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To-day’s Easy Listening

From Slate’s pop culture mystery podcast, Decoder Ring:

Shared Article from Slate Magazine

When Muzak Met Grunge

Muzak was once a great musical institution, but it was already a punchline by the time the Seattle grunge scene landed in its offices.

slate.com


Three high points for this episode:

  1. The shout-out to Sara DeBell’s epochal work Grunge Lite;

  2. A really pretty useful and surprising retelling of the story of the music trade and industry in Seattle, which really kind of underlines the weird dialectic of rock music, Muzak, Sub Pop Records and the birth of grunge. Muzak was a commercial service and artistic culture basically designed around lushly orchestrated versions of jazz standards, and it faced deep, fundamental problems with the developing dominance of rock music and rockist ideas and culture.[1] Muzak’s footprint within professional music in Seattle ended up actually making their offices the incubator for what became Sub Pop Records, while at the same time everything about their business and product represented one of the most ridiculed and despised paradigms for everything that Seattle grunge rockers saw themselves as reacting against.

  3. A somewhat overly cynical, but genuinely insightful, discussion of how algorithmic mood playlists have dissolved the human programming of the Muzak Corporation and rewoven it into the fabric of everyday life for streaming music listeners. (It turns out that even as we [sic] were mocking Muzak out of business, we [sic] were coming around on its central premise, without even realizing it…. When you open Spotify, the first thing you see isn’t albums or artists, it’s playlists — prominently, mood playlists….) — and the closing, generous exhortation to come back to listen to Muzak as music, and to try really to hear what it does, and appreciate it for what it is.

  1. [1]Including basic practical problems — the central role of vocals and lyrics in rock music, changes to tempo and tone and instruments, etc. — as well as more ideological problems — the elevation of idealized original authorship and virtuouso instrumental performances, basically primitivist and stridently anti-commercialist standards of authenticity, etc. Muzak originated in a world where songs everybody played were standards; it found itself in a world where those songs became covers parasitic on an older and usually more esteemed original.↩

“Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision — fair and bright indeed it seemed — of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks.”

Here is a close-up photo of a survivor's eye blanked out by retinal burning, a common effect of the flash of light and radiation during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

8:15am. 76 years, 140,000 souls.

Here is a pocket watch, stopped at 8:15am.

Donated by Kazuo Nikawa
1,600m from the hypocenter
Kan-on Bridge

Kengo Nikawa (then, 59) was exposed to the bomb crossing the Kan-on Bridge by bike going from his home to his assigned building demolition site in the center of the city. He suffered major burns on his right shoulder, back, and head and took refuge in Kochi-mura Saiki-gun. He died on August 22. Kengo was never without this precious watch given him by his son, Kazuo.

— Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Jocelyn Pook (1997), “Oppenheimer”

Here are some photos in which...
Paper lanterns float down the Motoyasu River in Hiroshima,
in the annual August 6 memorial event, in memory of the lives lost.

The quotation in the title: “Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision — fair and bright indeed it seemed — of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks…. is from Winston Churchill’s self-serving memoiristic history of the end of the war, The Second World War, Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy. Churchill is describing his reactions to the first news of the detonation of a working atomic bomb at the Trinity test site, which Harry Truman and his war officials confided to him at the Potsdam Conference with Truman and Josef Stalin. The same conference reiterated the demand for unconditional surrender. Truman later cited the Potsdam Conference demands as justification for destroying the city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, in order to force that outcome. The nightmare picture for Churchill was the hypothetical death of huge numbers of American and British soldiers during an invasion of the Japanese home islands. He said this was based on the spectacle of Okinawa island and the terrible death and destruction caused by brutal fighting and the Japanese soldiers’ repeated use of suicide attacks in the last resort.

Tactical Communication

. . . When experts or agencies deliver information to the public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda, they are telling what is called a noble lie. Although the teller’s intentions may be pure—for example, a feeling of urgency that behavioral change is needed among the lay public—the consequences can undermine not only those intentions but also public trust in experts and science. . . .

. . . Even though his [Anthony Fauci’s] comments were made to influence public actions to get more people vaccinated (a noble effort), the central dilemma remains: Do we want public health officials to report facts and uncertainties transparently? Or do we want them to shape information, via nudges, to influence the public to take specific actions? The former fosters an open and honest dialogue with the public to facilitate democratic policymaking. The second subverts the very idea of a democracy and implies that those who set the rules or shape the media narrative are justified in depriving the public of information that they may consider or value differently.

