Mix tapes and High Fidelity part one

1. My memory of the 1980s regarding mix tapes and taping in general are mixed. Yes I just wrote that.

2. I had a cool rig in 1985 that taped from the radio, and I taped some radio shows, the way you'd listen to Pandora now. Santa Cruz, KUSP, Friday night with Lance "Give Thanks To Lance" Linares. My first tape: a Lee Scratch Perry set complete with rare 45s and the utterly transcendent "Labrish." These are, you understand, tapes; you turn on the radio and hit the button, and then think in 45 minute blocks. I taped a great "British Invasion" set and a Motown set that turned me on to "Give it up Part 1," the Marvin Gaye song that I later played to fill the dance floor. Then in 1986 I moved to San Francisco and made my signature mix "North Star," refined over a few tries. This involved raiding my roommate Lynn's record collection, and doing the gently-lift-needle-and-drop while hitting-tape-button-a-second-later. I called the mix North Star because it had a Darryl Hall song "North Star" on it that I absolutely loved. The opening was pretty cool: North Star, then Peter Gabriel's Here Comes the Flood (I was doing anti-nuclear work at the time, and the song's apocalypse felt way too likely) and then Howard Jones singing "No One Is To Blame." The mix also had some Annie Lennox and some Heads. But that opening was always my favorite because of the way the first two songs connected with each other, and then this total pop song says "Oh and by the way love is its own apocalypse and maybe it shouldn't be." The mix also had "Excellent Birds" (Lori Anderson and Peter Gabriel). And it had War (The Temptations, not Edwin Starr), and some Frankie Goes To Hollywood and a quote from Che.

3. For me mixing that tape was like writing crossed with collage (or more properly, audio collage). Like collage, the edges count. North Star is utterly transcendent, with Hall's voice floating, suspended over the hushed instrumental like an incantation:

North Star

We stare

How far

How clear

The star is unimaginably far away; touch brings us from that distance to its opposite, an intimacy as sublime as the distance of stars. Putting this next to Here Comes the Flood is like taking a passionate, plaintive image of distance and touch, cutting it out as a shape, and then pasting a nuclear and/or environmental apocalypse image next to it. Neither is unaffected; both are heard differently, which is the beauty IMHO of those mixes. 

3.  So I spent all this time winding and rewinding and plunking down turntable arms and lifting them and hitting stop and record and play and rewind, and when I think back I try to count the hours and it seems like...I don't know, maybe 6 hours a tape minimum? To get one precious tape that I could then copy, and give to friends (Paula, Sigrid, Paxus, that guy from Zagreb). And it was time that felt almost sacred, as if this thing that I was producing was somehow a representation of my Self, or less grandiosely, my musical self and tastes and sense of sequence and progression. North Star gets at my hyper-romantic side, and my political/apocalyptic side, and my poppy and fun side, and my iconoclastic side. Collage self, in a way. 

4. And I played the tape a bunch on my Walkman (yes, those headphones, that clunky rig, but man it was righteous to listen to music and ride a bike all over San Francisco). And I took the tape to Europe and gave it away (in Zagreb, in Greece) and later wondered if anyone had copied it and spread it around or used part of it to build on. 

5. Now I spend a good deal of time making mixes and burning them onto CD's, and giving them to people. I often gather a bunch of songs together in a big uber-list, then feel for beginnings and progressions, and try out things and eliminate things and replace things. I like the collage feel, and the idea of working quickly and not overthinking a mix, and letting all my rules be more or less tacit. I also like the metaphor of a mix as a kind of letter or poem to an audience. And here is where the High Fidelity link comes in.

6. It is written in Wikipedia: "The high point of traditional mixtape culture was arguably the publication of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity in 1995." I really can't argue with this; I remember reading the novel in the late 90s and LOVING the whole obsessive way the protagonist, Rob Fleming, sets about making a mix tape, often in the context of reaching out to a potential love interest. (Well, pretty exclusively in that context!). In its way the mix tape is a love letter, but a love letter of indirection, the way some Elizabethan courtier might write a sonnet that indirectly gets all of its romantic points across AND deploys clever rhetorical moves and a heightened sense of aesthetic shape in order to more completely underline said romantic points. (When said Elizabethan court poet dies, and the coterie of people who could "read" the double messages were also dead, then we are left simply with the sonnet itself; when Paula and Sigrid and I are dead, no one will know the personal connection of Here Comes the Flood to an 80's sense of nuclear dread. But in each case you have this thing: a mix tape, a sonnet.)

