Scooters as a gateway drug

Saw some boys riding down the hill in the park near my house. They looked about 14, and were bearing down on the rough asphalt of a step incline. My first thought glancing over was "Those boys should be riding skateboards. They are way to tall for those scooters." But they were smiling and hot-dogging their way over and around the many potholes in the park's path. Ok, so they were old hands in riding scooters, but it was only a matter of time before they took to skateboards. Now all over town there are signs "No skateboarding." So the next step past scootering was already headed in the direction of illegality. Never mind Foucault's essay on the forced prohibition of skate boarding. Nothing wrong about skate boarding except that it's illegal. And from there, young boys slide down more than the curving hills of central PA. All that fun, comradeship, daredevil thrill seeking, the local police will tell you where it will lead. Why not just let'm have a smooth ride?

Borders and Elections

Borders can have a strange fascination. At times they seem so arbitrary, as if they were not based in anything belonging to the material world, and yet the more fake and imposed they are, the more likely that they are reinforced by soldiers with guns. Nothing like the Berlin Wall during the Cold War to make this point. Its irreality, the fact that it did not belong to Berlin's urban fabric, was everywhere apparent. Whenever it cut through a street, veered too close to a building, it showed itself as a false imposition, yet of course its very arbitrariness underscored the violence that continuously supported it. Without the eerie equipment of the East German border police, without the tank traps, barbed wire, and hidden machine guns, the border would have seemed like a baroque figment of some ancient diplomats' negotiation.

How much can we compare the US-Mexican border with the Iron Curtain? Certainly there is more movement across, and the security is no where as tight. The similarity lies in the double perspectives the border invokes. To see the border as a Mexican who cannot cross, gives the it a hard quality that Americans wandering over never see. Borders create divided consciousness through their selection process. I crossed over the Berlin Wall, whereas my German relatives could not and dared not—a matter of passports and fear.

The American exemption in Berlin and today across the Rio Grande means that border seems something like a folly, those illusionary ditches from English estates—you, the privileged spectator are only vaguely aware of its existence, but the other side sees a sheer barrier. This applies better to the US-Mexican border than to the German-German, where the military was omnipresent, yet as an eighteen-year old I also claimed an immunity, which let me walk past the turrets (nervously to be sure).

The difference between one person's passing and another's remaining creates the border's contradictions. It sets one group against the other, even if none of them is responsible for the border, a reality we will see in today's German elections.

Trailer for a Book

Maxim Biller is an obnoxious Schmuck which is why I can't help buying and even reading his books. His story last year in the New Yorker thrilled me. The more I read his stuff, the more I think there has to be something else he's written that I am missing.

This video is meant to make him seem like more of a nuisance than he really is, but it works and its hilarious. From the opening line he yanks on the ethnic chain: "Some people write about Indians, some people write about Eskimos, others about Germans, I write about Jews." The video makes sure you see the bitter, restrained faces of white haired German intellectuals biting their tongues, rather than telling him off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUpQwMPvulA&feature=player_embedded#t=187

Taking Control of Noise

As a boy, I always wondered about the truth in old people's complaint that rock music was just noise. There is an obvious truth to their complaint. If rock music was supposed to signify some kind of rupture with the past, then this question of the sound had to be part of it. If old style music was supposed to be an escape from the harsh reality of work, if harmony was supposed to transport you away from the grime and grind of modern life, then rock music took the opposite approach. It drove straight into the crash site.

So here's my thesis: the electric guitar marks an attempt to reverse industrial alienation. With the emergence of electronic music the grind of machinery was taken over by players who could rework the brutal sounds of factories and mechanical weapons. Blaring electrical music reinserted a human subject into technological sounds which to anyone raised on older music sounded dehumanizing. Theodor Adorno and countless others accustomed to old fashioned strings and horns failed to recognize the acoustic transformation, even if Adorno did understand that the new sound was quickly being absorbed into big business. The ease with which the blues went electric shows that industrialized music started when poor black people from the country hit factory jobs. The electricification of folk music was simply the recognition that the purveyors of acoustic instruments had taken up industrial labor.

So the next question is how does sampling signify the further disappearance of industrial experience and its replacement by a stream of endless media images. If innovation in contemporary music comes from transforming the sounds of everyday life rather than building on a tradition taught, then sampling must be a response to the further decline of virtuous performance in the face of its endless repetition through recordings. Why learn to play when you constantly have the best example at your fingertips? Are you going to compete with Clapton, Page etc, if you can hear their every twitch all day long? You may want to be like them, but air guitar and a stereo will let you indulge in the fantasy effortlessly. You don't have to recreate their sound with an instrument. Learning to play is an effort, after all.

Even dedicated, disciplined classical performers must face this problem: old quartets never die. Its hard to develop your own late Beethoven style if you are forever listening to the Guarnari Quartet. How do you sing Schubert if your mom already has three Fischer-Dieskau CDs? It's one thing to hear their music in your head as you practice yours, its another to have it blaring down the hall or even just sitting on your shelf, all packaged in perfection. That old chestnut that B.B. King developed his own style as he was trying to imitate Robert Johnson's may be true, but it could have only worked if King did not have a perfectly remastered set of Johnson's recordings in his bedroom. It's the gap, temporal and acoustic, between hearing a master and imitating him that allows your own style to develop. If the classic performance is forever in your face, you might as well just sample it.

