empty signifiers

The card game we consider "solitaire" is in fact a French invention, as the earliest texts still remaining are written by Frenchmen in French explaining the rules of the game of "Patience." Patience games became popular in Britain, and from there spread to the Americas with the expansion of the British empire.

What is solitaire, though? Why do we play it the way we do? What does the game communicate to us? Games meant for an individual are often seen as a way to pass the time, to occupy the mind, to busy the fingers. But games are agreements, contracts entered into between players, or between the player and the game itself. The game and the agreement are both encapsulated in the rules of the game. The rules are the reason you play the game, and the very thing you play, simultaneously. Whether you expect it or not, the act of playing the game is an act of agreement, and it is worth taking a minute to examine what you're agreeing to.

Start at the start. What is the card? Pairing a unit of measure with an amount of the same; it is almost a mnemonic device to teach Arabic numerals. The numeral 2, and two diamonds, two clubs, two hearts, two spades. But after the numeral ten, we encounter the "face" cards--the anthropomorphic display of royalty, the Jack, the Queen, the King, and ending paradoxically with the ace, alphabetical, anumerical. We have an unexpected island of humanity in a sea of abstraction, of quantized units. And they are not just any people, they are the ruling class.

The by-now-familiar game of Solitaire we all recognize begins with an arrangement of seven stacks of cards, with each stack consisting of the same number of cards as its position from the left (that is, the first stack from the left contains one card, the second stack two cards, etc.). The goal is to order the cards into suits, beginning with the ace and ascending numerically until reaching the king. But to achieve this goal we first order the cards into four stacks, starting with kings, and arranging them in a flip-flop color order--red, black, red, black (Stendhal would surely approve).

It is almost an exercise in mannered futility. Begin with one arbitrary hierarchy--that of space and number--and replace it with another arbitrary hierarchy, a mixture of color and number, while aiming at yet a third arbitrary hierarchy of homogeneity. What is it about? What are we agreeing to? What is its purpose, locked in the rules?

It does not seem to mean anything. It does not seem to have a purpose other than killing time.

But we begin with a hierarchy. A progression through space from left to right of an increasing quantity. And to progress through space is to progress through time; we begin with one card and apportion our stacks with more and more, until we have seven cards at the end of the line. We seed the stacks, arrange the layout, set the field ourselves.

It is easiest to remove the stack with the fewest cards, and to do so is to open the space that stack used to occupy. One can fill empty spaces only with kings, with patriarchs; and from the patriarchs we descend until we have an ordered kingdom descending to the lowest quantity. We alternate colors but we are not finished. We must arrange the cards into their own suits in reverse order, until the king lands on top, in his rightful place at the throne.

The game speaks to ethnicity and segregation, to the rightness of homogeneity and clearly-defined color boundaries. In today’s cards the backdrop is whiteness, but it would be wrong to speak of “white” cards; no, the colors are red and black, and the redness and the blackness is a point of difference, a dimension to be controlled for, a reason to arrange. In the initial stage of the game we place black cards on red cards and vice versa, but only in tightly-controlled descending numerical order. In the final stage—to “win” the game—we place the colors in the same pile, rearranging our initial diffusion, creating two stacks of each color. That is winning, that is the state in which we seek to move the universe of solitaire: every color has its place.

That white is not a color of the cards is telling. It is the backdrop, the canvas against which red and black are defined. Whiteness is the state of things until color comes to mar the canvas with contrast. There is no reason to consider white in the cards as a special entity, because white isn’t even a color here.

Some things to think of next time you play the cards and rearrange the colors into their proper order. The imperialist in Napoleon surely saw the draw in being able to arrange your own universe, to lay the colors down in quantities, to take the extant numbers and move them according to your whim. It speaks to the ethnocentricity of imperialist Europe in its entirety, in its previous business with the slave trade, in the future destruction of the Native American.

Perhaps there is no hint of overt conquest in the game, and this is simply “reading too much into it.”

Maybe it’s just not in the cards.

07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The hardest part of starting up a side business while still keeping the nine-to-five is trying to drum up enough business to make it all worthwhile, and simultaneously drumming up just enough business that I'm not overwhelmed. Not entirely sure I've hit the Goldilocks point yet.

There's articles brewing, including one promising one about the reflections on religion of the illusion of omnipotence in video games, that should be pretty ripe for a fresh insight. But I've got Photoshop work to complete, prints to have printed, web pages to create, and most importantly a corporate identity (not my own) to solidify before I can even begin thinking about writing a worthwhile article. I might put up stub entries or compile a list of interesting links, but I apologize if there isn't more of substance available. There's a lot happening.

01:35 AM | Permalink

If I can be said to have a writing process, it is something like this: Sit down in front of computer. Open word processor. Be visited by a woman wearing a long bedsheet and more than likely a funny hat. Read what I just wrote so when people ask me about it I will know what's going on.

But, to move away from too-vague jokes about Greek mythology, this is basically a description of how I've always written. There is a definite need for inspiration, otherwise I just roll in circles, but at the same time when I sit to the screen I can usually depend on some kind of inspiration. The spontaneity is not much of a factor when it comes to putting the words all down, because a large part of how I write is to be struck at four in the morning with a phrase, and later that evening start with the phrase and let it snowball into something else.

