"The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra run around the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments."
- Charles Mingus
Double Bass Player; Piano Player; Composer; Vocalist; Arranger; Philanthropist
Perhaps the most influential bassist in the history of jazz, Charles Mingus also earned acclaim as one of the greatest composers in the history of music. In addition he was also a bandleader and an accomplished pianist, however -like many jazz greats- his contributions have been minimized by critics and various segments of society that have historically marginalized jazz music and continue to do so today. The lack of respect and appreciation for jazz in the United States was and continues to be a defeating paradox, as jazz (along with the blues) is the only genre of music that can be classified as distinctly American. Charles Mingus deserves his legend status not only in jazz, but in American music as a whole.
Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922, his early influences were classical and gospel music. The gospel influence grew out of his religious home life and the fact that his stepmother only allowed gospel music in her home. After moving to California at an early age, Charles studied composition and classical bass and played in the L.A. Youth Orchestra. Unfortunately, Charles -like so many others- had to abandon his dreams due to the cruelty of societal ignorance. He was told that because he was black, he would never be able to play classical music the way it should be played. Charles Mingus crushed this stereotype later in life, as several of his classical compositions went on to earn widespread acceptance.
Charles deliberately incorporated a variety of different styles into his unique sound. He developed a "conversational" approach with his playing, characterized by a single line "vocal" type of playing. This technique was centered around the idea that the bass deserved equal footing with the other lead instruments. By nature, this leads to artistic improvisation which, at the time, was frowned upon by jazz critics. Those critics claimed that improvisation was nothing more than "spontaneous composition," but Charles refused to allow the critics to detract from his art and often encouraged instinctual playing and improvisations in his bands (Trios, Sextets, and Octets). Interestingly, even his style of composition favored improvisations, and at a certain point in his career, he rarely wrote down fully developed scores. Rather, he would sit at the piano and sing/hum melody lines and then allow his band members to expand on the line and contribute melodically, technically and (perhaps most important to Charles), personally.
Even though he had an extremely prolific carreer, Charles was not free from financial troubles. As is true for most musicians playing for what they believe rather than for money, Mingus tried earnestly to break ties with the mostly "white commercial jazz scene." In an attempt to free himself from the financial lock with the jazz record companies, he organized many concerts (out of which emerged the Jazz Artists Guild), wrote an "autobiography" entitled
Beneath The Underdog, and started two of his own recording companies;
Debut Records and the
Charles Mingus label. However, despite his best efforts, Mingus failed in his efforts to beat the system and disappeared from public awareness towards the latter half of the 1960's. In describing his feelings before his descent towards poverty, Charles was quoted as saying, "I've come to the point, musically and personally, where I have to play the way I want to. I just can't compromise anymore." Unfortunately, these words weren't just a feeling that Mingus had, rather, they were a solemn sign of the times.
Forced back into public performances by heavy financial burdens, Charles resumed his carreer in 1969...and by 1971, after he published his book, and acquired a Guggenheim fellowship in composition, he was basically back to full speed composing, arranging, singing, and playing. Sadly, in 1977 he became extremely ill and was later diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. One year after his last recording session (1978), Mingus passed away leaving behind more than fifty albums and about 300 individual works. The achievements of Charles Mingus live on through his archives at the Library of Congress (he is the first jazz artist to have papers admitted into the archives), and through his music, and most importantly through the musicians that he signed on his record label.
Topic:
ANGER AND RESISTANCE:
What's the Meaning of This?!
In studying society, we often unconsciously assume we are studying "them" -- but we are not. We are studying ourselves and we resist that, we dislike that. It makes us uncomfortable and it makes us angry. Socrates wasn't given a medal and a tickertape parade after all. As the Russian existentialist philosopher Shestov said, "It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man."
When you turn the TV on, in effect, you turn the world off. The TV is only two feet high or so, yet we are fooled into thinking we are watching life-sized things. How is it that everything on it appears real and life-like?
Technical events produce the illusion of being natural and realistic. They produce the feeling of being non-produced (a good cut is one you don't notice, as the editors say). In the same way, we are unaware that the practice of watching TV is a practice because we have never experienced it as a phenomenon in its own right. Doing the Technical Events Test forces us to notice that watching TV is a practice, an active, ongoing achievement that we accomplish "for another first time through" each time. We see what the texture of the experience of watching TV consists of. We are shocked into seeing what it is we've been doing all these years.
