Moderator:
Jonathan Serviss, former KPCC Patt Morrison senior producer; current KNX 1070 Morning Drive writer/editor/producer.

Panelists:
David Simpson, author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Erin Aubry Kaplan, author of Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista

Notes:
-restorative vs retributive justice (see truth and reconciliation)
-consensus reality
-forgotten reality/history; who writes history? who remembers history?
-alternate historical universe

Gods, Graves & Scholars by C.W. Ceram:
“Humanity, which used to be so entirely absorbed in the daily assaults of contemporary events and future threats, has learned to be curious about its past and even fascinated by it.”

in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling — Abraham as more than the knight of infinite resignation, as the knight of faith, facing down the absurd, and furthermore willing it

in philosophy / philology
Crispin Sartwell: End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History — references Job and Abraham (à la Kierkegaard) as examples of loss of telos / loss of plot / loss of a “sense of narrative coherence” (18)

in sociology
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority — cites the Abraham story as an example of the age-old “dilemma” of obedience (preface)

in song
Bob Dylan: “Highway 61 Revisited” — “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”

in fiction
Neil Simon: God’s Favorite — Job modernized and made comical

in philosophy / anthropology
René Girard: Job the Victim of his People — Job as scapegoat (not yet read)

in psychology
C.G. Jung: Answer to Job and Edward F. Edinger: Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job (not yet read)

other disturbing lessons:
Cain and Abel (in fiction: East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

David and Bathsheba and Uriah (in fiction: God Knows by Joseph Heller)

the prodigal son (As a child I objected to the prodigal son getting a feast while the “good” son gets no reward. As an adult I’m frustrated that my brain is stuck believing “prodigal” means someone who has gone away and now returned. I always have to concentrate to land on the right definition.)

Notes (taken on a receipt that I managed to scrounge up (didn’t have a notebook with me) for something purchased 02-06-10 for *5.00 and *0.49 tx, which I now remember was a Norton Critical Edition of Death in Venice from Counterpoint):

Intro:
quote from the book comparing the growth of math to the growth of a city

Crease:

• inspiration for the book came from looking at a “e=mc^2″ ornament — how equations have become symbolic and taken on cultural meaning

.

• Pythagorean Theorem
• symbol of a proof
• c^2 = a^2 + b^2, rule known of well before Pythagoras, but the Greeks did the proof
• first extant example of the proof in Plato’s Meno
• people are still trying to discover new ways to prove this, there are hundreds of variations already; proving this anew is not about the contribution to mathematics but the joy of discovery
• anecdote of when Einstein was 12 and first saw this proof, idea of universal rules

.

• F = ma and gravity
• Galileo as bridge between Aristotle and Newton; his idea that mass is something separate from weight
• story of apple traced back to Newton himself
• Newton would ask how? not why? (had to do with his theology)

.

• e = mc^2 and general relativity
• why we know it in this form (with the corrective amount left off) due to a book on the Manhattan Project after the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• has become a symbol for knowledge itself
• Einstein wanted to combine seemingly disparate ideas of Maxwell’s and Newton’s

.

• e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
• evidence in Los Angeles trial
• (my note: see footnote pg. 199 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea about Euler’s equation as the “paragon of mathematical beauty”)

.

• entropy
• referenced across disciplines in works, for example of Stoppard and Pynchon)

.

• uncertainty Heisenberg and Schrodinger
• Copenhagen play: Bohr vs. Heisenberg on making sense
• uncertainty and quantum in popular culture — painting, literature, scultpure, theology, literary criticism, humor (A cop pulls Heisenberg over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”)
• people know that observations had and effect before Heisenberg

.

• Maxwell’s equations
• didn’t actually write the equations (as we know them) himself, Heaviside did that later

.

• how equations changed through history
• often given in words first, and becomes “catchier” later, such and Newton with F = ma
• at some point “=” and “+” etc. had to be invented

.

• Suggested reading: David Lindley’s Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science

.

• side note: several of these equations are on the steps outside of LAPL

Notes:

Crawford
-Hitler wanted to “cleanse” music too; wanted to get rid of the culture of chaos in the Weimar Republic

-book covers 31 of the musicians who immigrated to L.A. during the Nazi era including composers and all kinds of performers, especially focused on those with paper “legacy” for research — letters etc.