Among psychologists who've studied writing, they have agreed that there is a phenomenon called "flow" where the writer is, to put it in a trite sports metaphor, "in the zone." (The psychology speak is "lack of presence.") That is, the writer who finds the flow is no longer aware of himself, only of the story. This is how I write. It is not so much stringing words together to form sentences as it is letting the film reel unwind in my head. I watch these narratives happen, and when the narrative is over, there are words and sentences and paragraphs. When I go about re-reading them, I experience the same effect, if I have done a good job.

That's how I proofread. How quickly does the film come back, and does it look like it did the first time? My mom will tell you that description has always been my strong suit. Perhaps this is why: I'm not writing a story so much as condensing a vision into some other medium. This has been most evident in what I'd consider my "good" stories, the ones that started most strongly in my imagination, the ones that I thought I wrote the best.

One of these days (and count them one closer, as I have written more tonight) when I finish my manuscript, A Life of Fire, and after it's published, we'll see if it comes across as any less psychotic than it seems to me.

11:51 PM | Permalink

The box office for Stubb's is operated by Front Gate Tickets (and since they're not Ticketmaster I feel okay linking to them), who has a promotion going with the online music site eMusic. I got a promo card in the mail that offered 50 free downloads from eMusic, and while I'm not certain that's actually an exclusive with Front Gate, I figured I'd try it out anyhow.

One of the albums I purchased proved to be quite the costly maneuver for eMusic. Their subscription plans allow you a quota of song downloads a month, which is why the "gift card" promotion makes sense--it's a taste of how you operate their particular scheme. Well, after hunting around through their plethora of indie and lesser-known artists, I came across a group I had long heard of but never listened to.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is perhaps most closely associated with Mogwai, their Scottish spiritual brethren; but where Mogwai's instrumental post-rock mirrors the personal apocalypses of the British lower working class, the music of GY!BE speaks to something a bit more North American in its paranoia and darkness.

Both bands are equally capable of trudging through the horrors of a lonely, empty existence. Mogwai uses that nihilism to fuel its own aggressive rage, its tearing guitars and its screaming pools of feedback. Mogwai makes music that seems inextricably tied to its homeland, the violence and the agony of the Irish outbursts, the claustrophobic, industrial feelings of a dirty mill town.

The album I purchased is called Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, a title I alluded to in a poem of my own, written a few years ago. The image that evocative name conjures for me is that of Job, kneeling on the broken ground among his ruined moments, railing at the God who has abandoned him. The first track is "Gathering Storm," and for the first three-quarters it is nearly triumphant, almost Sigur Ros-inspired in its sweeping sublimity. As the final crescendo whistles out into a crying guitar's squeal, it becomes eminently clear that the ascendancy is short-lived. What follows is a melancholy, guarded, schizophrenic album, incorporating found sounds ("Terrible Canyons of Static" includes the nightmarish fever-dream of a street preacher, almost Gnostic in his assertions of special knowledge), the wails of violins, and a haunting emptiness in its soundscape that speaks to primal fear.

I described Mogwai's atmospherics, and how they display a purely British melancholy; it is no surprise that the same empire that produced the rage and the fury of the Sex Pistols could create a band of disenchanted men writing songs like "Moses? I Amn't." But GY!BE's milieu is much more sinister, inspired equally by the Cold War as any musical movement. The hollow minimalism and the shifting, minor-key explorations would not be out of place in the soundtrack of 28 Days Later or 12 Monkeys, films of the aftermath of humanity's self-destruction.

GY!BE hails from Canada, but their music and its fears of military-industrial dominance, of empty cities and wasted landscapes, of surveillance and totalitarianism, is just as poignant and frighteningly moving today as it would have been had it been released in the 1960s. Not a casual listen by any means, but this stunning work is highly recommended.

07:46 PM | Permalink

In 2002, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand as part of a medical forum for college students potentially interested in healthcare careers. Having long ago decided that a doctor's life was not for me, I went along anyhow, considering it was a trip to Australia and New Zealand--and God knows when I'll ever get the chance to go back.

During our stay in northeast Queensland, we visited an aboriginal community healthcare center. Because of metabolic differences between the aboriginal population (which is by no means a singular entity--there are many different populations and tribes of aborigines in Australia), the incidence of diabetes was a particularly strong cause of rising morbidity among the locals. To peoples whose hereditary background included long times of famine, extraordinary physical exertion to support a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and the relative lack of suitable plantlife for agriculture, the simple carbohydrates of European food are murderous.

The head of the community healthcare center spent a bit of time discussing the challenges specific to treating an aboriginal community from both the cultural viewpoint and the symptomatic side of the issue, and at the end of the lecture we had a short break to get a snack and stretch our cramped legs. Most of the seventy other students went outside into the Cairns sunshine, but I stayed in the cool of the classroom--the midmorning light in Oz has teeth, and it takes only fifteen or twenty minutes to feel bruises stemming from the gold light in the empty blue sky.

