April 2005 – The Celestial Monochord

Deep Impact: NASA and Performance Art

On July 4th, NASA is going to bash a large plug of copper into a comet (discovered in 1867 by Ernst Temple). Nobody’s sure exactly what will happen — which is the main reason to do it — but it should make a sizable crater in the comet and generate a plume of ejecta.

NASA seems to like to schedule landings and other such events to coincide with holidays (July 4, December 24, etc.). Not only are people at home and watching TV, but NASA’s copywriters often try to manage some sort of tie-in. The resulting headllines can be agonizing.

In 2000, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft arrived at an asteroid (basically, a large rock) named Eros. A 1999 encounter had failed, and the spacecraft had to take more than a year to swing around again, so I believe the February 14th date of the encounter was a coincidence. But it generated endless headlines about Romancing the Stone in a Valentine’s Day NEAR-Eros tryst, etc., etc. I shudder to imagine the headlines this year’s unprovoked Independence Day attack on Comet Temple might generate in the USA or abroad.

In part, NASA designs its missions as public performace art and then tries to spin the missions to appeal to headline writers — but the agency is simply an inept storyteller. NASA’s unmanned robotic missions are incredibly cheap, completely safe, visually and conceptually dazzling to the public, and hugely productive scientifically — especially when compared to the wasteful and dangerous manned space program. Nothing NASA has done in the last 30 years has inspired more interest and support than missions like Voyager, Viking, the Mars rovers, or the Hubble Space Telescope. The credit for these successes goes not to the cleverness of the PR department or the cuddliness of the astronaut corps, but to the skill and creativity of NASA engineers and scientists. Just go with what you do best.

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Part 2: Slave Culture

Slaves on American currency

Years ago, reading the arguments in the 1800s over the abolition of slavery, I was struck by how often the debate turned to the religious beliefs of the slaves themselves. Pro-slavery types argued that slaves could not possibly grasp the notion of God or appreciate the stories in the Bible — and so slavery was OK.

After a while, this concern sounded almost desparate and obsessive, growing from fear: If slaves know who God is and God knows who slaves are, and if they pray to Him and He can hear them praying to Him, and they know He can hear them and He knows that they know He can hear them … well … well, white folks are going straight to Hell.

I’m very knowledgable about neither the Bible nor Negro spirituals. But it’s clear even to me that African American slaves didn’t merely understand the Bible, they related to it with a personal, creative passion that produced one of the most relentless, intense, complex, and beautiful musical traditions on Earth. This must have been troubling to some people, to say the least.

Both the Bible and Negro spirituals are basically examples of "slave culture" — their authors naturally understood each other. That’s what I suspect. I came to the realization when researching the many and varied versions of the Ezekiel story in Negro spirituals. I even resorted to reading the Book of Ezekiel …

To make a long story short, God takes his reluctant prophet Ezekiel to a field of very dry human bones. He tells Zeke to get those bones to get up take a little walk, and Zeke isn’t sure he can get that done. So God tells him "Look, I’m God, and I ain’t kidding around":

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.

Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

My mind reels, imagining the impact such a story must have had for an African American slave. In comparison, their white counterparts must have found the story rather, I don’t know … interesting?

Part 1

Steve Robinson: Astronaut Banjoist

Banjo Player and Mission Specialist, Steve Robinson

Believe it or not, the next Shuttle mission will send a banjo player into space. I mean, how monochordum mundi is that?

I wonder if he’ll play us Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away) from the launch pad. Anyway, check out NASA’s official pre-flight interview with Steve Robinson:

I still want to be a musician and an artist someday when I grow up. I play music and I play guitar in a rock and roll band, and I play banjo and mandolin and bass and a pedal steel guitar.

Remember, in space no one can hear you scream "Yowza!"

Black Jug Bands

Menphisjug

There’s so much to say about jug bands (believe it or not), it’s hard to know where to begin. Why not start with my own first impression — the thing that first made me realize there’s much more to the story than I thought.

Before my interest in old music, I’d thought string bands with jug accompaniment were a white thing — a really white thing. Well, don’t believe everything you see on the Andy Griffith Show, I guess. I purchased a two-volume compilation of early jug bands and was surprised to find that virtually all the performers were black … really black.