Aside from whether it’s right to tell noble lies in the service of eliciting socially beneficial behavior, there is also the question of efficacy. Experts on infectious diseases are not necessarily experts on social behavior. Even if we accept Fauci’s claim that he downplayed the importance of wearing masks because he didn’t want to unleash a run on masks, we might wonder how he knew that his noble lie would be more effective than simply being honest and explaining to people why it was important to assure an adequate supply of masks for medical workers. . . .

— Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad, The Noble Lies of COVID-19
Slate, 28 Quintilis 2021

Shared Article from Slate Magazine

The U.S. Government’s Noble Lies About COVID-19

When Fauci said in March 2020 that Americans didn’t need to wear masks, it was a noble lie—and a destructive one.

slate.com


“Is shopping a recipe for the city?” (Wade Graham, DREAM CITIES, 2016)

From a generally very interesting chapter on Idea 6, Malls, in Wade Graham’s Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (a book on architecture and urban forms):

If the world is becoming a mall, has shopping become the driver of urban form? In most educated circles this suggestion elicits a [196] collective shudder. Shopping is sub-serious, as Cicero insisted: All retail dealing may be described as dishonest and base.[1] Architecture, always zealous in defense of its claim to be a high art, wants nothing to do with it. Except, on rare occasions, to pay the bills. Louis Sullivan did a department store, Frank Lloyd Wright a boutique, Rudolf Schindler a store or two, and I. M. Pei’s first major project was a mall, but these are rarely mentioned along with their canonical masterpieces. And yet a case can be made that shopping, in the form of trade, gave birth to the city, that shopping has been and remains the lifeblood coursing through its heart, that the design of shopping is inseparable from the design of cities since time immemorial and is an indispensable guide to the urban future.

The largest neolithic settlement known, Çatalhöyük in Turkey, was founded in 7000 BCE, probably as a trading center.[2] The market at the center of Thebes has been dated to 1500 BCE. The Greek agora, or gathering place, the acknowledged birthplace of Western civilization and democratic society, was both a marketplace for shopping and a civic center for discussion, sociality, and politics. The Greek words for I shop and I speak in public are both derived from the same root; in modern Greek agora still means marketplace. The agora became the Roman forum, the medieval fair and market town, the Eastern bazaar and souk. Is shopping a recipe for the city? Consider the evidence. In the exchange of goods is gathering, and in gathering is society; meeting, trading information, gossiping, haggling, freedom of movement for women, and people-watching — the original theater is the theater of customers as participants in a perennial ritual and unpredictable drama. Done right, shopping can define space in ways that are fundamentally urban: the shopping space is a space apart, inside, separate from other distracting activities, and essentially pedestrian, but also connected to the outside. [197] Shopping generates movement and density; it mixes and connects people, and disconnected or disparate parts of the city. If this is the case, then maximizing shopping equals maximizing urbanism. . . .

. . . [236] We can only hope that shopping design’s evolution toward more inclusion and integration continues. Regardless, as long as it is profitable, it will continue to be a major contributor to the environments we inhabit, as it has been for centuries, if not more. Time will tell. In an essay on the firm’s influence, the L.A. architect and critic Craig Hodgetts asked whether Jerde’s artificial cosmos may, in time, attain the dignity of the truly cosmopolitan… with the scars and patina of age. Yet age and familiarity are not what make a place truly urban, but its integration into the fabric of the city around it. The question is then, will Jerde’s places become, as some previous forms of shopping architecture have, public places as much as private ones–places integral to urban vitality?

— Wade Graham, #6. Malls.
In Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (2016).

See also:

  1. [1][Sordidi etiam putandi, qui mercantur a mercatoribus, quod statim vendant…. Cic., De officiis i. 150, here lightly paraphrased by the translator that Graham quotes. More literally: And again — they are to be reckoned sordid, who buy from merchants what they turn around and sell. In the passage, Cicero is listing off a series of working-class trades and lines of business that we (Roman noblemen) understand to be sordid (dirty) or illiberal (unfit for or unbecoming of a free gentleman) — among them toll-taking, money-lending, all hired work that is purchased for labor rather than for artistic or skillful quality, buying from merchants to resell, manufacturing in a workshop, and trades that minister to immediate enjoyment, like fishing and fish-selling, butchery, cooking, poultry-stuffing, cosmetics, dancing and performing in variety shows. –RG.]↩
  2. [2][This is contested; some confidently assert it was founded for trade, some assert just as confidently that all the evidence now points to it being founded as a religious center, etc. etc. –RG.]↩
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