For the four or five of us left, the director began a story of a patient he'd treated, whose Anglicanized name was Michael. (The Australian colonial government in the 1910s and '20s began a movement toward isolating and "breeding out" aboriginal bloodlines by separating families and enforcing surgical sterilization, much akin to the United States' own activities against American Indians.) When he was a younger man, he'd lived in an aboriginal boarding house with other young people who'd been separated from their families by the Australian military.

Michael loved a local girl, an aborigine woman he'd met while tending officers' stables at the garrison adjacent to the boarding house. Her new, European name was Angela, and from all accounts Michael believed the young woman was his angel, sent from Heaven to allow him a measure of peace and happiness in his harsh life. Michael had planned to marry Angela, and had gathered traditional presents and artifacts made by members of a neighboring tribe as wedding gifts. With the presents in hand, he began the four-mile walk back to the boarding house and the outpost.

When he arrived in the little farmstead he planned to cultivate with Angela, he found an Australian military officer and two cohorts waiting in his living room. Angela was not to be found. Concerned, Michael asked the officers what had happened to his fiance; the officer told Michael that he had asked Angela to marry him, and she had accepted. Michael could not provide her a lifestyle in this environment, whereas the trappings of the officer's salary would make quite a comfortable homestead. That this served to further dilute the aboriginal genepool was a benefit to social policy, but finding himself with a beautiful girl as his wife was surely not objectionable to the officer.

Stunned, Michael left the homestead and walked to the stables. There he found a machete used to clear scrub. Entranced, scattered, his thoughts distant and broken, he walked back to the homestead that was no longer his, and buried the half-moon blade in the back of the officer's skull. Leaving the body bleeding behind him, Michael shed his Anglican name, his linen clothes, and with nothing covering him but shadow and anger he ran into the bush. He was 20.

In 1985, an old and sun-scarred man came out of the jungle to live in the city. He lived a normal life, visited restaurants, and haunted the outskirts of town. He had no children and no family, and the local government--in an act both of contrition and kindness--provided him a modest stipend to live in a one-bedroom apartment in a low income complex.

During the next twelve years, the man without a name changed. His body, muscular and thin, lost its tone. His lungs lost their air; the arches of his feet collapsed. He could no longer run for miles, could no longer run from the first whispers of morning until the sun collapsed in exhaustion and the stars sparkled above. As he became accustomed to the European diet, his health decayed.

In 1998, the director of the aboriginal clinic oversaw an operation on the old man: the amputation of his left foot just above the ankle. The ravages of diabetes destroyed his body, and the ulcers on his foot had become septic and gangrenous. One of diabetes' hallmark symptoms is neuropathy, the tingling and pain that comes from the slow death of the nerves in the extremities. He could not feel the cuts on his feet, and the swelling from edema had bloated them so that his shoes, once a stylish fit, had become tourniquets. Without circulation, flesh cannot heal; and without pain, he never knew anything was wrong.

Two months after he lost his foot, the old man died.

When he had emerged from the wilderness those years ago, the old villagers had recognized him, had known he was the man they talked about in local histories and folktales. The man who'd returned to the bush, the man who had spent fifty-one years in the wilderness, who had returned as fit and healthy as the day he had left. The old man had left his name behind, and in the lonely Outback had no need for another. The white Australians just knew him as the crazy drunk who'd come in from the jungle. The aborigines knew him by a different name, spoken sadly.

He was the man who had left to find the Dreamtime, before the changing ways, before the shaping of the world. He had sought out the Dreamtime and the formlessness and the magic of the old days.

The man who lost his way.

The man who died without dreaming.

11:19 PM | Permalink

So my professional enterprise, the Brightside Media Company, now has both a logo and a stack of approximately 200 or so business cards to its name. The wheels are rolling and hopefully the momentum will only build, until I've got what's a proper company on my hands.

There are, probably, only 3 drawings I've ever made in my life that I'm proud of. (All others I disavow, for I am literally terrible at producing representative drawings.) The abstracted lightbulb I've produced here, meant also to evoke the shape of the question mark, is one of those few drawings I've ever liked.

On BSMC's site you can see the rough I produced with a tablet and a scan of the sketch, as and then you can visit the final printed version of the business card. It's one of my prouder moments when it comes to producing art, and I've already handed out several of the cards to my clients.

10:54 PM | Permalink

We all play games, and we all play games of thousands of different types. Some of us appreciate sports more than anything else, but a sport is still a game; some of us play card games, some play games with animals, others play games by themselves. With the rise of the Internet there has come a new kind of game, or at least a new ability to communicate and play games with a broader variety of people at any one point in time. The type of game I'm referring to is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, heretofore abbreviated MMORPG (or more simply, MMO). And the most popular of all MMOs is World of Warcraft (referred to below as either "WoW" or "Warcraft").

But WoW is not technically a game.

Games are a certain kind of human activity, and while there is no real philosophical consensus as to the nature of the game, we might be able to settle on a broad definition. Games are activities, and those who engage in the activity of the game are said to be "players." The players participate in the game by pursuing the goal of the game while simultaneously following the rules. If there are no rules, one is not playing a game. Similarly, if there is no goal, one is also not playing a game. There isn't much of a specialized word describing the activities one undertakes if one attempts to play a game without rules or a goal, and this is yet another area of contention (for if something is not a "game" what is it, and how does one play it?), but what I would call the activity described above is playing pretend.

