Monday, March 07, 2011

Blog #8

I'm not sure how much I like this book; I think I will need to spend more time with it before I truly appreciate it.

Rhythmic Cinema
"Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell it as a story" (80).
"Whenever you look at an image or listen to a sound, there's a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order" (81).

I feel these two quotes are pretty straight forward, it's often easier to grasp a concept when told a story, our mind creates links between images rather than grasping at cold, hard facts. Every image we see and sound we hear will create links to other images and sounds until we can make sense of what we see and hear, it's an impressive process our brain goes through.


Rhythmic Space
"Speaking in code, we live in a world so utterly infused with digitality that it makes even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web" (89).
"Admitting that we do not know and maintaining the attitude that we do not know the direction necessarily to go, permit the possibility of alteration, of thinking, of new contributions and new discoveries for the problem of developing a way to do what we want ultimately, even when we do not know what we want" (92).

The first quote brings a digital aspect to the concepts from "Rhythmic Cinema". Each and every element that is added or taken away from the whole will cause something to happen to the rest of the Internet. The second quote should be taken into account by a lot of people, not many are willing to admit when they don't know something; I believe Miller was on to something when he wrote this quote, that our ability to learn is what leads to creativity and makes us who we are. If we all knew everything, there would be no new creations.


Errata Erratum
"The click of a mouse, the roll of a pair of dice - they both have a kind of intentionality behind them" (93).
"Whatever mix you make of it, it can only be a guess - you have to make your own version, that's kind of the point" (93).
"We're left with the ability to make our own interpretation of a given framework, and are invited to run with it as a kind of game 'system'" (97).

I wasn't quite sure what to do with this section, but Miller's quote about the "intentionality" behind a click or a roll caught my attention; it definitely important, each action has a reaction. The second and third quotes discuss our individual abilities to make our own mixes and interpret things our own way, we take elements from all the things that have impacted us and bring them together into a whole new product.


The Future is Here
"I was presented with something that contemporary America seems to have in abundance, and that other countries are struggling to catch up with - a trend I like to call 'demographic nostalgia'" (104).
"That's the joy of being able to see how this stuff is unfolding in a real way across the globe. It's almost exactly a social approximation of the way web culture collapses distinctions between geography and expression, and it's almost as if the main issues of the day are all about how people are adjusting to the peculiarity of being in a simultaneous yet unevenly distributed world" (105).

I wrote down the first quote because I'd like someone to define "demographic nostalgia" for me. In a few of my classes we've discussed the way the web and most digitization are slowly taking down barriers both in social aspects but also in our geography, the virtual world has NO geographical frontiers, or they are not well defined and we are definitely "adjusting to the peculiarity".


The Prostitute
"[The] 'Taylorization' of urban pattern recognition: that sense of wandering through an indeterminate maze of intentionality is what makes up the creative act - selection and detection, morphology of structure" (108).
"Messages need to be delivered, codes need to be interpreted, and information, always, is hungry for new routes to move through" (112).
"Transactional realism: It's an old sampling of tone form again and again - sampling as a mode of creating, a way of dealing with overflow, of internalizing the machinery of collective culture" (113).
"You can never play a record the same way for the same crowd. That's why remixes happen. Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive" (113).

I picked out the first and third quotes mainly for the "definitions", I thought they would be important for me to remember. The delivery of messages and the interpretation of codes reminded me of previous readings and of the concepts from previous sections. The fourth quote made me smile, it's true that playing a song twice for the same crowd is difficult, it's like watching a movie twice in theater, you only do so if you've really enjoyed it.

www.whosampled.com
I was listening to David Bowie while writing this so I decided to look him up on www.whosampled.com to see who sampled his songs and who he sampled. I was surprised that there was two categories, one for his sampling as an artist (7 songs) and one as a producer (1 song). Clicking around, I found that his song "Heroes" was sampled in Moulin Rouge's "Elephant Love Medley" and then I remembered that this song was a mix of many songs. The list is in fact extensive:

All You Need Is Love by The Beatles (1967)
Your Song by Elton John (1970)
Don't Leave Me This Way by Harold Melving & the Blue Notes (1975)
Silly Love Songs by Wings (1976)
I Was Made for Loving You by Kiss (1979)
Up Where We Bong by Joe Cocked and Jennifer Warnes (1982)
One More Night by Phil Collins (1984)
Pride (In the Name of Love) by U2 (1984)
I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston (1992)

This mix of ten songs is a pretty good representation of some of Miller's concepts; for one it definitely required personal interpretation of all these songs to be able to pick out specific passages to bring back together into a complete unit. As I was going through whosampled I was thinking about the quote where Miller wrote "it's an old sampling of tone form again and again - sampling as a mode of creating, a way of dealing with overflow, of internalizing the machinery of collective culture" (113).

5 comments:

  1. I have to agree with you on not liking this book. It was a hard read. Anyway, it is interesting to see that you pulled out quotes that were more personally related. I had problems finding things to relate to in this book (probably because I didn't understand what he was trying to say). I found that sampling site kinda fascinating and frustrating at the same time, just because I am pretty sure that there are many, many more songs that are sampled and they aren't listed. After looking at some songs that sampled, it just made the idea of copyright issues seem really stupid, especially when I could barely pull out what piece was sampled even though they gave me the time it occured at.

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  2. I like the idea of definitions in the last section. Your quotes give some hard descriptions, something this book is very sparse on. I suppose in the epilogue summation is important, but why did Miller wait so long for clarification? Furthermore, is this the correct interpretation? I am not certain, from the previous pages it seems that Miller is describing how there are no distinct rules or definitions. I suppose I have trouble understanding which is which. If anything, I could guess it is both. We need original content or material to remix, but we need remixes to find original content.

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  3. Great post, and interesting song choice. I like the quote you connect it back to and wish you had just thrown out a few more sentences that really directly connected your song genealogy with the reading.

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  4. "Internalizing the machinery of collective culture" offers an interesting insight into what sampling truly is. The fact that artists are attributing each other so publicly, so reverently, and so MUCH lately through sampling really shows how collective music really is. It's not made in isolation, it most certainly operates on a public scale where all things are influential in its creation. Sampling is a much more direct and explicit artifact of this musical influence.

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  5. Moulin Rouge is one of my all time favorite movies and I am glad you used Elephant Love Medley as your example. When I first saw this movie I didn't know what a remix was but i was completely captivated by the songs. The beatles are one of my all time favorite bands and the fact that their song "all you need is love" was mixed with a whitney Houston song gave it so much more meaning and emotion for me. This remix also opened my ears to new songs I had never hear before like "your song" which is now one of my favorites

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