Dave, did you ever read my recombinant dub piece?

[koganbot]

Dave (and anyone else), did you ever happen to run across the recombinant dub piece I did for the Voice back in '02? "Recombinant dub" isn't entirely what the piece is about, it's just the name for one of the concepts in it, one of the poles of attraction in a multi-poles-of-attraction environment. Also, I actually discuss no dub music in the piece, "dub" just being a metaphor and catch-all.

I thought you might be able to make something of my metaphor in relation to what you started working on last year in relation to "cultural center" versus "less of a center." The metaphor might work like this, as a way of posing questions:

What if you're a moviemaker shooting a city scene? You shoot a street scene, dialogue between three main characters, a few other people involved with or taking account of the main characters, though not speaking, the rest of the people there as setting, as are the buildings, cars, etc. So now you reshoot the scene, everything the same, except you've taken out the three leading actors and their dialogue. And you then look at the film to see what you've got: what seems to hold its own, what seems to jump to attention, what seems to appear for the first time, what gets its meaning altered, what seems to continue unchanged.

In the original shoot, the background had been there for the foreground, to give the main characters a location, a setting, a sense of what part of the world they were either living in or passing through and what sort of life might be going on in the world; but a lot of it might just be there 'cause it's there, without being vetted by the location scout or the scenery gal or the costume department; e.g. you shoot a scene in a park with trees 'cause that's the sort of park you want, but you're not particularly noticing or caring whether the trees are eucalyptus or maple or oak or aspen or pine.

And so you look at your shots from the reshoot and then say, "Let's say this is our world, without the main characters: where do we take it, but without necessarily having to fill in a foreground in the way we had a foreground before (though that might be what we do, find a new foreground, but we don't have to)?"

Working the metaphor: in the old fragmented '60s there were more people miles away from the main movie, and the specialty movies off to the side tended to get unnoticed. Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented. (But is what I just said correct?)

Also see: Over in Popular on The Final Countdown thread there's a relevant discussion between Tom and swanstep on the subject of "umbrella" and "coalition" as metaphors for genre.

(Also, here's an old ilX thread on Dub Metal that mentions my piece and is interesting for the way that, though there was dysfunction from the sixth post or so - from the moment hstencil entered and jess needled him - the thread managed to work around and in a few instances even prosper from the dysfunction.)

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hm, a lot to think about here -- I'm rereading the recombinant dub piece now.

I think one thing I'd maybe shift in the metaphor is that I'm not sure I'd get rid of the actors, with the pieces standing in previously as background for the foreground now without that foreground. Rather, the scope widens to the point that the fore isn't as fore as it once was. We see the three actors, and perhaps recognize them as "the actors," but we might see that elm tree much more prominently, or those other actors, or whatever else.

And to swim back and forth between literal and metaphor, this is to some extent what happens to film in the postclassical period (starting in roughly the 1950s) -- the influence of art house aesthetics starts to create a cinematic language that is not as centered on the actor, but rather creates a general picture that the actor happens to inhabit. We follow the actor (perhaps) because we know he's the actor, but not because he's necessarily been centralized by the surrounding imagery.

But to go back to the metaphor, the "pulling out" of scope actually starts to denature our understanding of how central the actor is in the first place. In postclassical cinema, there's no question that a given star is the star (even if it's an unprofessional actor), regardless of how prominent the elm tree is. Whereas when every shot radically de-centers the actors, we can only follow them if we choose to. So I imagine that you have some people -- many people -- who continue to do so, but you also have a lot of people who pay more attention to the trees, or to the city architecture, or the other people in the shot (the "new" actors), perhaps at the expense of those three formerly central actors.

"Let's say this is our world, without the main characters: where do we take it, but without necessarily having to fill in a foreground in the way we had a foreground before (though that might be what we do, find a new foreground, but we don't have to)?"

Raul Ruiz has a lot of interesting ideas about the "secret plan" of a given film, which is just this -- finding a network of possibilities that essentially remove the foreground (the plot, the characters) to imagine something else; while we're watching the foreground, the "real" story is happening in a subterranean way we don't actively notice (and have to create ourselves). The thing is, I don't see how you get around the problem of filling in a foreground at all, you merely change what you want the foreground to look like while recognizing you have less control over other people also seeing your chosen foreground, since you can't center it for them and thus they need to find it for themselves. And the way they'll find it, most likely, is by observing socially that you are watching it.

Which is maybe a way of saying that you can always decrease the size and meaningfulness of a center but you can't destroy the center; if you want to focus on the elm tree, you focus on the elm tree (and perhaps become part of an experimental film and media subculture, and make films in which the tree is the main character, etc., "this is a film about how fog lifts slowly from a landscape, and the stars are fog and a tree and a horse" might be the plot synopsis of Fog Line, which many people worship as dutifully, in their own way, as mainstream critics do Citizen Kane).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Still, reading over the recombinant dub piece again, a few points stick out:

So the shifts don't mean much and don't put the band interestingly at odds with itself. If the band had done a Celine Dion torch song followed by growling, darkness-drenched goth metal followed by Trick Daddy thug hip-hop, now those would be changes in identity.

This is maybe the "I like my center" argument, in which easy signifiers of sound and genre may recombine without challenging the underlying social arrangement -- i.e. there's "no meaningful genre distinction," but Person X has nothing to say to Person Y, even as they listen to essentially the same music. They're standing right next to each other but have nothing to say. This is why the Big Problem in internet communication, say, isn't necessarily that no one can agree on anything, but that people don't really know how to talk to one another regardless of what they agree on (what they need to agree on are the terms in which they might agree or disagree, the agreement and disagreement of content not being nearly as important as the agreement and disagreement of how the conversation happens).

One thing that centralization has going for it is an ability to guide a conversation to a particular subject -- when the actors are centered in the frame, it's much harder to talk about the elm tree instead. (Or, to drop the metaphor, if I'm put into contact with X in a generalist publication because I happen to like Y, I am in more conversation with Y in that moment than I would be if I had to look for Y myself to find it, something I would never actively do.) But even if you're guided to a center more forcibly, this doesn't ensure that you'll have anything interesting to say about it. (There's a metaphor in here somewhere for the year-end Slate convos, in which the para-center of pop-friendly thought is just as dry and unenlightening as the para-center of indie thought.)

the Recombinant Dubsters—particularly in hip-hop and techno—have usurped the official role of Conveyors of the Future, this frees rockers to evolve in all sorts of directions without worrying about which way is "forward." The forward spot is already occupied.

And this is probably as true to the then-Conveyors-of-Future categories now as it was for rock then, which means that the wide-open future is wide-open, or at least more so, for everyone. But I'm similarly ambivalent about this -- it's not music I'm worried about, it's people's ability or desire to talk about music in a certain way.

Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented.

I think this is right, but I also think ultimately it's neither here nor there, merely a field on which we find ourselves. The problem with this feeling of diffusion and diversity is that such diffusion and diversity feels irreconcilable, when in fact it isn't. When there are more perceived "others," there are more people with whom it's not acceptable for you to speak, so you retreat. But though there's nothing inherently wrong with clusters and quasi-tribal formation around a larger number of cultural "centers," there is something wrong with the retreat part, even though it seems to follow naturally.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The persistence of "the old actors," the former foreground, is one reason why my writing about these changes started to fall apart a bit. The fact is that old centers are holding pretty steadfastly even as new ones begin to gain prominence, even if that prominence is relative to lower expectations (lower record sales means you don't need to sell as many to be a "#1," but that designation of #1 selling artist still means something, even if it doesn't mean as much).