granada covered in snow, and tourist helicopterganda (see below)

Una Vuelta en Granada

2007-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Images and sounds recorded during a walk in Granada while reading Audio Culture.

Words borrowed, respectively, from Edgard Varese, John Cage, Morton Feldman, R. Murray Schafer, Simon Reynolds, Henry Cowell, Jacques Attali, Luis Russolo, and Mark Slouka.

Wikiwander #2 : "I felt a strange calmness"

2007-05-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is a psychology professor noted for his work in the study of happiness, creativity, subjective well-being, and fun. In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow—a Zen-like state of total oneness with the activity at hand and the situation.

Csikszentmihalyi described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. The flow state also implies a kind of focused attention, and indeed, it has been noted that mindfulness meditation, yoga, and martial arts seem to improve a person's capacity for flow.

In short; flow could be described as a state where attention, motivation, and the situation meet, resulting in a kind of productive harmony or feedback.

-----

Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low level details. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice.

Examples of automaticity are common activities such as walking, speaking, bicycle riding, assembly-line work, and driving a car. After an activity is sufficiently practiced it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automaticised activity (for example holding a conversation or planning a speech while driving a car). Automaticity refers to knowing how to do something so well that you don't have to think about it while doing it.

-----

Habituation is an example of non-associative learning in which there is a progressive diminution of behavioral response probability with repetition of a stimulus.

Artwork by Karen Ruenitz

Habituation need not be conscious - for example, a short time after we get dressed, the stimulus clothes creates disappears from our nervous systems and we become unaware of it. In this way, habituation is used to ignore any continual stimulus, presumably because changes in stimulus level are normally far more important than absolute levels of stimulation.

Indeed, without habituation we would be unable to distinguish meaningful information from the background, unchanging information.

-----

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information. A majority of the test subjects information presented in banners. When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks, while either consciously or unconsciously ignoring large colourful or animated banners and other graphics.

-----

Fluxus is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1950s. Marcel Duchamp and Allan Kaprow (who is credited as the creator of the first "happenings") were also influential to Fluxus.

Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.

Fluxus art was often presented in "events", which Fluxus member George Brecht defined as "the smallest unit of a situation." The events consisted of a minimal instruction, opening the events to accidents and other unintended effects.] Also contributing to the randomness of events was the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Duchamp's notion of the viewer completing the art work. The Event performances sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to frustrate the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art. The often playful style of Fluxus artists led to their being considered by some little more than a group of pranksters in their early years.

-----

In the field of human-computer interaction, a Wizard of Oz experiment is a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated by an unseen human being.

As a result of tricking participants into thinking that they needed to generate language simple enough that a computer could actually understood, the variety and complexity of the lexical structures gathered was greatly reduced and simple keyword matching algorithms could be developed to analyze the data collected.

Twelve Months

2007-05-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

I graduated college 365 days ago. What have I learned?

May: Vinyl is heavy and expensive to ship across the country, but worth it.
June: When you bet big and fail, maybe its time to leave the country.

July: The closer you get to center of Jamaica, the more you believe in ghosts.
August: Cubans have better taste in hip-hop than Americans.

September: All rhythm rivers lead to Granada.
October: Ramadan isn't so hard if you just go through the motions. Honest to God is tho.

November: Home feels like itself.
December: Winter in California is not a means, but an end.

January: Read, read, read, but not much think.
February 7th: 23 years old and content.

March: On the Road again. Multicity art&music I'm pretty good at.
April: Sometimes Sony and UCLA say no, but the U.S. Senate says yes.

May: Don't fall asleep at the wheel.

Wikiwander #1 : "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme"

2007-05-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Alltagsgeschichte is a form of microhistory that was particularly prevalent amongst German historians during the 1980s. The name comes from German, where Alltag means everyday life; it can thus be roughly translated as everyday-history. In this sense, alltagsgeschichte can be considered part of the wider Marxian historical school of 'history from below'.

The purpose of alltagsgeschichte is to find and prove the links between the down-to-earth, everyday, basic experiences of ordinary people in a society, and the broad social and political changes which occur in that society. Because this is such a massively broad endeavour to undertake, it can only feasibly be practised on the most minute of scales.

----

Arnold Toynbee was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline.

He presented history in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."

----

Ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. The depiction of the serpent is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way, as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens.

In Timaeus, Plato describes a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe — an immortal, perfectly constructed animal: "The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything."

------

The basic premise of Eternal Return is that the universe is limited in extent and contains a finite amount of matter, while time is viewed as being infinite. The universe has no starting or ending state, while the matter comprising it is constantly changing its state. The number of possible changes is finite, and so sooner or later the same state will recur.

Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing," and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht") imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. What if, he asks, a demon were to confront you at your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'" Nietzsche, The Gay Science

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make" Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

-------

An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly, either due to the loop having no terminating condition or having one that can never be met. Looping is repeating a set of instructions until a specific condition is met. An infinite loop occurs when the condition will never be met, due to some inherent characteristic of the loop. A pseudo-infinite loop is a loop that appears infinite but is really just a very long loop.

An Alderson loop is a special version of an infinite loop where there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in the current implementation of the code. The loop includes a hidden exit which is inaccessible in the code except to the creator of the loop.

2007-01-15T09:35:00.000-08:00

like jimmy castor, the blog has just begun.

The purpose of my posts will be to share my education. By this, I do not mean teaching - this is certainly not about educating other people, but simply sharing the syllabus of my self-improvement. After 16 years of traditional schooling, I'm now ready to take responsibility for my own, which means conflating the teacher/student binary: I and I are now teacher and student.

But who would want such an Ignorant Schoolmaster, you ask?

Jacques Rancière's lessons on intellectual emancipation were inspired by the revolutionary teaching theories of Joseph Jacoto, a professor who promoted autodidactism in the early 19th century, arguing that uneducated peasants could learn independently without a teacher to explain things. He even proved that illiterate parents could teach subjects to their children that they themselves did not know, an idea that contradicts to the general assumption of intellectual superiority of teacher over student. According to the logic of traditional pedagogy, the learned schoolmaster must transfer his knowledge to the ignorant pupil through explanation. In contrast, Rancière argues that the Ignorant Schoolmaster can teach without explaining anything, simply by empowering his students to teach themselves.

I apologize for not recognizing the irony of me explaining this, but since I am my only student, consider this an overheard internal classroom discussion.

This blog will feature brief dense summaries and anaylses of whatever I'm currently exploring - my goal is condensation without condescension. Though I don't yet consider myself a superduper good writer guy, I think I have a keen sense for the essential. As such, I'm better with a knife than a pen. Soon to be 23 years old, my current place within the student/scholar spectrum is somewhere between writing my last book report and starting my first book. Consider this the annotated bibliography of my transiton.

~ further reading on The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière, and Joseph Jacoto, plus a Jimmy Castor video.