Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about calendaring. I lead a very exciting life, let me tell you. Anyway, I’ve recently moved my calendaring from iCal to Google Calendar because I like being able to edit my calendar from the office (or the road), in addition to working on it from my home computer. Anyway, all this work about calendaring (I’ve also set it up so that people can see when I’m busy) culminated in my discovery of this passage in Jean Baudrillard’s Fragments (which is excellent (and cheap)):

Since I stopped having one, I’ve become very curious about other people’s daily schedules. Whatever can they be working at from the moment they wake up? How can they bear having something to do from right after breakfast? How can they spin round all day long like fluid in a washbasin, until they reach the orifice of sleep? They tap away at the touch screens of their lives, on which is perpetually displayed a hysterical daily round, and, from time to time, the ecstatic daily round of empty time (13)

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I realize that people reading my previous post (about music) will, perhaps, find it odd. I know that I don’t listen to “mainstream” music, by any stretch of the imagination, but I find my independent music listening has become a lot safer, of late. I’ve really been digging a lot more indie rock/pop and a lot of the post-rock, psych, noise, and metal that used to be my meta-indie cred. Anyway, I like making a conscious effort to getting back to more outsider stuff.

It’s similar to the realization I came to that my cooking and eating habits were getting to safe. I made a promise, to myself, to eat more organ meats and stuff like that. My mom thought I was insane: “you’re already one of the most adventurous eaters I know.” Same with my music taste, but I feel like i could go so much further, I guess.

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I’m faced with a fork in the metaphoric road, today. Despite the fact that I was concerned with being “so busy” this semester, I find I have a lot more unstructured time this semester than, really, ever before. I think part of it is how much more reading I’ve been getting done since Shawna and I have started combining studying and hanging out. The problem, though, is that I’m done with my reading for the week and it’s Monday morning (this isn’t entirely true; I’ve not actually yet read Structures of Scientific Revolutions, but this will be reading number four (number two for this year!)). I was reading Fred’s book on Adorno (Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (a book so good they titled it thrice!)), but when he got into a detailed analysis of Kant’s and Hegel’s competing influence on Adorno’s understanding of the thing, I got run over by Teutonic philosophy. I’m picking at Jean Baudrillard’s Fragments, as well, but it’s a book that can, really, only be picked at (not being composed of an argument and all). Anyway, as I see it, I can either do my taxes or start reading The Dialectic of Enlightenment (based on my comments last week on Adorno and something Fred had to say about “The Culture Industry,” I’‘m thinking that I need to give that book another chance). Both of these smell specifically un-fun. While I suppose I could just laze about the house all day, watching movies and eating bonbons, I feel sort of bad. Everyone else I know is insanely busy and pressured and stuff. All I really have to do today is walk down to the mailbox and mail this month’s bills (I also have to go teach at 2:30, but I have a feeling that I’m really, really going to forget to do this). Anyway, I think I’m going to go wander around the house and wait for inspiration. Having nothing to do is so much work, damn!

Image Credit: Divergence by wauter de tuinkabouter

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The newest edition of Resonant Frequency over at Pitchfork is a really interesting read. Not only does it respond to a Langdon Winner essay (who was, as you may recall, the star of my last posting), but it mirrors something I’ve been concerned with lately. I’ve noticed that since I’ve graduated from Gatech, I’ve not been as adventurous in my music listening as I used to be. I remember recently listening to a recent Pruient release and finding that it gave me a headache (which has always been the case with Pruient, but I used to, at least, give them a chance). I’ve been avoiding Wolf Eyes, Sunburned Hand of Man, and anything labeled “psych” recently. I think part of the reason is that music is no longer a project for me, to borrow the terms from the PFM column. Given the fact that I spend so much time in deep analysis of texts, films, and other social phenomenon, I can’t dedicate as much time to listening to complex music, I think. Rather, I want music to be a space of relaxation, something I can do to unwind. That said, I decided to turn off the Junior Boys’ album, upon reading that column, and spend some more time with the record that was probably my favorite of last year: Nachtmystium’s Instinct:Decay. While this isn’t as challenging as some of the stuff I used to spend considerable time with as an undergraduate, it’s nice to listen to music that is a little more difficult to summarize, explain, or love.

At the same time, I totally get Mark Richardson’s point about records and how they grow your ability to hear music. I put on Fizheuer Zieheuer yesterday while Shawna and I were studying. Despite the rather boring nature of the track (it’s more or less polka-house for forty minutes), something about it had appealed to me. When it came on after Philip Glass’s Solo Piano, I think things clicked. Ricardo Villalobos’s track has more in common with John Adam’s “The Chairman Dances” than it does with dance music. I’m getting this record, now, I think. I’m also interested to get back into some of the rather difficult German tech house I was listening to earlier in the year, in light of how I now “get” it’s relationship to the minimalist classical tradition.

