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VCU continues its Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age lecture series, kicking off the spring schedule on February 6th with a Roundtable discussion on blogging in the arts and humanities. Guest bloggers include Charles Bernstein, founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY—Buffalo, Tyler Green, editor and writer for the Modern Art Notes blog, and Dan Cohen, Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Three men, zero women, by the way, a fact that would be of interest to Kathryn Hayles, author of My Mother was a Computer and Hillis Professor of Literature and Media Arts at UCLA. She will talk on Gender in Cyberspace on February 26th. On April 11, the lecture series ends with a collaboratively edited bang flourish whimper “conversation” with Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia.

I received this message on my voicemail at work. At first, I thought it was a “rabbithole” into a new ARG, but then I realized it was just a mentally unstable person calling my toll-free number to exorcise a few demons before an afternoon nap. Have a listen:
http://richardsebastian.com/blog/audio/5663.mp3

In this era of DIY, participatory media, I encourage everyone out there within earshot to submit a video to Crying, While Eating. I know I plan to.

What I Am Eating
Gravy

Dancer Moses Pendleton made a big impression on me when I was 13 or 14 years old. Not as a dancer, but as an eccentric personality and avante-garde artist. After watching a PBS documentary called Dance in America in which Moses was featured, I started carrying around a cheap tape recorder in my pocket and recording every minute of my day, like Moses did in the film. In the documentary, Moses, whose elongated features reminded me of an exaggerated Mick Fleetwood, had an an enormous wooden chest in his NY apartment overflowing with tapes of his daily recordings. The best thing about those tapes, though, and what made me want to imitate him, was that he threw them into the chest without ever listening to them. In fact, he never listened to them. For some reason, I thought that was brilliant. So I tried it too, but quickly came to realize I wasn’t as committed to the idea as he was. And besides, I was sending all of my paper route money to TDK.
Last night, Moses’s dance company Momix was at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for a performance called The Lunar Sea. This performance clearly demonstrated that Moses is as much an artist, or in his words, an illusionist, as a dancer. The performance was about an hour and half long, without a break, and took place behind a large scrim at the front of the stage that displayed close-up images of astral objects and natural landscapes. The dancers moved behind the scrim, their bodies transformed by black-lights and reflective costumes into organic shapes that seemed to float on air, like undersea creatures.

From a review by The Stage:

Dancers morph into one another, their foreheads pressed together, bodies rippling in clever physical illusion to become ghosts flitting through the night, ethereal mermaids swimming across the dark stage, ice skating planets, glowing, shunting, whirling and spinning mid-air.

The brilliance of the company can be seen in that they do not only rely on the spectacle created by costumes and props but by the shapes that can be created by the body and that powerful tool - the imagination. Give them a shower curtain and an umbrella and you get jellyfish. Give them a pair of stripy Camden market tights and you get a carnivorous spider or two.

The music was as ambient and ethereal as the dancers’ movements, creating an otherworldly, underwater atmosphere.

Still, for me, the overall performace came off as a bit gimmicky. I enjoyed its visual cleverness and imagination, but after the initial and quite pleasing opening performance, the visual tricks got a bit old, and I yearned for a respite from the floaty, eerie, Windham Hill world on stage. And besides, the images dancing across the scrim often seemed too neutral and predictable, and I wondered if they were actually just big Windows Vista screensavers.

I also couldn’t help comparing this performance to the BattleWorks performance we saw at Modlin last fall, but perhaps this is unfair. The two performances had quite different goals and used radically different techniques. Still, I suppose I was in the mood for something more physical and visceral, like Robert Battle’s pieces, not the hypnotic, aquatic mood piece of The Lunar Sea.

This should be a gen-u-wine hoot:

Guest artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude will speak on Wednesday, Jan. 31, at 6:30 p.m. at the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts as part of the VCU School of the Arts’ Windmueller Arts Lecture Series. Christo and Jeanne-Claude — widely acclaimed for transforming monumental works of art using fabric — will discuss their current work in progress, “Over the River: Project for Arkansas River, Colorado.” This event is free and open to the public.

Afterward, Christo and Jean Claude are going to wrap the decrepit and crumbling Franklin Street Gym (where I work) in swaths of Reynold’s aluminum foil (sponsored by Alcoa). Guest illusionist David Copperfield will make the building completely disappear–for good–during his VCU campus appearance in February.

Although I am an avid political blog reader, I still like to watch the evening news, mostly to see how the day’s events have been watered-down and made palatable for the American public, but also out of habit. It is a creature comfort of sorts, similar to my extreme fondness for Law & Order. I know I must be one of only a handful of viewers under 40 (oops, I mean under 41) watching the news because of the commercials –ad after ad for stool softeners, Cialis, investment portfolios, and diamond jewelry RLS. They save the iPod and Yaris commercials for The Colbert Report, I guess.

