The Media Prism

Photograph by Dayna Bateman who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr

Prism: definition. An optical instrument used as an angle gauge, consisting of a thin wedge of glass which establishes a fixed (critical) angle of projection in a point sample.

I’ve been reading the fifteenth anniversary of Wired magazine, where its team calculates the hits and misses they’ve made in trying to report the influence of the digital revolution on everyday life. About the media it says it predicted the extinction of the media giants but not their slow death-throes and the damage they’d do as they fell, whipping up froth all around us, and reporting with a heightened sense of urgency and doom to keep our adrenalin buzzing so we’ll keep checking in with them.

There’s an interview with Brian Eno in this issue where he talks about contemplative experiences.

I’ve noticed two things: If you make something that is the right slowness, people are very happy to slow themselves down to meet it. And if you accompany that with music which is the right quietness, people are happy to quiet themselves down to listen to it. I dispute the assumption that everyone’s attention span is getting shorter: I find people are begging for experiences that are longer and slower, less “dramatic” and more sensual.

It’s been several years since I’ve sat down in a cafe with a printed copy of the New York Times, but I can’t put aside the romantic qualities of this newspaper. In Sydney I go through long stretches of reading neither the printed or digital copies of the Sydney Morning Herald but I always catch up with bits of the New York Times, refracted through a prism.

At the end of a brutal war a new world was settling into place in 1922, with poets and writers looking back and looking forward: using new styles to tell timeless stories. T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses were published. New communications devices and entertainment mediums were being launched. And a young Joseph Campbell was living in Paris, reading the new books and becoming insterested in what Freud and Jung were saying about consciousness. I’ve been re-reading The Wasteland this week. I re-read it every couple of years and each time I read it anew the fragments make more sense to me and it seems more whole, flowing as an entire object, than on the previous reading. My favourite bloggers turn items from the New York Times into the kind of mythical quotations tied to everyday life that T. S. Eliot used in The Wasteland. I enjoy the New York Times most when it’s refracted through the prisms of the minds I feel in tune with. It’s not the New York Times I want, so much, as the “critical angle of projection” the writers I admire beam through the articles.

Today Dayna Bateman photographed the front cover of the newspaper. And Geoff Manaugh, on Bldgblog, poetically distilled an article about the increasing desertification of Spain. It’s his poetic insights I crave, for example: “a new cartography of aridity”.

“Grass on golf courses or surrounding villas is sometimes labeled a ‘crop,’” we read in the New York Times, “making owners eligible for water that would not be allocated to keep leisure space green. Foreign investors plant a few trees and call their vacation homes ‘farms’ so they are eligible for irrigation water.”
It’s the hydrology of leisure.
“No one knows if it goes to a swimming pool,” the head of a local water board says.
On a purely bureaucratic level, this is genius: reclassifying your backyard as an agricultural zone so that you can get water rations from the government.
But will this really be the last gasp of southern European civilization, as the dunes roll in, leaving unfinished resorts surrounded by dead olive tree orchards, burying half-drunk British tourists alive beneath surprise evening dust storms? Is well-watered leisure really the only option available to us here – or will a new kind of strategic xeriscaping save us from endemic thirst?
More practically, all of this brings to mind an ongoing interest of mine in a future landscape design project: mapping zones of desertification in southern Europe.
You go around for the summer with a landscape architecture class, a box full of GPS devices, and some graph paper, producing a new cartography of aridity.

Bldgblog.

Depth of Field

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

William Faulkner. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. 1949


 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform Tupelo in 2008
When I visited Memphis in 1989 I was reading a copy of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Night was slowly starting to fall as my friend and I left Oxford, Mississippi after visiting the museum that Faulker’s home has become. It looked exactly like the watercolour on the copy of the novel I’d borrowed from the branch of the New York Public Library on Seventh Avenue. Faulkner had written phrases on the walls, from works in progress, and he had many different copies and versions of the Bible and compendiums of Greek myths on the bookshelves in his writing room and study. Faulkner drew up maps of of a fictional territory for his novels but I could see that these were devices for inabiting the real world deeply: physically, mentally and spiritually. His novels were not inventions or diversions from life.

When rain started falling, as we went past the turnoff to Tupelo, Mississippi — the birthplace of Elvis Presly — it sounded like the rainstorm at the beginning of Nick Cave’s song, “Tupelo”, which fuses the life of Elvis with the story of Christ. I was gradually coming to understand how vital music can be, a force of life and nature and that there need be no difference between a great novel, myth, or piece of contemporary music. I grasped that Nick inhabited his music as deeply as Faulkner his writing.  