Here is the great paragraph where Rob lays it out:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules. 

Well, yeah. And of course every rule is made to be flouted at some point, and Rob has a way of overthinking everything in his life INCLUDING his mixes (which are never listed in the novel, of course; naming the songs would unduly expose him (and Hornby) to the scorn of...readers like Rob. His reluctance to commit to the woman in his life, Laura, is like his reluctance to commit to a system for arranging his LPs, and his constant anxiety about which songs ought to go in which place in the mix. 

7. In the old days, the process of erasing and redoing was (even when a labor of love) a wildly onerous process. Now? I make a mix quickly, shift things around with ease, make versions of versions of mixes so that there are several generations of some (May Bee, Picnic, Reggae Street, SkiSun). And yet...at the end of the day I like burning a mix to a CD, making it an object, even though I know that CDs will most likely go the way of all flesh, digital and analog. I like that Cat has a different version than Claire and that Ribi and Kelsey both have version 2 of a mix I have three other versions of. So, both infinitely editable AND each CD is a kind of commitment to this and not any other sequence. Postmodern and modern; a digital Elizabethan love letter to the world, to one's friends, and a kind of making instead of simply consuming and listening. 

            

It is time to begin blogging again, and catching up on the things that matter to me AND that seem to commingle: cyborgs of course, but also education, and politics (especially environmental, but also political economics), and community.

I thought I'd start with a long-ago and far away piece: an interview from 1996, when the Cyborg Handbook had just come out, and Chris Gray and I were speaking to interested media (film crews, editors of technology 'zines, academics, the occasional SF fan). I'm almost as curious about what I did not think to say as what I said; still, this seemed like a good jumping-off point.

 http://www.apogeebooks.com/omnimag/archives/chats/em101496.html

Prime Time Replay:

Steven Mentor
on Cyborg Culture

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MsgId: *emedia(1)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:00:37 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.9

Good evening! It's Monday, and time for another session of "eMedia." Tonight's guest is Steven Mentor, who co-authored "The Cyborg Handbook," with Chris Hables Gray. Steven, are you online now?

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MsgId: *emedia(3)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:03:39 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Howdy! I'm "here"

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MsgId: *emedia(5)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:06:01 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.17

Steven, I'd like you to get into your experience and background in cyborg life. What made you interested in cybernetic organic culture?

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MsgId: *emedia(6)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:06:54 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Paulette - my human self wants to know how to get quickly around again - is it controlhome? Or some other set of keys?

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MsgId: *emedia(7)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:08:03 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.9

Got it. It's Control-home to get to the top of your screen, and control-end to get to the bottom. Also, if you have it, change "20" to how many messages you want to see on your screen. I suggest "5" or "10", to make it easier.

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MsgId: *emedia(8)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:08:54 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

I initially got interested in cybernetics after reading Donna Haraway as a grad student at UCSC in the early 80s, but I think behind that lies 10 years of activism around nuclear weapons and energy. I wanted to understand how technological systems worked, but more importantly, how they were changing human beings as political animals. But once I'd read Donna, I started to see cyborgs everywhere - not only in sci fi but in literary Modernism, in the hospitals my wife works in, and of course everywhere on television. And so this figure - only one way to understand technology and humans, to be sure - became productive for me, and I ran with it.

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MsgId: *emedia(9)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:11:05 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.9

How did you meet with Chris Hables Gray? (Gray was the 1993-1994 NASA Fellow in History, and is currently an Einsenhower Fellow to Czechoslavakia.)

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MsgId: *emedia(11)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:15:59 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Chris is one of my oldest friends, and in many ways my political mentor. I met Chris at Stanford; I was a grad student in English, and he was helping launch the anti-apartheid movement on campus. Since then we've been political partners in organizing, have lived together in collective households for many years, and spent a lot of parties raving in the kitchen with whoever wanted to theorize and drink beer. Our biggest campaign together was the anti-Diablo nuclear plant direct action campaign, and he's always felt sort of like a war buddy to me after that.

