koganbot | Dave, did you ever read my recombinant dub piece?

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.)