As an aside, the imaginative faculties are required to play games, as one needs to accept the artificial restrictions of the rules. As games have gotten more advanced, the rules have become more naturalistic; often the rules of MMOs and Warcraft in particular mimic what might be considered the fundamental rules, i.e., the laws of physics and our universe. In WoW in particular the rules place limits on the ability of a character to function, in the form of health and what might loosely be grouped as "energy." And where WoW departs from the rules of physics, there are imaginative flights that deviate from the laws but are still restricted--magic, for instance, is restrained by a limited amount of magical energy available to the character. Such energy must be regenerated either by drinking, which itself is dependent on a finite resource, or simply by the passage of time.

(I call the laws of physics and nature "rules" because they are conditions one must accept before engaging in practical behaviors; no matter how much you deny gravity, or the need for oxygen, there is no escaping their existence or necessity. So while they are not rules insofar as rules are restrictions on activity based on agreement, they nonetheless function in an identical manner.)

So it is acceptable that WoW and MMOs have rules; but one of the rules of all games is that the game stops when a condition is fulfilled. This is the goal of the game, and the goal is simply another rule, but a rule that defines when play ends; it is something of a self-aware rule, or a rule that restricts not simply the player's actions in the universe of the game, but the game itself. Thus games need conditions of "victory" to escape from the boundaries of pretend or imagination and to become games. This is where I recently ran into quite the roadblock when discussing Warcraft with fellow players.

To explain why a game requires a victory condition is a controversial segment of the anthropological and sociological study of games. A game without victory is a simple rote exercise; there is no reason, no motivation for playing beyond the continuation of the pretend universe. You do not see people playing variants of checkers wherein pieces are "jumped" but not removed from the board; without the possibility of winning the simplicity of the game is not enough to hold one's interest. Nor does the game provide what one might consider the fundamental benefit of the game: a foundation in the nature of strategy.

Chess is often likened to warfare, and indeed the pieces are modeled on the trappings of a feudal society. Ramparts and siege towers (rooks), the mount as the representation of the knight, the oblique movement of the bishop, and the near-omnipotence of the queen (and intriguingly the coincidental impotence of the king, in a rare moment of feminist empowerment prior to the 20th century). There are strong lessons learned by playing chess. How to plan ahead for unexpected contingencies; how to cover your own plans and deceive your opponent; but the most basic lesson of them all is the nature of consequence. One cannot blindly move in chess without coming to a quick defeat. Like all games, a recitative knowledge of the rules is no guarantee of victory. Strategies inside those rules, that is, skillful manipulation of the game without breaking the agreements reached by the players, teach those same players that there are consequences to each action. And that those consequences often have disastrous costs.

Some of the simple "games" or exercises we play with our animal friends are not, traditionally, games. Throwing a ball back and forth may be an activity that one can "play," but the act of play is not necessarily denotative of the game. This is the logical fallacy of one opponent of my ideas, that the nature of the game is that it is played; and in pointing out that one plays all manner of nongames, he dismissed this as "playing syntax" (which, again, strictly speaking is "playing semantics," as we are arguing over the definition of a word and not its placement in a sentence). One plays songs, instruments, movies, we engage in play with babies and dogs and cats and our significant others, but no one claims that the act of playing instruments or songs or movies is necessarily the act of playing games. Games are a subset of a larger set we might name "Things We Play."

But back to the matter at hand. The truth of it is, almost all MMOs are nongames, and Warcraft in particular is a nongame. Why is this so, and does this necessarily denigrate the software if we do not refer to it as a "game"? The latter answer is "No, it does not denigrate Warcraft," but the other question is somewhat more difficult to respond to.

The business model of the MMO is that of subscriptions. Warcraft as a specific example charges $40 for the purchase of the software (or as their lawyers likely describe it, for the purchase of a "license" that allows one to play the software at the publisher's sole discretion), and a further $15 a month for access to the servers that allow the player to join the game. For as long as you wish to play, you must pay the publisher that $15 a month access fee. It is then in the best interests of the developer to "hook" the individual into paying that access fee for as long as possible, as the longer the individual continues to pay, the more profit is generated by each subscriber.

One possible way to keep the subscriber on the hook for as many months as possible is to create a huge software "world" for the subscriber to explore. Of course, the larger the initial development effort, the more money the developer must put at risk in the hope of generating a hit product. Another tactic is to promise the subscriber the continued and regular release of new content, essentially expanding the available world as a kind of reward for continuing to subscribe. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the MMO genre is convincing individuals to continue to engage in their world where there is no hope of ending or success. There is no victory condition defined for these software universes; to allow a player the possibility of victory is to provide an avenue for the termination of a subscription.

