The Dish

Robin James looks at two recent NYT stories on urban noise through the lens of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (pdf):

Russolo was worried that traditional musical sounds were too pure to have any affective punch:

In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion (Russolo, 5).

Russolo thought we needed industrial noise to reinvigorate art music. “We get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds,” he argues, “than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies” (6). Modernist aesthetics value transgression and difficulty. The ability to tolerate and appreciate noise was a sign of avant-garde taste; so, cultural elites stereotypically valued “noisy” works, while the unwashed masses preferred kitsch. In the Times article, this modernist association between noise tolerance and privilege is reversed: sensitivity is a privilege reserved for those with means to protect themselves from it and preserve their delicate aural/affective palate, and noise-tolerance is the effect of exposure. …

You can even see this reversal in contemporary pop music aesthetics: mainstream pop–from the Biebs to Skrillex–is really noisy, while hipsters and NPR listeners prefer traditionally pretty, harmonious, folk-y, “new sincerity”-style artists.

Update from a reader:

This is as lazy as Thomas Friedman basing a column on a chat with a cabbie and as wrong as Peggy Noonan’s take on the IRS.

First, the use of the useless word “hipster” alongside NPR listenership as flags of privilege is lazy and tautological. Even if one charitably (in this context) interprets “hipster” as “trust fund kid”, I dare James to come to a show at Brooklyn’s Death by Audio or one of promoter Todd P’s more extreme events and come away insisting that “hipsters” don’t like noise. Likewise, I’d argue that the majority of free jazz fans today are probably NPR listeners. And can we merely stipulate that not all NPR listeners share the musical tastes of the producers who select the acts on the network’s air, as well as that a lot of “hipsters” like Skrillex?

Second, I don’t think it’s folks from Washington Heights, East New York, or Newark who flock to Lincoln Center to see performances of works by Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, etc. Or at Poisson Rouge on nights when noisier acts are playing.

Second, WTF does James mean by “noise” here? Bieber’s music is profoundly simple and euphonious. Skrillex is more complex but not by much. So it’s noise because it includes the same high-in-the-mix samples as so much other music today? If so, where would James put the original recyclers of the title of Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noise? Because at least here in the U.S., that band’s popularity was confined to college kids and … hipsters.

This is where blogging fails: when it attempts to offer instant and contrarian responses to more reasoned writing. I suggest a new Dish award, or at least a flag alongside the Poseur and Hathos alerts, for cultural analysis this lazy and jejune.

Laura Mallonnee studies the subject:

[M]aps as visual systems have never been objective, but are susceptible to manipulation–especially political censorship. Before statistics were widely available online from entities like the U.S. Census or the Center for Disease Control, the only mapmakers were either governments or large companies that could invest the capital to both gather the data and map it. Neil Alan, the current president of the North American Cartographic Information Society, pointed out that as a condition for its presence in China, Google currently lists the land contested in the Chinese-Indian border dispute as Chinese territory. Even color choice can be powerful. “Red is a warning, cautionary color, so you right away jade the readers by choosing the colors that you do,” he says.

In 2012, China put a map on its passport laying claim to a host of disputed territories, while in 2011, India forced The Economist to censor every copy of an issue featuring a map of Kashmir. In 2005, Mark Monmonier, author of How To Lie With Maps, wrote that maps by their nature are especially vulnerable to manipulation:

Most maps are massive reductions of the reality they represent, and clarity demands that much of that reality be suppressed. The mapmaker who tries to tell the whole truth in a single map typically produces a confusing display, especially if the area is large and the phenomenon at least moderately complex. Map users understand this and trust the mapmaker to select relevant facts and highlight what’s important. … When combined with the public’s naive acceptance of maps as objective representations, cartographic genrealization becomes an open invitation to both deliberate and unintentional prevarication.

Recent Dish on the power of maps here, here, and here.

(Image of a Dutch map from 1915. More propaganda maps here: “They were obtained from the University of Amsterdam website where you can zoom in to high magnification. [via Briefe an Konrad]”.)