Party School

After midnight the tragic consequences of being the number one party school appear, girls get raped, boys fall down stairwells. Only a fraction of the stories make their way into the newspapers, many more are hushed up, told years later in church basements or the next day to close friends and the occasional therapist. The accidental death of eighteen-year old Joseph Dado after leaving a party at 3am is the only the latest awful case.

Central PA has had a long drinking history. The Whiskey Rebellion did not start here for nothing. All those apple orchards planted two hundred years ago were not intended for baking pies. Hard cider kept the locals going through the winter, so much so that Europeans visiting in the nineteenth-century marveled at how falling down drunk rural Americans got after dinner. I have sat in archives reading the letters of nineteenth century college students, every other one promises mother or father that they won't drink this semester.

But it's not just the isolation, not just that there's nothing to do out here at night. The sudden opportunity to indulge, the encouragement provided by fraternities and football, this makes boys and girls binge like they never would around adults.

The suggestion by a group of university presidents that the drinking age be lowered spoke directly to the problem that kids have no experience and then suddenly too much. Still the public response was so muted that the story dropped from the media within a day of its appearance.

We are too invested in the contradictions of prohibition and consumption. You cannot do it until you are old enough to over do it. The university tries to teach students not to drink while it builds a public image around football. The contradictions are obvious to every freshman: just don't get caught is the bottom line. The problem is that too many kids cannot handle that double edged maneuver.

Finishing

While in grad school, I worked for a dear friend who ran a massive used book shop, a big red barn on the side of the road. I loved the smell of the place, the dusty piles, the rare finds and I was grateful for the extra money in the summer when I had no stipend. There were a few of us who did odd jobs there. My allotment was to schlep heavy boxes, mow the old farm field that surrounded the barn, befriend customers and occasionally run the cash register.

After a busy three-day weekend when I had filled in for a cashier who had suddenly quit, we were sitting around chatting and I asked my friend whom she was going to hire to work the register. She answered with a line taken from her parents, who also ran several used book stores: "The best clerks are grad students who think they are going to finish their dissertation." The point being that they never will, but they hang around forever trying. They are bookish and appreciative.

For me this comment was one of those moments when the curtain gets raised and you see the control room. I decide no matter what, I was never going to fall into this trap.

Mind you I really liked hanging out in grad school. We lived in a funky upstate town full of old hippies and the security that comes from being centrally isolated. I had lots of friends who were still hanging around Ithaca, didn't want to leave the lifestyle, thought the outside world was fascist, loved their girlfriend too much to apply for a job.

And to this day there are people, companies and institutions willing to give a place to those highly educated, almost finished academics. How many ABDs do the grading, the driving, weeding, and generally helping around the place without which relationships, stores and universities could not function? How many of us have been grateful just to be accepted and to be left a little time to write? But in truth, that's not enough.

Secure Reading

As high school kids we hung out in libraries all the time. Only two places in New York City would screen who got to use the reading rooms. The New York Public on 42^nd St had a rule that you had to be over 18 to enter, but no one really stopped us from ordering books there so long as we approached the librarian's desk earnestly with a hushed demeanor. Columbia University started checking ID cards in the late 70s probably from fear of crime. So as high school kids we shied away from Butler library. But once in a while we would sneak into the law school library where they had not yet placed any guards, probably because the stacks were modern and bright as opposed to Butler's gothic dungeon. By and large though, there were no restrictions on getting into the libraries of New York, and that a cluster of geeks would stop at nothing to find a back issue of the New England Journal of Medicine never entered the minds of library administrators.

Today institutional libraries require users to demonstrate that they have the proper credentials, but their motives are totally different. They are not trying to keep the place quiet or prevent muggings. It's not even the fear of terrorism. The real motive is financial.

The spread of security passwords has the effect of creating barriers that protect property, not unlike enclosures around common fields at the end of the eighteenth century when capitalist agriculture restructured the English countryside. Today, the more security barriers are strictly enforced, the more certain publishers are that their on-line services will not be accessed by those, who are not part of the fee structure.

After 9/11 there came a wave of security password protection on libraries. The occasional suggestion was made that terrorists would use free public computers to plot attacks, and librarians protested at the requirement that libraries track the books users check out. Once that requirement was dropped, the pass words still remained, and they exist now, one suspects, so as to allow libraries to buy and publishers to sell online journals, books, reference databases and the like.

The ease with which academics can research online is of course made possible by the passwords that protect the property of the publishers who sell their content to the library. Now admittedly there has been little file sharing of academic databases. How often does one download a pdf from a journal in order to spread it around the internet? Never. Passwords are the hedge around the academic field. Few wish to poach there these days. High school kids may sneak in, but they do so from their computers, not on foot past a hung over security guard.

So the next time you type in your user ID along with an eight symbol figure, know that you are entering a financial deal built upon the hysteria of terrorism.