Now there is a term peculiar to the entertainment software industry in describing these activities without victory conditions, and that term is "sandbox." The obvious reference is to the child's sandbox, the generally turtle-shaped (in my own limited childhood observations) box that allows children to play and create with the sand whatever they will. There is no victory condition, obviously, and it's meaningless to discuss rules for the sandbox; but insofar as software is a construct written to the specifications of the programmer and the machine the software will eventually run on, there are necessarily rules to the operation of the software's universe (and to the participant's interaction in the software's universe). So while sandboxes have rules, they lack the necessary victory conditions to be considered "games." One of the earliest sandboxes, if not the earliest, is Will Wright's SimCity. The participant was given a plot of land to develop into a bustling metropolis, while dealing with the ravages of time, limited resources, and natural disasters. But no matter how long one participated, no matter how well one controlled the growth and maintenance of one's city, the software never ended. One never achieved any kind of satisfaction or ending outside of the goals one set for him or herself.

Thus SimCity is not a game--one can never "win" SimCity, as the sandbox never ends its simulation. Perhaps what Will Wright had meant to accomplish was to subtlely encode a nihilistic worldview of the futility of human action on the environment in such a way that children would purchase it and fill his bank accounts, but that is one particular brand of speculation that might be entirely too cynical to be true. In any circumstance, the impetus to play the game was a kind of cruel test of endurance, pitting human frailty against the inhuman machine. Given the choice of who would tire first, gray matter will collapse before circuitry.

WoW is similarly a sandbox, but for different reasons. There are edges against which one's progress might falter (namely, the "level cap" of 60, and the cap on skill progression at 300; though the level cap will be extended to 70 with the upcoming expansion pack), but there is no clear moment at which one could be said to have "won" World of Warcraft. Winning is an activity predicated on exclusion. For one to win, others must fail. To have games wherein all are winners is to defeat the purpose of the game; it is akin to having a game wherein attaining the victory condition is impossible. I would argue the latter before accepting there is a clear victory condition for WoW, as part of the nature of victory conditions is that they are self-aware rules established by the participants. Winning must be a recognizable event for there to be a win, or a victory.

Wittgenstein argued that games are necessary elements of human interaction, but his scope of the term "game" was somewhat ludicrously wide. (This specifically is a reference to his assertion that language itself is a game, which the nature of recent explorations into linguistics and the psychology of language would suggest that it is only a game if one can be said to play a game wherein the rules are everchanging and the tokens one uses to recognize each player are similarly arbitrary, that is, a game where the rules are not only unrecognizable, but fundamentally uknowable in their entirety.) Part of the necessity is the victory condition, and this is the more-positive flipside to the dark undercurrent of the game: that part of the nature of the game is failure.

One must be capable of losing to be capable of playing; an endless exercise of the imagination is not a game. While most of those who enjoy interacting with the sandbox model do so because they set their own goals and their own victory conditions, it does not elevate the sandbox to the nature of the game. Instead there is an argument to be made that the granular transaction of the individual to the sandbox might be characteristic of playing a game. But this holds mostly for single-participant sandboxes, as once one enters into agreement with other participants via acceptance of rules, the granular transaction disappears into a cloudier group interaction with the software itself.

Nowhere have I expressed that "game" is inherently more valuable a descriptor than "sandbox," for self-determination is something that sandboxes are uniquely qualified to impart to the participant, wherein games reinforce a respect for hierarchy and an acceptance of consequence. They are different animals, but neither is a better animal than its counterpart.

05:42 PM | Permalink

On Wednesday evening, I went to Stubb's Barbecue here in Austin for 101X's (the local alternative station) first birthday concert series. The headliner was Britain's own much-hyped Arctic Monkeys, with a supporting act of my personal favorite, We Are Scientists.

First, a discussion about the venue in general. Stubb's is a great place to see a show, as it's an informal collection of a handful of bar stations, merchandising outlets, and a great open gravel pit in front of the bandshell. The only separation between yourself and the front row is a sharp pair of elbows and the inevitable tall fellow who steps in front of you just as you try to edge past. The downside to Stubb's in the beginning of a hotter-than-average summer is the temperature. When sundown hits at 8:45, and the temperature is still a searing 96 degrees, the midst of the crowd is easily 110.

Because of 101X's heavy promotion, and the Monkeys' position as the current contender for the "Biggest Band Since Oasis" (which they share with pretty much every band since Oasis), I was easily one of the 10 oldest people at the concert. I have yet to stay alive for a quarter of a century, and yet I felt old; the number of us who could legally purchase alcohol was vastly outnumbered by the throngs of high schoolers wearing cutoff Dickies shorts, "vintage" band t-shirts, and plaid neckties. I did manage to strike up a conversation with a friendly photographer covering the concert for a local alternative magazine, who alongside his editor happened to make up an entire fifth of the oldest demographic at the show.

And what a show it was. We Are Scientists's debut album, With Love and Squalor, is a blisteringly tight compilation of songs. The band is a trio, guitar-bass-drums, and it leaves the majority of the group's particular flavor in the hands of extraordinarily competent lead guitarist Keith Murray. With twisting guitar lines and flickering distortion, he carves out a haunted, urgent place for his own peculiar vocals inside the music. The lyrics are quite the clever commentary, both piercing and self-effacing, and in particular one of my favorite lines comes from the propulsive, bouncing "Inaction":

It's hard to rely on the rhythmn section/ When they're all packing up/ And they're heading for the exit/ Yeah we're all about the same/ A bunch of slaves to fashion/ Who are tall, dark and scared/ And just praying for some action/ How am I supposed to know what makes this happen?/ (How am I supposed to know what makes this happen?)