-utilized Gladys Caldwell’s collection of newspaper articles about live music reviews starting from the ’20s from LAPL

-writers came to L.A. too and some of these people knew each other (Mann, Brecht); émigré circles

-chapter about film composers — how they saved themselves as “composers” (didn’t want to be looked down on as film composers only); composer for Errol Flynn movies

-in those days in Hollywood every studio had a full orchestra

-LACC opera workshop, first of its kind (i.e. at public school); but no opera in L.A. until 1986 which was tough for many of the composers who came from opera-rich Europe, so singers trained in L.A. had to go to Europe

-why did so many of these artists end up in L.A.? tried other European cities first but the Great Depression meant quotas had been set up to save jobs for locals, whereas the film industry had a lot of jobs to go around. +, of course, the weather

-Ojai Festival

-people saving their money to bring people out of Europe

Kraft
-after the wars arts take on a new dimension: after WWI experimentation (Schoenberg 12-tone), after WWII trying to make order from the chaos; in these cases didn’t draw on the past so much

-Tom Mix westerns uncredited composers

-”no minor chords” (Sam Goldwyn)

-L.A. Music Festival (Waxman)

-playing “donuts” = whole notes

In May 2004 telegraph.co.uk reported that a French author had written a book with no verbs: “Perhaps inevitably, critics have commented unfavourably on the lack of action in Michel Thaler’s work, The Train from Nowhere, which runs to 233 pages.”

“The author… said it was liberating to write without verbs, which he describes as ‘invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature’.”

no “e”:

Gadsby: Champion of Youth. This 1939 novel, available online, contains no “e”s. I can’t even write a descriptive sentence about it without an “e.”

In 1969, Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without any “e,” which has been translated to English (in 1994 as A Void) without any “e”s. This book has been an off and on topic of discussion amongst my friends for years, but a new discovery is his book with

only “e”:

Les Revenentes (1972).

other:

To date, my favorite “novel with a schtick” is David Markson’s *postmodern* Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I, perhaps reductively, would call “a novel in aphorisms.” Also in some ways lacking action (despite its verbs), this book is still pretty engaging. (However, I didn’t find that to be the case in another aphoristic-type work by Markson, This Is Not a Novel.)

• toujours, déjà (French—Derrida)
• immer schon (German—Kant, Heidegger)
• it’s a bit dodgy to try to define, but basically (and not all-inclusively) what has not happened in the past is past; what has happened at present has always already happened in the present and the future
• To see it used by Derrida in context, read some of Of Grammatology.

“as if“

• als ob (German—Vaihinger, Kant)
• a seemingly very practical philosophy
• from Wikipedia: “In Philosophie des Als Ob, [Vaihinger] argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave ‘as if’ the world matches our models.”

“thing in itself“

• Ding an sich (German—Kant)
• noumena—the thing as opposed to the physical actuality of the thing as experienced by the senses
• like Plato’s forms?

To read:

• Critique of Pure Reason
• Philosophy of As If
• a lot of Derrida

Take note:

• Noumena is a death metal band from Finland
• The Always Already is an indie rock band from Austin, TX

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.”

“During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.”

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdote and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Panel Discussion

Feb 28 2006. To promote the release of the USA edition of his book ‘Rip It Up & Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984′ author Simon Reynolds held a panel discussion at Mo Pitkin’s on NYC’s Lower East Side.

Contort Yourself: No Wave New York [i was probably searching the internet for James Chance/James White]

(a review by Simon Reynolds of some James Chance reissues/live album for Mojo probably 1995)
Sick muthafunker James White was a key player in all this miscegenated mayhem. Swiftly following up the 1979 debut Buy, White changed his band’s name from the Contortions to the Blacks, and released Off White on the ultra-hip Ze label. The opener Contort Yourself encapsulates White’s sonic and lyrical shtick. Over brittle funk guitar, neurotic bass and a hissing hi-hat disco beat, James spurted the infantile squall of his bebop sax and rapped nihilistic nursery rhymes: “now is the time/to lose all control/distort your body/and twist your soul”. Next came the vile misogny of Stained Sheets, a duet juxtaposing Stella Rico’s needy, orgasmic whimpers with White’s sadistic contempt. A blankly ironic cover of Irving Berlin’s (Tropical) Heatwave segues into Almost Black, the most dubious homage to blackness-as-primitivism since Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay The White Negro. That said, Off White’s febrile funk remains queerly compelling, even if you’re left feeling so soiled you have to take a bath afterwards.

unofficial subtitle:
A heroic-patriotic-cosmopolitan-philanthropic-fatalistic drama

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