I suppose I ought to mention dates! We met in 1976.

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MsgId: *emedia(14)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:19:45 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.9

I'll agree with seeing cyborgs everywhere. After reading the essay collection in "Cyborg Handbook," it puts a new perspective on what I'd consider cyborg and otherwise. But I also noticed that the book's slant is decidedly feminist. Is this because of Haraway, or is it because cyborg culture seems female?

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MsgId: *emedia(15)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:24:00 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Well, to use Donna's language, the knowledge that Chris and I bring to cyborgs is situated; we always felt that feminism was one of THE crucial discourses of social change, and worked hard to explore how men could embrace feminist ideas and political practices. Of course we had a lot of help from many of the women in political groups!! But I do think that Donna's spin on cyborgs as transgressive, as compatible with certain kinds of feminist visions, certainly influenced me. Her notion of cyborg is a far cry from, say, Van Damme's or some of the other hypermasculine cyborgs in popular culture.

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MsgId: *emedia(18)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:28:38 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.17

That's something else I wanted to ask about, too. How do you feel about films like "Terminator I & II" and "Universal Soldier," where we're presented with ultra-male representatives of technology? Although I have to say I think James Cameron favors extraordinarily strong women....

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MsgId: *emedia(23)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:41:55 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

To respond to your question about Terminator - I loved it, independent of any camp or ironic position I might also have. I think Jonathan Goldberg's piece in our Cyborg Handbook - "Recalling Totalities" - does a fantastic job of exploring the connection of masculinity and cyborgs. I tend to see both anxiety about masculinity AND an interesting use of machinery to promote the "organic" in the bodybuilding movment, which is of course always present in a film with Arnie.

While I'm waiting for cyberspace to send your words winging - I'd like to explain anxiety and cyborgs. The technology for shapig our bodies is both enabling and disabling - just like technologies for more serious cyborg morphing, such as genetic engineering. On the one hand we can engage with machines to literally shape our organic bodies. On the other hand, much of this shaping is driven by anxieties brought on by machines themselves, or rather, by the society we live in. That cyborg society clearly replaces many human functions with machines; many traditional masculine activities are no longer very relevant to suburbanculture, for example, and so we get pathetic versions - dad with a bar b que fork as The Hunter. So we use cyborg tech to reachieve a masculinity we can "see."

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MsgId: *emedia(25)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:45:45 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.33

Where can we see cyborg products working in real space, as opposed to what's presented on film?

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MsgId: *emedia(28)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:51:52 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Well, "real space" certainly is contested these days! But one thing that I find fascinating about the cyborg figure - you can find so many of them outside of sci fi films! A pedestrian example - or rather,a nonpedestrian example - we are all driving huge prosthetic metal bodies around. Soon we begin to configure time and space as if we were a car. Cyborgs experience new kinds of time and space due to their intractions with machines, and their new human/machine sensoria. Other places I've been interested in: military, medicine, work, and politics. Oh and certainly in aging.

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MsgId: *emedia(30)
Date: Mon Oct 14 21:57:25 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.9

The car is a very good example, and one I thought of reading through the "Genesis" chapters of "Cyborg Handbook." The most interesting chapter in this section is about Africa as the origin of cybernetic organic culture. But is something which apparently seems Northern-oriented being used to assist African societies? Or is cyborg studies exclusive to the First World?

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MsgId: *emedia(32)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:00:44 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Here's another cyborg space - the complex notion of cyberspace, which includes both what is "behind the screen" and also the material spaces of logging in. I await your reply; in some ways I am much blinder as a cyborg here than I would be if we were IRL. My material "real" is something you can't know, and often feels completely irrelevant when I'm surfing the Net or chatting with friends in a MOO or MUD. This disconnection of my virtual self from my material self is a truism in cyberpunditry. But again, the agency involved is complex.

Yes - Ron Eglash's work on African material culture and cybernetics is wonderful - his slide show includes many more images than we were able to print in Cyborg Handbook. But I think this question of whether cyborg = North in a North/South divide gets at a key element of cyborg politics: the extent to which the tech which makes us all cyborgs - communications nets that enable transnational corporations as well as nongovernmental organizatins - are both undermining and enabling certain kinds of liberatory visions.