Their music is complex, unfolding on repeated listens; it's also immediately accessible, and relies on refreshingly few production tricks. Their live show is energetic, frenetic, and frequently unexpected--one of their great tricks is to begin wrapping up the song they're playing, and immediately bridge it into the introduction of another song, often one nonadjacent on the album. The unexpected juxtaposition, and their playfulness with our expectations, leads to a positive, enjoyable vibe. The crowd responded effusively to their off-hand absurdist jokes and the stripped-down music alike.

As the Scientists left the stage, the sun sank below the horizon; I busied myself buying t-shirts and beer. Shiner is the latter, and a plain "Arctic Monkeys" logo tee and a brilliant "i are scientists" shirt the former. Having chatted a bit with a crewmember named Timothy on the vagaries of the Nashville music scene, as well as the Steve Wariner show I caught at Stubb's this Sunday past, I spoke again to Eric the friendly photographer as he readed himself to dash before the crowd and catch a few shots of the Monkeys during their set. I edged my way into the first few rows and myself snapped a roll or so with a lomographic camera I received as a Christmas present (and will upload those accordingly after I receive them from my processor). The Monkeys took the stage and opened with, surprisingly, a ballad.

Staying in the pit for their first two or three songs, I retreated to the relative safety of the back of the venue for the remainder of their set. Their mixing was atrocious, their onstage energy absent, and their musicianship sorely lacking. Dressed in torn t-shirts, staggering and more than likely drunk, they had the charisma of wornout gym socks, and projected the air of bored teenagers waiting for something to happen. Perhaps they did not receive the memorandum that they were supposed to happen.

I set myself a goal for listening to the Monkeys: I would wait until I heard their radio-friendly single, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," and then I left the venue with my ears ringing and my legs weak. With the bass and the feed from the drums overwhelming the lead guitar, what I heard of the song was mostly an unintelligble mumbling of the lyrics--with an equally unintelligible call-and-response--and the clattering bang of kick drums and cymbals.

I left Stubb's with a very definite feeling of disappointment: that the Monkeys' live show is terrible; that they've relegated We Are Scientists to their supporting act; that I did not leave immediately after We Are Scientists. But what's done is done, and of all the shows to go to, W.A.S. put on a hell of a live act. Here's to more success for the New York trio, and hopefully the Arctic Monkeys will fade as easily into the background as they have exploded into prominence.

01:28 AM | Permalink

Written for Steve Wariner's site.

Living in Austin, Texas is a bit like living inside a kaleidoscope: The various flavors of local establishments crash against each other to produce a rainbow of individual experiences, and yet the town retains a coherent atmosphere nonetheless. We have the world-famous South by Southwest music festival; in February I saw an Icelandic orchestral rock group named Sigur Ros; and on Sunday, June 4, Steve Wariner came to play at Stubb's Barbecue.

Stubb's is one of the more eclectic venues in town, with a stacked-stone barbecue restaurant next door to the venue. It was built in the 1960s after Christopher B. "Stubb" Stubblefield, the owner, returned from the Korean War and began opening barbecue restaurants and fairgrounds in Lubbock. Stubb's in Austin has hosted rocker Stevie Ray Vaughan, bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, and even Linda Ronstadt!

It was here, at sundown, with the temperature close to ninety degrees, that I came and stood on the gravel and waited for Steve to take the stage. There was an air of anticipation as the sunlight faded to a reddish-yellow. More and more people moved toward the stage, crowding around the bandshell, and when the lights came up and Steve appeared with the band, everyone burst into a sustained cheer at once. Steve was in top form as he played, mixing such old favorites as "Kansas City Lights" and "The Weekend" with more contemporary hits like "Two Teardrops" and "Burning the Roadhouse Down," and the crowd was there with him, singing and hollering and pumping clenched fists into the night air.

Steve's set had the manic energy of the last night on the road, and the people gathered to hear it were responsive and friendly. I was truly impressed with the diversity of the audience—there were men and women of all ages, long-time fans and UT students alike, cheering and hollering and singing with him at the top of their lungs. Notably, Texas's own Governor Perry was in attendance, snapping photographs and waving from the balcony.

Halfway through the set Steve stopped for a moment, to talk about how much he appreciates the fans who come to his shows and the listeners that sing along. As his voice stretched into the sustained holler that opens "Longneck Bottle," the crowd erupted into whistles and applause.

The medley that followed, of "Longneck," "Nothin' but the Taillights," and "Where the Blacktop Ends," really showcased the variety of Steve's songwriting skills. That the old-school honky-tonk of "Longneck" could flow so readily into "Taillights'" easy country-rock, and that the thumping, hooky bass of "Where the Blacktop Ends" seemed such a natural conclusion, is quite the testament to the band's wide-ranging talents.

Though they played for an hour and a half minutes with a palpable energy and an infectious enthusiasm, the time came for the set to wind down, as the sun had long since set and the air cooled. After closing initially with the poignant and beautiful "Holes in the Floor of Heaven," Steve and the band came back onstage for an encore amidst the screams and whistles and raised hands of all those gathered around him.