And although it’s turned out that the African American experience in the South in, say, the 1920’s was much more rural than I’d imagined (being a northerner), jug band music is an exception — the jug bands recorded in the 1920’s were usually urban, black, and southern. A few of these records do "sound rural" to me, but to that extent, these urban bands seem to be either making fun of country life, or tapping into a nostalgia for it.

I should also mention that the level of artistry was often extremely fine.

The whole thing is … well, not what I had expected.

John Prine: Fair & Square

John Prine, 2005

"Fair & Square," John Prine’s first album of new songs in a decade, was released today. I’m still absorbing it, but I like it just fine for an initial spin — I’ve hit "repeat" on several songs, which is a good sign.

A few years ago, Rolling Stone printed a story Prine told about running into Bob Dylan in a restaurant in Manhattan, if I remember correctly. They took a walk through the streets of Greenwich Village.

Prine doesn’t say precisely why — what in the conversation inspired it — but for some reason, at some point, Dylan says to Prine something like, "Come here, let me show you something." He leads Prine over to a night club where the ID-checker outside the door is a woman about 25 years old. Dylan says, "Do you know who I am? Who either of us are?" The woman looks at them very intently and answers, "No."

Philosophy of Science, Part 2 of 2

I got to meet a philosphy of science hero of mine, Joseph Rouse, and talk with him at length. At the end of the conversation, I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books. For a moment, he looked very puzzled — apparently, philosophers of science do not regularly have fans who ask to have their books signed. Once he got the idea, though, he seemed to relish the opportunity.

A minor point in that book keeps coming back to me. Imagine, if you will, that you and a friend are walking along and happen upon two people who are having an argument.

One is insisting, "Snow is white."
The other insists, "Snow is NOT white."

I don’t know why — maybe they’re artists, or meteorologists, or, maybe … zoologists?

Anyway, you and your friend are philospophers of science. You eavesdrop for a while and then get into your own argument.

You insist, "The statement ‘snow is white’ is true."
Your friend insists, "The statement ‘snow is white’ is false."

Now … the question is, what are you two philosophers contributing to this debate that the two orginal debaters could not contribute on their own? Unless you’re very much more careful, the answer is: Diddly Squat.

The problem has to do with what philosophers can do for (or do about) science without either becoming scientists on the one hand or, on the other, being totally irrelevent. If you want to debate whether quarks "really exist," or whether scientist’s conclusions really follow from the evidence they’ve gathered, you are likely to repeat the same arguments scientists themselves debate very regularly and with a much better command of the complications involved than philosophers usually enjoy.

Thinking about this deeply left me finally agreeing that science — if well done — is something I ultimately trust to answer its own questions. It also left me feeling that I should leave the question of the value of the philosophy of science to others.

Philosophy of Science, Part 1 of 2

I studied a lot of philosophy of science in grad school, and I’m very glad I did — it deepened the way I understand a lot of things that are very important to me personally. Still, looking back, most of the big questions I thought I was grappling with then no longer seem important to me, and ring a bit hollow. But two details do seem to keep coming back to me … and if they keep following me around, they must matter somehow.

We spent a lot of time talking about how much the stuff scientists talk about are "social constructs" — stories scientists tell each other as a group of folk that make up a culture — and how much they’re something else having more to do with the universe they study.

Always, during these discussions, some guy or other would get rather aggressive and try to prove that "things exist" by banging his fists on desks, kicking chairs, thumping his chest like an ape, etc.

Eventually, it became clear to me that whether or not desks are, in fact, hard is rarely a question that real scientists debate for very long. More typically, they debate things like, say, how to reconcile two experiments that give different answers for the precise magnitude of dark energy, or whether a certain experiment in a particle accelator really did create a certain particle for a miniscule moment, thereby implying some new form of energy field, and so on. There’s no need for philosophers of science to go around slapping themselves. The real questions are much more subtle.

You can draw whatever Moral of the Story you please. I suppose one lesson is that the most vivid, dramatic, immediately impressive arguments are very often not correct.

Thanks go to "The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations" by Ashmore, Edwards and Potter, in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology.

Shaking the Hell Out of Folks

Shaking
image adapted from poster at the Library of Congress

I think more deeply about pre-War folk and blues than I do most other music, so maybe it's me … but it seems striking how many of these old recordings have lines that ring in your head, multiplying and deepening and getting sweeter the more you think about them.