Example: someone can mobilize worldwide support for Tien an Mien by sending images via the Net, or can update people on Bosnia or Somalia or even places closer to home like East Palo Alto - underdeveloped, to use the euphemism. But while the new tech enables new players, it also strengthens the hands of many "old"players who are in a position to morph themselves into global cyborg bodies. Here, transnational corporations are much faster than say governments, and so a true map of the world would look at nets of wealth and communication rather than simply at lines which say "nation-state."

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MsgId: *emedia(36)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:11:54 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.33

Eglash's essay is very much like the foundation for modern art: how Picasso and Miro took imagery from African art and rearranged it in such a way that it seemed radical to Western culture. Yet African art and imagery is very organic. How would cyborgian culture interact with the Third World? But to follow up on what you just said: it goes against the way most films present cyborg culture--as something controlled by the gov't, when in fact, it seems to usurp gov'tal control. Would cyborg politics be considered chaotic?

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MsgId: *emedia(38)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:16:50 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Well of course one way it interacts is precisely the way Picasso and Braque operated: appropriation! If commodity culture drives the economies that drive cyborg societies, than the thirst for the new will always circle round from domestic to exotic. But I want to pick up on another element of your question: the element of Picasso and collage. Picasso used those masks to do something to his own art culture: to defy painting. And collage, which is so crucial to 20th c art, is a big part of how I see cyborgs. Picasso used collage to fragment and augment the human body, the figure, in time and space. AND he used a collision of painterly techniques and "real" objects to fragment theillusin of 3D space. This is the world that cyborgs live in; and it is a world which ironically expands the role of the imagination, myth, projection, etc., in the otherwise apparently austere and routinized world of engineering and Taylorized labor and buy or die consuemrism.

As to your question about chaos and whether cyborg tech is a state conspiracy - in a way, the notion of the State controlling everthing is a 50s cold war nostalgia. The X-files is a perfect example: all the loose ends of our questions tie up in a shadowy room, figures smoking, coherent bad guys with coherent and unified aims. Yeah, right. I think a better way to plot cyborg politics is to look back over those classic political texts, called Star Trek. The first Star Trek theorized the Cold War: boy, those evil empire Klingons/Russians sure seem outdated compard to our snazzy corporate outfits! Then Star Trek Next Generation theorized the post Cold War world: the Russians are our allies, sort of, and yet there are new enemies on the horizon, and some small fractures in our alliances. Now if you live in a country that was targeted by the CIA like Guatemala was, this view of things might feel a bit off! But then we go to the real Chaos of post cold war world: Deep Space Nine, where the chaos is at home at the space station, and where our lives are lived next to a worm hole, and both sides contain confusing choices of allies and enemies: more the world of "terrorists" (whether state or nonstate) than the comfy world of Federation Peace. More and more non-Northern perspectives work their way into the First World.

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=MsgId: *emedia(44)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:35:05 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.33

Star Trek! Now I understand its appeal from a more scientific point of view. I also enjoy the way cyborgs on the programs aren't necessarily sinister; that they're not programmed to "complete a mission," as T2's terminators are. But it also brings to mind that many people are using cybernetic organic tech now, in the form of pacemakers and artifical, mechanical limbs. Are organ transplants part of cyborg science, or does cyborg science deal only with the relationship between humanity and the machines they create? Is the brain a cybernetic organism?

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MsgId: *emedia(45)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:41:23 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Yes, of course organ transplants are cyborg tech. I've always been struck by how the origins of cyborgs - at NASA, and later by writers like Halacy in Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, all make medicine central. If we go back to that collage idea again: instead of an inviolate organic body, we imagine a space of functions, and varius solutions to those functions.If a heart wears out, we can replace it with another organic heart, or a machine, or some hybrid - or perhaps even find ways to eliminate tht function altogether, as the original Cyborg astronaut article suggested! Eliminate everything, from lungs that breathe air (can't do that in space) to elimination itself! Many of the extremes of cyborg engineering can be seen in domesticated versions in medicine involving aging, reproduction, prosthetics, etc.

