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).

[koganbot]

If every shot radically decenters the actors, then "decentering the actors" becomes the center of the film.

Hmmm. My complaint about rock criticism and musicwrite is that the critics don't know how or aren't willing to sustain an intellectual conversation - and this seems to be a problem of concentration: a refusal to communicate, a refusal to understand, and a refusal to follow through. But this isn't because in today's de-centered world people are too pulled this way and that to concentrate on the same subject matter (though it is difficult to gather people together to all talk about the same thing). Rather, the problem is that when person B says to person A, "You said X but I did not understand you, and you said Y but you seemed to contradict yourself," and A never gets back to B with a response, or A gives a response that just repeats X and Y in slightly re-worded form, this isn't because in today's culture A has so many interesting things to think about, in a wide variety all over the place, that he just never really got around to thinking about B's comments (though of course the culture does provide quite a variety for anyone who wants it). It's more that noticing problems and possibilities in his own ideas just isn't something that A finds fun, or that A even knows how to do.

And the reason the health care debate is so distorted isn't because, e.g., people are distracted by what's happening with Conan and Jay or whoever else happens to jump in front of their radar and if people hadn't been distracted they'd have taken the time to find out what's actually in the health bill, and if the media would only report what's in the health bill people would then know it. My guess is that under no circumstances would people take the time to find out what's in the health bill. (Confession: I don't know what's in the health bill.)

(Not sure how well the last two paragraphs hook up with the issue I was raising in my post. Over on Tom's Tumblr, in response to his linking Hornby's horrendous review of Kid A, I made a couple of points on the supposed "time" issue, which I recast as an issue of when and whether people are willing to put effort into what they do with their leisure time. The reason I didn't repost here on my lj, as I would normally do when I post something so substantial, was that I hadn't said anything new; really all I was doing was subtextually repeating my gripe about how hard it is to get people to play with me. But if I were to repost, I'd have add the frame, "How do we model reflective thinking and intellectual interchange as something that people might potentially view as fun? And also, how do we engage the problem of incompetence? People spend a lot of effort and emotion online arguing poorly. Is there a way that arguing well can seem more rewarding than arguing poorly?" [Speaking of de-centering, I've now wandered far away form my original topic.]