Probably, that's one thing Bob Dylan learned from the old music … but that's another story.

Uncle Dave Macon rewrote an old minstrel song into a song satirizing the automobile. His "Jordan Is a Hard Road To Travel" was a "topical" song when it was recorded in 1927, even though its sentiments were already old-fashioned. You can hear it at Hongking Duck, and the New Lost City Ramblers have a great cover of it on "40 Years of Concert Recordings."

For now, never mind the fascinating chorus with its reference to the River Jordan. Let's look at one of the verses:

You can talk about your evangelists
You can talk about Mr. Ford, too
But Henry's a-shaking more Hell out of folks
Than all the evangelists do

There are multiple jokes packed into these few lines.

The most literal is about the suspension system, tires, rough idle of those 1920's Ford flivvers, not to mention the terrible roads they had to travel. A ride in the country in a Model-T Ford was so rattling and convulsive that Uncle Dave considered it even more violent than the jostling you suffered in the Holiness and Pentecostal church services sweeping the USA in the 1920's. So, that's one layer of the joke, and a pretty funny one.

Uncle Dave disliked the automobile, in part because it put him out of business as a mule teamster. He also disliked the disruption the automobile caused in society, in the way people lived. Ford's production methods and the cars they produced brought wrenching changes in the economy, social hierarchies, family structures, and geography of the USA, and fast. These shocks were widely discussed and debated.

So maybe we have the convulsive services of the Evangelists trying to shake people until all the hellishness comes out of them, while Ford's disruptions are bringing out the hell in people in quite another sense. And in this battle, Dave thinks Ford is winning.

But there's still one more joke in this little verse. Uncle Dave would have known very well that the Ford Motor Company had long campaigned to instill "moral purity" and "family values" in its autoworkers. They sent company reps to the workers' homes for surprise inspections, looking for booze, tobacco, loose women, soiled linens, etc. Henry Ford, like the evangelists, was trying to save souls.

As part of this effort, Ford also sponsored old-time fiddle contests with enormous cash prizes, believing that white, down-home fiddling was more wholesome than the hot African American-influenced jazz and blues so popular in the era. Every mention of these contest I've seen treats them as a strategy by Henry Ford to instill his beloved conservative values in his workers and customers.

I haven't made a thorough study of it, but I suspect Ford also, or instead, wanted to improve the reputation of his product. He wanted to associate his newfangled contraption with old-time values, thereby dispelling the stench of sex, jazz, and chaos that seemed to hover around the automobile in the minds and noses of many potential customers.

I doubt Uncle Dave's sharp wit could have missed the irony that Henry Ford was pushing nostalgia and wholesomeness at the same time he was creating a sinful new American culture.

You can talk about your evangelists
You can talk about Mr. Ford, too
But Henry's a-shaking more Hell out of folks
Than all the evangelists do

Lisa Simpson Goes to Banjo Camp

My wife Jenny reports that the episode of The Simpsons that aired on Sunday, April 17 briefly showed Lisa Simpson wearing a t-shirt that said “Banjo Camp.” I missed it because I glanced down to peel a shrimp. I would love a screenshot of it, if anybody out there can make that happen for me.

Also, if anyone would kindly explain to me just what’s so funny, exactly, about wearing a t-shirt that says “Banjo Camp” …

UPDATE (April 26, 2005)

It turns out that Lisa’s shirt actually said “Band Camp”:

Bandcamp

“Banjo Camp” was merely wishful thinking on Jenny’s part. Ah well, it could happen to anyone. Actually, it does explain a lot — of course, band camp is for dweebs, and so, is funny. But banjo camp? That would’ve needlessly alienated a key demographic, don’t you think?

Art and Science on “Morning Edition”

NPR’s Morning Edition has been airing a series exploring the intersections between art and science. It’s had some fine moments, and it’s definitely worth listening to on the web. Probably my favorite segment was on Louis and Bebe Barron, pioneers of electronic music in the 1950’s.

An apparently eccentric husband and wife team, the Barrons found ingenious ways to get crude 1950’s-era electronics to make strange noises. Frequently, they would deliberately push circuits beyond their limits, creating various whirrs, whistles, and pops as the circuitry fried — that is, they made instruments that made music through self-destruction.

The home page of the series reads like a kind of Dream-Jobs-Only classifieds section.