A reader writes:

I want to echo what your reader said about his connections tethering him to the world.  I absolutely share the sentiment.  I have an objectively great life, full of privilege, but I feel as if I’m always carrying around a massive dark truth about reality.  At some point in my early 20s, I read a lot of existential philosophy and have been managing an existential crisis ever since.  I purposely create responsibility and connections in my life to keep myself from being able to consider ending it.  If I didn’t have my dog to take care of (and a family some day in the future, hopefully), I’d look at life in a “I could take it or leave it” manner.

Another reader:

I’ve never really responded to any of your posts but I felt compelled to write in about your new thread on suicide. Describing suicide as “among the most selfish acts” really resonated with me. In fact, it’s the exact lesson I learned after my failed (thankfully) suicide attempt at the age of 14.

I was in a coma for three days and I woke up to absolute devastation around me.

My parents, brother, and friends were horribly affected. For years afterwards my mother suffered from a sort of PTSD, having frequent and intrusive flashbacks to the memories of finding me unresponsive in my bed, carrying me to the car, and driving me to the hospital. At the age of 14, I learned that my life is really not mine alone to do what I please. Although I had no “dependents” (my own children, an animal), I realized that other people’s happiness, emotional and physical wellbeing did depend on my continued existence.

I am now 27, and though I have struggled off and on with thoughts of suicide throughout my young adult life (thankfully less and less as I grow older), I have never seriously considered taking my life again. It probably seems morbid, but I would often picture my family and friends if I were to take my life again, how terrible it would be for them, and it gives me a strange motivation to keep on going.

At the age of 14, I simply was not able to comprehend the complex ways that my life intersected and affected those around me. Whenever I hear or read about teenagers taking their life, I think about how it might be possible to impart this same lesson on young people without needing a failed suicide attempt to learn it.

Another:

My brother committed suicide three years ago.  Suicide leaves many questions, and not enough answers.  I did a lot of reading on suicide after my brother died to try and find some answers.  You might be interested in the research by Dr. Thomas Joiner.  His theory on suicide is right on the mark, in my opinion.  Three pillars: 1. Burdensomeness, which leads to the mistaken belief that your death is worth more than your life to others 2. Loneliness/Alienation 3. A fearlessness of death that builds up over time.  All three need to come together at the same time, like a perfect storm.

Another:

My father committed suicide about two years ago, and one of the hardest things to think about is whether he knew how much his family all loved him. We know he loved us. We don’t see his suicide as some big middle finger at us. But what keeps me up at night is wondering whether, in his last moments, he understood how deeply we wanted him in our lives. If he knew that and still committed suicide, so be it. His was the result of a long and terrible struggle with depression, and I can appreciate that he desperately needed to find peace. But if he left us without knowing that; if his depression prevented him from seeing it – well, what a terrible world.

Weigel assesses the Wyoming Senate primary:

Harper Polling, the first company to take a temperature in the Wyoming GOP Senate primary, returns with a bevy of bad news for Liz Cheney. In a trial heat with Sen. Mike Enzi, she trails him 55-21. … There’s no way Enzi ends up winning by 34 points, but Cheney has to do an unheard-of amount of damage to him to close in.

Harry Enten believes that Cheney is going to lose:

In order to successfully challenge someone in a primary, you need to be more popular than the incumbent. Enzi is actually the more popular one.

He sports a 76% favorable rating against just 6% who see him in an unfavorable light. Despite being less well known, Cheney has a higher unfavorable rating at 15%. Her favorable rating, meanwhile, is 31pt lower at 45%. That will go up as the campaign goes on, but so will her unfavorable rating.

You might be wondering whether or not Cheney’s connection to her father Dick will help her during the campaign. The former vice-president does have a 58pt net favorable rating, yet that’s significantly less than Enzi’s 70pt net favorable rating. The younger Cheney is going to have to come up with a better strategy than just connecting herself to her father if she wants to win.

Larison thinks that running as a Tea Partier won’t work for Cheney:

To think of this challenge as a Tea Party-style insurgency is to get things backwards. That sort of insurgency requires someone to pose as an opponent of political insiders and a critic of the current party leadership in Washington, and Cheney is neither of these. She might try to use the rhetoric of an insurgent candidate, but it will be impossible to miss that Cheney’s run is backed by outside money and Washington connections. It will be an exceedingly cynical attempt to exploit anti-Washington sentiment in order to entrench a family dynasty in national politics.