So midway through the news tonight, while I was in the other room during a commercial break, I think I hear a Buzzcocks’ song playing on the TV. Could it be? It sounds unmistakably like Everybody’s Happy Nowadays. Not a cover of the song, but the ACTUAL song. Elaine heard it too, and we both slowly walked back into the living room, incredulous, wondering exactly what product was being advertised. Since I can no longer hear the James Brown song “I Feel Good” without thinking of constipation, I hoped to God this song wasn’t being used to peddle Gas-X or Summer’s Eve or Polydent. Nope, not quite–but close:

Now approaching 50 itself, AARP is heading off a midlife crisis with a new TV ad that celebrates the aging process to the strains of the Buzzcocks’ classic punk song “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays.”

The image overhaul, aimed in part at future AARPers now in their 30s and 40s, is part of a long-running effort to reposition the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons (it has gone by just AARP since 1999) as one devoted to vigorous, working people who are 50-and-up.

So, I guess I am being marketed to during the evening news: by the AARP. Holy mother. What’s next? Pavement’s Range Life being used to sell homeowner’s insurance (...if I could settle down, then I would settle down), or The Clash’s London Calling for British Air?

Like other recent pop culture phenomena–Britney Spears, Third World adoptions, botox, Donald Trump– Second Life seems to be charting a similar trajectory of intense, overly positive cultural saturation and acceptance, closely followed by cultural exhaustion and criticism. It took a little longer with Britney and The Donald, of course, but in the end, all have followed the same sad arc. Not that SL is anywhere near as well-known as Britney or The Donald (and SL still has yet to generate a number one hit or TV show), but you could hardly tell that from the breathless nature of the SL press. Numerous articles in the past 6 months have uncritically heralded SL as the Next Big Thing, which has doubled, even tripled the interest in SL. But now, after being caught sliding out of its virtual limo without any panties on, SL is experiencing a backlash. As expected, many in the press have turned on SL, talking about the dangers of SL, the rampant, unpixelated sex, those creepy Furries, the hype, the craven quest for money and digital genitalia. Both the early acceptance of SL, and the current criticism, in the end, are unjustified, as it is all based upon hype and buzz and superficilaity. Like the current US political system, it is hard to find moderate, rational voices.

Still, in my opinion, the excitement over SL, at least it’s social and educational potential, is well-founded. Not that there is much hard evidence yet supporting that statement. But SL clearly demonstrates a new way of interacting and learning. It is exciting, and there are tons of SL research studies on SL about to happen. Including, possibly, my own.
But the jury is still out on exactly how SL can best be used as an effective educational platform. What can you do better there than in real life (RL), or using other, less complex tools? I admit finding SL a bit overwhelming. To get to a rudimentary level of basic functionality in SL you are required to dedicate a considerable amount of time and effort in-world. And truthfully, while I see so much educational potential in SL, I am not quite sure how to get from the idea stage to something I, and those in my field, can use. It is exciting to be able to ask those questions, and have the opportunity to explore what I foresee as the future of education–realistically-rendered, virtual collaboration spaces, open to anyone and everyone, including Furries, The Donald, Britney, and those with multi-colored genitalia.

As anyone who has lived in this city for any length of time knows, Richmond has its gaze fixed longingly toward the past. Back toward the ante-bellum South, the Civil War, to a long-gone era where the city was at the height of its powers and influence. For decades, city leaders and a complacent Richmond public have figured that the only way to recapture the faded glory of yesteryear is to try to keep the past alive instead of making an effort to reorient the city’s future toward new ideas and a new vision.

So I was surprised to see two “futurists” listed as speakers at last night’s Richmond Forum event. The first was Alvin Toffler, author of the influential book Future Shock. Appearing beside him was New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of two slim but popular volumes, The Tipping Point and Blink.

The speakers that the Richmond Forum usually attracts rarely capture my interest. In the past they have skewed toward the conservative side, with more political figures and entertainers than academics or thinkers, and more males than females. And they have tended to be older, more mainstream speakers–John Glenn, Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, etc. You get the picture. So, I was especially interested to see Malcolm Gladwell, with his shock of reddish kinky hair, appearing before the somewhat geriatric and brightly bow-tied Richmond establishment. When I called about buying tickets, though, I found they were priced to keep the slackers, punks, and low-culture types like me out of the conversation. Thankfully, a friend of my dear, sweet mama had season tickets and couldn’t make it, and offered the tickets to us.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves despite some typical Richmond touches that prevented us from being too impressed. For example, the stage set was ludicrous. The stage was dominated by 5 towering fiberglass, faux-finished Corinthian columns , each surrounded by potted ferns. The columns had the effect of dwarfing the speakers, making them look Hobbit-sized. Before the presentation, a slide of the American flag was displayed, and we all stood to sing the National Anthem (Odd that I find that act to be divisive and partisan). I figured it was just something the old-schoolers in the audience were accustomed to–like saying grace before dinner, opening a door for a lady, and taking off one’s hat indoors.