Now, the brain as a cybernetic organism - there's a knotty question! Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera writes on masculine fantasies of total escape from the body (the meat) into Mind - the ultimte Cartesian wet dream! And I think many cyber-enthusiasts embrace one or another fantasy of total trascendence of the body and mortality. Me, I like my body a whole lot - I agree with Katherie Hayles' critique of all this bodilessness among (mostly) male theorists. But having said that: of course the brain is a cybernetic organ! Norbert Wiener, founding "father" (in many senses of that term) of cybernetics, often made the comparison between thinking machines, learning machines, and the original learning machine - homo sapiens. Beyond the reductive language of Artificial Intelligence, the mind - the embodied mind - is still the coolest thing in My world.

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MsgId: *emedia(47)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:47:33 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.33

Are diseases cybernetic as well? It seems that as our medical technology progresses, so does the strength of certain viruses.

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MsgId: *emedia(48)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:53:09 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

You want to read two incredible stories about this? Blood Music by Greg Bear - the whole novel is the answer "yes" to your question. And Bruce Sterling's short story Our Neural Chernobyl - whose title alone gives you the sense of it. But technomedicine also pushes our sense of what is alive - are viruses alive? Yes and no. What if we were to consider ourselves made up of a multitude of living systems, each with compatible but also competing aims. Now that is a collage cyborg! A cybernetic organic collage of systems. To descend to (or rise to) this view would mean an end to the figure of human, in some ways.

I think we are seeing many cases of positive feedback in our world - not just the feedback between diseases, antibiotics, and evolved diseases that evade or conquer these "cures", followed by new cures etc etc - but also bad positive feedback between many systems of life: the soil and oil-based agriculture, for example. Or the feedback system of logging and destruction of salmon runs in the Northwest. In fact, the original cyberneticists - the Macy Group, which included Wiener, Margaret Mead, von Neumann, Greg Bateson, many others - imagined a way to solve complex human/political/ecological problems by looking at ALL the systems involved, not simply one. The hubris of engineering meets the desire of post World War 2 humans to find some way back/forward from the various Holocausts of this century.

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MsgId: *emedia(49)
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:55:20 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.17

Two final questions (or one, if you haven't seen the program): Does "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" (new) display a comprehensive study of cybernetic technology and culture? And, if humanity is still capable of evolving, will we become more mechanical, or organic?

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MsgId: *emedia(51)
Date: Mon Oct 14 23:03:52 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

Sadly, I haven't seen the new Jonny Quest - no excuse for that! To answer the second question: in some ways evolution is like weather - we can affect it, but it happens independently of conscious human agency. That wasn't meant as a New Age statement either! But (holding a card to my head, eyes closed, reading the future) I believe that humans (if they survive the coming collapses - oil, other ecological hard landings, also collapse of various social systems based on older tech and values) - if we survive, we will experiment with our sensory organs, and with various plug-ins to the CNS. All the stuff from cyberpunk will be normal: porn in Sensurround, children growing up surrounded by Data and its servo mechanisms. The very notion of Human as a coherent figure will come into question with these add ons, these prosthetics - with their attendant amputations and losses.

But I think a true coevolution is possible because we can imagine it, and perhaps some places on earth - and not necessarily First World ones alone - will support those kinds of experiments, and resist teh worst excesses of cyborg culture as a militry and ecological nightmare. I have a son by IVF and he is my version of coevolution - I liketo think he will have more tools than I did for making difficult choices about technologies and our fragile social and ecological systems. Make it so!

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MsgId: *emedia(52)
Date: Mon Oct 14 23:06:01 EDT 1996 
From: Paulette At: 152.163.233.17

Thanks, Steven, for a very good online interview tonight! We're out of time. Those seeking more info on cyber-culture should check out Steven's website athttp://www.converger.cyberhutch.com. Next week, Michael Sanchez from Do Something and Litespeed Media discuss "Webstock96," an interactive, four-day lovefest on behalf of the Do Something foundation.

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MsgId: *emedia(54)
Date: Mon Oct 14 23:07:41 EDT 1996 
From: cybunny At: 199.182.129.232

It's been lovely - thanks! over and out, steven

Copyright (C) 1996 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.