By counting the technical events as we watch TV, we bring about a "paradigm shift." What is a technical event? We've all seen TV cameras in banks and jewelry stores. A stationary video camera simply recording what's in front of it is what I will call "pure TV." Anything other than pure TV is a technical event: the camera zooms up, that's a technical event; you are watching someone's profile talking and suddenly you are switched to another person responding, that's a technical event; a car is driving down the road and you also hear music playing, that's a technical event. Simply count the number of times there is a cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, appearance of words on the screen, fade in/out, etc.
When you focus on the technical events you can't focus on the plot or storyline. You learn very quickly how difficult it is to divide your attention. Either you watch the program or you count the technical events. You are unable to do both at the same time. In terms of the phenomenology of perception, this is a little like the famous demonstration of either seeing-the-vase or seeing-two-profiles, but not seeing both simultaneously in any sustained manner.
As we watch, we notice the discrete segments of independent footage that are presented with a rapid-fire quality. We, the "passive" viewers, apparently put together, synthesize and integrate the scenes: we link, we knit, we chain, we retain the past and anticipate the future. We methodically weave them all together into a coherent narrative. A high-speed filling-in-the-blanks and connecting-the-dots occurs. Our actively synthesizing mind, our labor, goes on while we sit back, relax and absorb. This high-speed integration of often wildly disconnected phenomena (angles, scenes, persons, music) is experienced in the mode of blank and passive absorption. It would seem that our minds are in high gear without our knowing. To address this we want to look at the following:
This difference between internally generated and imposed imagery is at the heart of whether it is accurate to say that television relaxes the mind. Relaxation implies renewal. One runs hard, then rests. While resting the muscles first experience calm and then, as new oxygen enters them, renewal.
When you are a watching, absorbing techno-guru, your mind may be in alpha, but it is certainly not "empty mind." Images are pouring into it. Your mind is not quiet or calm or empty. It may be nearer to dead, or zombie-ized. It is occupied. No renewal can come from this condition. For renewal, the mind would have to be at rest, or once rested, it would have to be seeking new kinds of stimulation, new exercise. Television offers neither rest nor stimulation.
Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that's as far as television goes. The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What's worse, it is filled with someone else's obsessive thoughts and images.
This dramatically reveals the functions of the political institution of television in
(a) training us to shorten our attention span
(b) making ordinary life appear dull
(c) injecting a hypnotic quality into our ordinary awareness
(d) coercing us into its reality
Television is the quintessential short-term medium. Like jugglers, television lives for the split second. Its relationship to viewers is measured in tiny fractions. Solemn hierarchies of men and women react to overnight program ratings with something approaching nervous breakdowns, because one percentage point can mean $30 million a year. The result of this manic concern is to design programming that will serve attention-getting rather than the humanistic substance that will stay with the viewer. The ratings race serves the advertisers, not the audience.
It is easier to shorten attention spans and increase distraction than to lengthen attention spans, increase concentration, and calm, quiet and still the mind. There is an old Zen analogy that the way to calm, clear and quiet the mind is similar to the way to clear a muddy pool -- not by action, by doing, by stirring it up, but by stillness, by letting it be, by letting it settle itself. The function of TV is to create, maintain and constantly reinforce what -- in the Zen tradition -- is often called "monkey-mind." The question to ask is: What is the good of a jumpy, volatile, scattered and hyper monkey-mind?
HYPNOSIS UNLIMITED
Since the emergence of long-term space flight in orbit above the earth, a new physiological phenomenon has arisen among our astronauts. They found that as a result of long-term weightlessness, some rather drastic physical changes began to occur in their bodies. They experienced a marked and dramatic reduction of muscle size. Even their hearts became markedly smaller. The astronauts also experienced a loss of co-ordination abilities -- such as the ability to focus on and follow moving objects with their eyes. All of this seems to be due to taking the human organism outside the experience of gravity. In order to preserve their earthbound physiology in conditions of weightlessness, astronauts need to do two to three hours of custom-designed exercises per day. Perhaps watching TV produces the equivalent mental condition of weightlessness for the human mind, together with the attending shrinkages and deteriorations. The normal, invisible, all-pervasive pressure of mental gravity, of our ordinary, active, incessantly thinking mind is suspended when we turn on the television.