I heard Daniel Lanois’s album Acadie around that time. I wasn’t hearing much new music at the time but he was the subject of a feature on a cable channel and his music reeled me in while I was channel surfing. It was deep and soulful, like a Faulkner novel, and he was submerged in shadows in a room in a grand old house while he was talking. I felt as if I’d fallen into a world I could live in. He’s made temporary studios in houses, bringing music into the rhythms of life, but recently he told the New York Times that “the grand rooms, the searching for the right hallway that will have the right sound for the guitar, that’s died out a little bit.”

Daniel Lanois: I’ve always been interested in original ways of building music. The recording studio has acted as my laboratory for ways of providing original expression in works. For the longest time I was satisfied with my originality to exist in the sonics of records I was making for other people. At a pivotal point of travel, ie. I was in New Orleans a lot and also working in Europe a lot, I was able to see my past in Canada as fertile story telling material. That’s when I started writing my songs.

Daniel Lanois. “The Maker”
 

Q: Your work is often seen as atmospheric – do you agree with that – and what are you aiming for in that atmosphere?

Daniel Lanois: Early on my atmospheres were largely ethereal as can be heard for example on Brian Eno’s Apollo record. It’s easy to spot the atmospheres in my work of that time. The term atmosphere has changed for me, creating an atmosphere now means setting a mood or tone. You can think of it like preparing a room for a toast, the clinking of a glass, offering tranquility or preparing your canvas for that one bold stroke that will allow the moment to be a standout. Atmosphere no longer means texture.

Miles Salter. Music News. April10 2008

Daniel Lanois made a movie over the course of a year, circa 2007, about record production. In this trailer you can hear him say: “I’m trying to make a film that’s beautiful in itself. About beauty. About the source of the art, rather than everything that surrounds the art.”

A term Mr. Lanois often uses in discussing music is ”depth of field,” and this perfectly describes the way his productions, both for himself and others, blend sonic clarity and murkiness. ”I Love You,” the opening song on ”Shine,” for example, inhabits at least three separate aural dimensions. The backing vocal by Ms. Harris is so dry and crisp that the singer seems to be just inches from the listener’s ear. Mr. Lanois’s own voice, by contrast, is encased in a protective halo of reverb that distances it from that of Ms. Harris. Even further in the background is the fragmented electric guitar part at the song’s core, which sounds as if it were recorded underwater several generations ago.

Mac Randall. New York Times. May 18 2003

I imagine that the first example of Lanois’s production for other musicians that I heard was the U2 album The Joshua Tree. Its beauty felt familiar to me. I had a frame-of-reference for the way it evoked the desert. I grew up in a sere, remote part of Australia and as a child remember hearing Roy Orbison’s angelic voice floating in the air while it was so hot that everything on the horizon was bent and misshapen in the heat haze.

 

Roy Orbison performs “Crying” on the Johnny Cash show in 1969

 

Roy Orbison and k d lang. "Crying". 1987.

I was living in New York when The Joshua Tree became a monster hit, reading William Faulkner’s and John Steinbeck’s novels. And I was listening to the music that had been the foundation of rock and roll, having had the extraordinary experience of Roy Orbison as my tutor in this subject. (When I interviewed him just before his death I was the recipient of the gratitude he felt for all Australians for continuing to buy his records and go to his concerts during the time when his career was in the wilderness.) I was discovering a mythic America while writing about Donald Trump’s new eponymous gilded tower for Blueprint magazine and reading in the New York Times about Oliver North and Manuel Noriega. Although I was listening to almost nothing but jazz at the time, with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and Bill Evans on my walkman as I discovered Manhattan, The Joshua Tree was everywhere and it‘s what comes to mind when I think back to that time.

Edge: Bono had been reading Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote, I was reading Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver. We had all fallen under the spell of America, not the TV reality but the dream, the version of America that Martin Luther King spoke about.

Bono: I’d been travelling widely, so travel was a huge theme. I’d been listening to the blues, and immersing myself in American writers, from native American writing through to black writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and poets and playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Charles Bukowski. I had this love affair with American literature happening at the same time as I became aware of how dangerous American foreign policy could be in the countries around it, with the brutal crushing of the Sandinistas. I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America. It was an age of greed, Wall Street, button down, win, win, win, no time for losers. New York was bankrupt. There was a harsh reality to America as well as the dream. So I started working on something which in my own mind was going to be called The Two Americas. I wanted to describe this era of prosperity and Savings and Loans scandals as a spiritual drought. I started thinking about the desert and what came together was quite a clear picture of where I was at, as a person a little off-kilter in my emotional life, but very much waking up as a writer and as a commentator on what I saw around me, my love of America and my fear of what America could become.

From U2 by U2 


Bono and Roy Orbison talking about and recording "Mystery Girl"