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I just finished Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor. By finished, I mean: “I skimmed the last three chapters to see if he had anything interesting to say.” While the first two chapters were pretty groovy, especially his treatment of Wittgenstein (which isn’t quite as groovy a discussion of technology as Bruno Latour’s definition of technology as a “swerve”), Winner soon fell into the common trap of people doing dialectically inflected social philosophy that I like to refer to as “empty hand-wringing.” This is the same problem I have with Adorno and Horkheimer’s (rather classic) essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In it Adorno (sort of the quintessential cranky old man), spends quite a few pages discussing why movies and jazz are destroying society. While I might be inclined to agree, so what? Sure, it was pretty amazing in the 1930s for Marxists to start worrying about culture as a battleground of class warfare, but why are we still reading it today? I would suggest the fact that we are still reading it today is why I have such a problem with Winner’s book.

Rather than offer any sort of program, Adorno and Horkheimer author an essay that basically lambastes the culture industry as dirty and dangerous for the entirety of the piece. While that’s all well and good, they never get around to any kind of suggestion as to what might be done. Is it enough to not go to the movies? Or listen to jazz? As Winner smartly points out in The Whale and the Reactor:

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I floated in the REST Lab sensory deprivation tank yesterday. It was a truly amazing experience and I consider myself to be very lucky to have been able to take part. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tank (or who haven’t seen Altered States), a sensory deprivation tank is a 7 foot by 4 foot enclosed capsule that is full of water that has been saturated with epsom salt. Basically, you float on top of the water in total darkness, while the environment is kept at a very humid 98 degrees. Due to the fact that your ears usually sink below the water, all you can hear is your heart beating. The womb-like nature of the tank is very relaxing; however, what’s more exciting are the radically altered perceptions of space and the visual hallucinations.

Most of the time in the tank, I was just relaxing and enjoying the total quiet and comfort of being quasi-weightless (I’ve since read that drinking coffee before a tank float can mess up your ability to have more far-out experiences, so I’ll try that next time). I didn’t really start to relax until the end of the float, and that’s when things got really cool. Due to it being completely dark, you lose track of your surroundings but in really unusual ways. Despite “knowing” that I was in a 7 by 4 chamber, the tank felt at least three to four times that size (sometimes, it felt rather infinite). At one point, I decided to test this, so I put my feet on one wall of the tank and my hands on the opposite. Rather than reaching the conclusion that “ah ha! the tank is shorter than my body,” I started to experience my body elongating and stretching (in a pleasantly weird way) to meet what my brain was telling me must have been the dimensions of the tank.

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And the torrent of verbiage continues …

My father once said that plumbing is the bane of man’s existence. I think he’s probably correct in his assumption. In addition to all the other joys in my life right now, I came home on Sunday night to discover that our toilet is running. I don’t know how long this has been going on, as I never got a chance to ask (due to … other things). Soon enough, I found myself up to my elbows in toilet scum and shouting into a cellular telephone and trying to diagnose what was wrong with our errant crapper. As I had feared, the flapper valve that seals the tank has corroded. I thought I had time to fix this, before it gave out, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Also, while fixing these problems, I discover that the water line to the tank can’t be turned off, as sealing the shut-off valve doesn’t stop the water. Cute. Anyway, I called maintenance and, while I feel I’ve failed in my masculine duty, I hope to have a working toilet.

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I haven’t set and listened to a record, without other distractions, in a long time. Tonight, I set down and pulled out a copy of Solo Piano, Philip Glass’s most intimate and striking recording. It’s just the composer, at a keyboard, working through some of his compositions. The opening piece, a five part suite, is entitled “Metamorphosis” and has brought me back from the edge a number of times. It didn’t disappoint, once again.

While all of Glass’s music can be thought of as “cinematic” (a term that post-rock has largely castrated), “Metamorphosis” is, perhaps, the most imagistic and evocative of his body of composition. The repeating piano phrases evoke a sense of mystery, magic, and melancholy—all things tied up with change, I think. I’ve been more aware of the power of this piece ever sense it was used as the score to “Valley of Darkness,” probably the best episode of Battlestar Galactica to date. Once again, this music has been able to help me see through a possibly painful situation and glimpse the wonder that surrounds us all.

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There were bats in my office today! Bats! The rumors are true!

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I may have, in the past, told you that I have cosmic luck. When things are good, I’m unstoppable. Of course, the price is that when things are bad, they tend to compound quickly. Today, I woke up after four hours of sleep or so and got ready to drive to Tennessee to visit my grandparents, as a first leg to the trip to State College, tomorrow. Well, as we are getting lunch ready, my dad says “you know you have a flat tire?” Shit. He takes my car to get it fixed, while I finish up Atlanta business. The people at the tire store can’t find anything wrong, suggesting that the people at Walmart may have bilked me when it comes to doing all the work I paid them to do. Nonetheless, the tire gets inflated and I get on the road about an hour late.

It takes about four hours to get to Johnson City from Atlanta. Keeping this in mind, about hour three I think “I can’t wait to wear my new jacket out.” Then I remember: my jacket is in my closet, along with all of my other clothes and my two winter coats. I call my parents and they agree to meet me in Clayton, GA to exchange clothes. It’s about 3 hours round trip from where I am at this point, so I’m off.

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