It was a great show for a great crowd of young and old alike. Much as the other concert-goers will attest, the other acts that grace the stage at Stubb's Barbecue will have to work hard to top Steve's dynamite set.

10:12 PM | Permalink

How intriguing it is to find yourself seen through the lens of someone else's perspective. There also comes a point, however, when the multiplicity becomes solipsism, and the loathing you glimpse in that foreign perspective is clouded by self-pity. History is written by the winners, it seems, but there are no winners when we find ourselves on the wrong end of a thousand sharp days and the lonelier gulf of a foggy memory.

The internet makes itself dangerous by its very nature. A web of thorns that connects and curls in on itself, so every empty branch is inextricably tied to every needling briar. Its illusion of confidence is the other dagger in the back; you write what you believe to be a confessional, in the booth, and you find on the other side of the screen not a priest, but a microphone. Anonymity in this space is hard to come by, and impossible to recapture when it's lost.

But there are no means to correct some mistakes, and there are no ways to take back the words that have polluted the air of the past. History is dust, and the dusty fingers of broken sentences and half-remembered slights will choke you to death with papyrus grasp.

In plainer language, I have found on the Internet a page written from someone I knew a ways ago. What had once been affection has curdled into hate, and since before the anger was attraction I was unaware regardless.

The nature of existence is to stumble blindly through the world and hope when the lights come on at the end of things you haven't knocked too much over.

09:46 PM | Permalink

One of the search terms leading to this site was "illumanti symbols," and searching for "illumanti" (which I take to be a misspelling of "illuminati") leads the searcher to quite the discussion of secret conspiracies, religion, and, inevitably, "symbology" and The Da Vinci Code.

The characterization of "symbology" I outlined recently, which although it does reference Dan Brown's work The Da Vinci Code, does not make the point that the term originated with Brown nor that novel. What follows after the jump is, inevitably, a long, dry discussion of the nature of language from a semiotic standpoint, and I must stress that while the content that follows is based on my own academic studies in literary theory, as well as the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and the eminent deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, that is not to say these theories have not courted controversy. It is often hard to introduce "deconstructionism" into the terms of a discourse without immediately creating said controversy, but I stand by the discipline as an effective tool for isolating the mechanisms by which we create and communicate meaning through language.

My actual point is not that Dan Brown's atrocious The Da Vinci Code created or originated the term "symbology." My point is that it is not an academic discipline. While this will probably draw more flak, I am not denying that people have at some point very probably studied something they termed symbology. It is that there is no basis in academia for using the term. You do not study it in college, there are no journals to publish papers about "symbology," and to use that term in literary theory is to be misinformed as to the theoretical foundations of language.

As a study of symbols, the only proper academic field is semiotics (which you might also see written as semiology, but they are the same). Now, whereupon we derive the word semiotics is from the Greek, sema, "sign," and more completely, from semeioun, "to signal."

Semiology then is literally the study of signs. It is the study of systems of signs and the way in which language uses signs, and it is an important field of literary and linguistic theory. Semiotics has even contributed to psychology and the study of the mind (look for the works of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan and the study of psycholinguistics).

How do signs "mean"? How does a sign communicate meaning from one individual to another? This is the fundamental question of language: how does it work? And it is in answering this question that we dismantle the basis for a field of "symbology." A sign is the medium through which we transmit meaning. Following Lacan, we discern the sign is composed to two halves: the signifier, which is to say the strict symbol (in the case of writing the signifier is the specific word we use), and the signified, which is the concept we refer to (in this case, the idea we want to communicate).

Take the sign tree. It is composed of a signifier, the sequence of letters we write as “tree,” and it is also composed of the signified, which is the concept of a tree, the idea of a tall thing made of bark with leaves that derives nourishment from sunshine. The idea of the tree is a totally separate entity from the word “tree.” If all the English speakers in the world decided that “tree” no longer referred to the leafy, branchy thing, and instead we would refer to that idea by the word “gubble,” then it would be perfectly acceptable to do so. The glue that holds language together is mutual agreement, and nothing else.

The nature of language is arbitrary. We decode language by referring to the signs we’ve already learned, and extrapolating from there, as well as asking other speakers more adept in the language to define these unknown signs for us. But it is only because we agree on what the signs mean that those signs actually mean anything. There is nothing about the word “tree” that suggests it is uniquely suited, or even correct, to use it to refer to the idea of the tree. This is why other languages actually use separate vocabularies--not because they are wrong, but because the speakers of those languages agreed on different sets of sounds to refer to the same concept.

This is why symbology as an academic discipline is in fact nothing more special than an everyday act of interpretation. For symbology to exist as a separate field of study, for it to be worthy of an entire branch of activity, requires it to be different in a fundamental way from the interpretation of other signs. This is not the case. Symbols are nothing more than signs with more than one referent. That is to say, it is one simple signifier (for example a cross), with several signifieds attached to it: the concept of resurrection; the concept of crucifixion; the concept of suffering; the concept of the afterlife; the concept of a footnote (as the cross is often an indicator of a footnote in legal, financial, or academic texts). Does this multiplicity of signifieds somehow require they all share a single signifier? No. It is simply yet another matter of agreement that symbols exist.