Toffler talked about his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, highlighting an emerging new economic model that measures not only traditional markets, but also a growing non-money economy created (by among other things) the open-source movement and user-generated products, all made possible by Web 2.0 and the knowledge economy. He referred to this as prosumer participation–productive consumers–and cited YouTube and–a bit anachronistically–Famous Amos as illustrative examples of how non-monetary economies become marketized, and cited Napster as an example of how money economies become demarketized.

Much of what Toffler discussed was old news, in a sped-up, Future Shock sense at least. With Time declaring You (or is it Me?) Person of the Year due to the explosion and influence of personal media and social networking tools, Toffler the futurist seems to be playing catch-up. He didn’t even mention the real fortunes being made off of virtual goods in digital worlds such as Second Life. Do I pay a personal property tax on my 512 square feet of land in Second Life? How will this new revolutionary economy handle places like SL?

When Gladwell took the podium, he clarified that he was not, like Toffler, a futurist. His presentation was pretty much a rehash of a recent New Yorker article in which he framed the current information revolution around a Puzzles vs Mysteries analogy. Basically, to solve a puzzle, we need to collect more information. Once we get enough information, we can solve the puzzle. For mysteries, it isn’t a matter of collecting more information but sorting through and selecting the right information,  which should lead to one of (perhaps) several solutions. He used Watergate as an example of a puzzle. Woodward and Bernstein had to gather hidden information by tapping anonymous sources and using old fashioned investigative procedures until they had enough information to expose and bring down President Nixon. In contrast, Enron was exposed not by uncovering hidden information, but by meticulously sorting through and closely examining dense, complex information that was readily available from Enron’s website.

Gladwell believes that more and more we live in a world of mysteries, requiring a new set of specialized skills in which we don’t need more information but need to find the right information (take that, NSA). Gladwell’s ideas were fairly *lite* and superficial compared to Toffler’s notable gravitas. He stuck with his well-researched repertoire, and during the discussion period had trouble extending any of his ideas to several, perceptive questions from the audience. I suppose this is a fairly responsible approach–why would he know anymore than anyone else how the information age will effect organized religion? Still, his reluctance to engage turned what could have been a lively debate into a pretty staid, one-sided conversation.

It was an enjoyable evening overall, and as Elaine and I strolled arm in arm out of the Landmark Theater and into the Richmond streets, we were met with an unseasonably warm breeze as we turned toward where our car was parked. Perhaps it was the winds of change, finally arriving in Richmond after such a long, long absence. Or it could have been just a bunch of hot air.

I am in a band. It is a cover band, of sorts. Not your usual cover band. We play once every 2 years (more or less). We cover 2 bands each time. One band is a 70s, prog-rock/AOR band. The second band is a new wave or punk band. The name of our band is The Miserable Space Cowboys. We have been together (with roatating membership) since around 1988.

Here is a loose history of the MSC incarnations:

1988: Steve Miller & The Smiths
1990: ELO & Joy Division
1995: Queen & The Jesus and Mary Chain
2000: Lynyrd Skynyrd & Devo
2002: Bob Seger & Depeche Mode
2004: Foreigner & Echo & the Bunneymen
2006: Styx & Buzzcocks
We played the Styx/Buzzcocks show in April 2006 at Out of Bounds Sport’s bar in Richmond, VA. You missed a “good” show. Seriously, though. The Buzzcocks were (are) freakin‘ awesome. And admit it: you love Styx more than any of that indie, cerebral shit they call music on Pitchfork. C’mon, Antony & the Johnsons? Get real.

For a taste of the MSC sweetness, take a peek at a YouTube video of the opener from our last show. It was shot by Richmond videographer & ex-cop Jesse Peters.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/sCxo1ZN6JlA” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]
I am hoping that for our next show we engage the double genius of Supertramp & The Cure. I used to listen to Supertramp on my paper route when I was a kid. Along with Pink Floyd, The Police, Journey (ouch), REO Speedwagon (oof), Yes, Peter Gabriel and Blue Oyster Cult. I’d pop the ol’ BASF High Metal cassette tape into the battery-powered Hitachi radio I bought at Circuit City, use the radio to weigh down the papers in my front basket, and crank it up to 11, my dog Clancy a counterweight in the back basket. Those were the days. I could fold, band, and land a paper with precision.

Needless to say, there is a soft spot in my heart for a smaltzy, piano-driven S’tramp song. I genuinely like The Cure, although I was only a fan of Head on the Door and the stuff that preceded it.