COERCING US INTO REALITY
Our culture and education conspire to condition us, to create a reliance on media to reinforce our actions, feelings and self-perceptions. When we seek media confirmation we acknowledge and assume that our personal experiences are not qualified as reality any longer. We lose the drive to pursue direct experience as well as the drive to participate in co-creating reality. We no longer do, we watch, and reality is someone else's creation. As Todd Gitlin has said, it's not until an event (institution, thought, principle, movement, etc.) crosses the media threshold that it takes on a solid reality for us. Stretched out across our world is the media membrane, over the threshold of which -- and only over the threshold -- lies legitimate, confirmed reality, and though we don't have to believe what the media tell us, we can't know what they don't tell us.
TV WITHOUT SOUND
There is such a thing as a narrative trance, a narrative-consciousness. We have been programmed to become narrative subjects, subjected to the developmental narrative mode, intertwined with the storyline. In this, we're suspending our narrative consciousness and hence de-stabilizing the narrative subject. We identify not with a character, nor with the omniscient author, but with the camera. During usual viewing, however, our eyes do not see what is actually there because our narrative-trained mind overrides our eyes. We don't see with our eyes, we see with our programming, and we are programmed to see stories. TV programs are made so that we don't notice the "technical events," the details -- so that we don't pay attention. We are programmed to be unaware of the programming, the non-narrative structure and possibilities of that structure. To watch TV programs is to be lifeless and unresisting. This is the state that allows the commercials to take full effect and operate our minds for us.
THE NATURE OF THE NEWS
As a usual daily routine, only the unusually tragic or triumphant is shown -- not the ordinary routines and day-to-day reality of our lives. It is true that the news show has fewer technical events. There is a good reason for this. With fewer technical events the news show appears realistic relative to other shows in the TV environment. Further, it appears super-realistic relative to the commercial shows in this environment. As earlier, we witnessed the joining of technical events in a coherent narrative. Here, we witness the reduction of worldly events into a narrative.
The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents all subject matter as entertaining. This transcends TV and spills over into our post-TV life experiences. TV trains us to orient toward and tune in to the entertainment quality of any experience, event, person. We look for that which is entertaining about any phenomenon rather than qualities of depth, social significance, spiritual resonance, beauty, etc. In this sense TV doesn't imitate life, but social life now aspires to imitate TV.
Further, we become greedy. Not greedy in the traditional sense in reference to material wealth, rather, we experience a greed to be entertained. It's not just a need for entertainment, but a downright greed for entertainment, and it becomes a 24-hour obsession. In the absence of entertainment, we usually entertain ourselves with plans for future entertainment.
As one formula puts it, Media Power = Political Power Squared The TV has shown us that politicians can't be trusted but TV can. That is, according to Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, implicit in showing us this about politicians is the message, "We who are showing you this, the TV, can be trusted." We can trust TV, and the institution of TV, to reveal how politicians and the institution of politics can't be trusted.
TV AND THE ILLUSION OF KNOWING
Marshall McLuhan says TV opens out onto an electronic global village. It would seem, rather, that it gives us only the illusion of being. It reinforces security by presenting danger, ignorance by presenting news, lethargy by presenting excitement, isolation by promising participation. The media confines reality to itself. And it limits knowledge by giving the illusion of knowledge. In the same way that the most effective way to deflect, diffuse and terminate a social movement is to announce that it has been achieved (the feminist movement must contend with this on an almost daily basis), the most effective way to deflect inquiry is to present it as fulfilled. TV acts in this guise as a thinking presentation device which offers non-experience as experience and not-knowingness as knowing.
In the words of Mat Maxwell, "Television becomes the world for people.... The world becomes television." The overall and cumulative effect of the media is to heighten our insensitivity to reality. Rather than breaking the chains of ignorance, political domination and illusion in our Platonic cave, something insidiously similar yet different is going on. Instead of actually turning away from the shadows to see the realities, instead of actually leaving the darkness of the cave and going up into the sunlight, we merely watch an image of ourselves doing this, we fantasize about doing it and think it's the same.