Another requirement for symbology to work as a discipline is for symbols to exist with some sort of unchanging or mandatory meaning. That one of the primary principles of symbology is the en/decoding of past information or wisdom is an indicator that the reading of symbols is not fundamentally different from the act of reading. Similar to Michel Foucault's plurality of authorship and meaning, the symbol exists as it does primarily because of a dichotomy in the audience of the symbol: the mainstream audience, who according to theory sees only the superficial layers of the symbol, and what I will refer to as the "gnostic" audience, those with the "special knowledge" required to examine the symbol and see its "true" or "correct" meaning.

But the plurality of meaning and the plurality of signifieds does not precipitate a correct answer. The symbol changes depending on the cultural assumptions and position of the viewer of the symbol. The practice of actually "decoding" the symbol is really nothing more than historical learning, tied to the peculiar history of a particular sect. That Freemasons have a vocabulary of symbols is not surprising. That they assert their interpretation of the symbols as "correct" is. The triangle is not always the symbol used to communicate the "sacred feminine" or the "sacred masculine." The triangle is, in some circumstances, the only way to communicate the closure of space into a segment of plane using the simplest number of mathematical points.

That particular sects have encoded their histories into a symbolic format is not a surprise, either. This is the act of communication at its most basic form: to condense your experience or thoughts into something which others will understand, you must encode your emotions and stream of consciousness into language. You do this automatically, as once you have attained language there is never any return to a prelingual mental state. Encoding meaning symbolically, or really, using any kind of metaphor or figurative language, is simply grasping the unstable nature of any particular sign and using it to your advantage. The ability to communicate in metaphor is hardwired into the human brain; research into synaesthesia--a condition wherein the human mind confuses the nature of different stimuli that often results in people experiencing the tactile feedback of a color, or the smell of a particular surface feeling--is yielding intriguing results into how our brain similarly encodes electrical signals into meaningful conscious information.

I have rambled for entirely too long. But the point of the article, if you take nothing else away, is this: the study of symbols is not a privileged enterprise, and the belief that symbols somehow have a "correct" or "true" interpretation that persists throughout time is incorrect. It is true that there is a particular context for the usage of symbols, and that reading symbols in context is likely to produce a particular intended meaning, but there is nothing different between this act of reading a symbol in context and, for instance, reading the newspaper in your native tongue. The decoding takes no special skills, requires no apparatus with which to begin the communication; all it requires is a foreknowledge of context that can easily be gleaned from history. "Symbology" is, then, rightly classified as both not an academic discipline, and further, as an activity that requires no further training than the ability to process language.

This is also the reason that all languages have not filtered down to using the same signs to refer to the same concepts. Other languages are, in fact, different, precisely because of the arbitrary nature of all language. Latin is what it is because the speakers of Latin decided upon a system to alter and create sounds in such a way that others could understand. They then developed a series of sounds, and written words as well, to refer to these common ideas. These Latin words are different from English; they are not, however, wrong. It is inane to discuss wrong or incorrect words outside of the context of the mutual agreement that holds language together.

How does this refer to symbology? It’s a pretty simple connection, actually. For symbology to be an academic discipline, it would require that symbols communicate meaning in a continuous logical stream, that their meanings be somehow absolute. This requires a “correct” interpretation of a symbol, and for the meaning of the symbol to exist as itself, separate from language. It’s nonsensical on its face to attempt to define a symbol as external to language and yet as a communicating object. All that communicates is a sign. Symbols themselves are signs, and so are chained to being arbitrary representatives of concepts. Metaphor, synecdoche, all symbols—and all symbolic or figurative language--is necessarily language.

Actually, there are two things you should take away from this article. The first being that "symbology" is not a priveleged or even real discipline.

The second?

Please, please don't read The Da Vinci Code. It's really, really terrible.

06:26 PM | Permalink

Off to Stubb's Barbecue to see the Arctic Monkeys and We Are Scientists.

Expect a writeup either late tonight or midday tomorrow!

06:25 PM | Permalink

First off there's recuperating from sickness. That's been a doozy--I got hammered by some kind of flu virus on Sunday when I was home, and it's taken about four or five days for me even to start eating again. Now that I am eating, sugary things are suddenly a hypersensitivity to my tastebuds. I can't explain that one.

Second, there's going to shows at Stubb's BBQ here in Austin. Woohoo!

Third, there's attempting to arrange a half-baked measure of competency from Yahoo! Small Business. Their domain system is an atrocious mixture of a lack of explanations, bastardized options menus, and illegible gibberish designed to keep your account in their greedy little hands. What I had originally intended, to separate out my personal blog from my professional web presence, and it's taken me this long to realize that I can't exactly do that when it's MY NAME attached to the address bar.

So there's how things stand for right now.

I'm planning on writing a post about Stubb's once I get back tonight, I'll let you know how the show goes. Wednesday has the Arctic Monkeys playing alongside We Are Scientists: good stuff ahead!

06:18 PM | Permalink