In Praise of Copying

Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying from Harvard University Press





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Hiding in Plain Sight: Regionalism and the Underground

An essay I wrote for the special underground issue of Artlink.

Borschke, M 2010. "Hiding in Plain Sight: regionalism and the underground". Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground". Artlink 30:2, p32-33.


I never really went looking for 'the underground', but as a teenager in the mid 1980s I found one at the top of a steep set of stairs in an artist-run gallery in downtown London, Ontario. The place was known as the Forest City Gallery, and in addition to providing exhibition space for the area’s visual artists and filmmakers, the gallery opened itself up to the city’s diverse underground music scene, including teenagers like me. It was the promise and thrill of an all-ages show that first brought me here.

As I remember it, the space was split like a heart into two chambers, with artworks lining the walls, young people with vaguely dangerous haircuts loitering without worry, and crews of earnest young things plugging in amps, plucking strings, fussing with synthesisers and microphones, in preparation for the music to come. It was a post-punk teen dream.

Also on the scene was a coterie of people my parents' age - ‘artists’, my friend Joel told me. They ran the place. They were the people who made it all possible, and while at the time I was in it for the joys and sorrows of punk rock, I would later learn that there was a lot more at stake. This was a community dedicated to artistic autonomy, where fierce regionalism reigned and where the idea that bigger cities like New York or even Toronto should set some sort of creative agenda was scoffed at.

Among the grown-ups was the late Greg Curnoe, one of the gallery’s co-founders, an artist who spent a great deal of his career exploring regionalism as an ideal. As Canadian curator and art historian Terrence Heath wrote:

"In the late sixties and seventies, [Canadian] artists and writers from coast to coast embraced the belief that art can only be made out of the specifics of life, place and time. Curnoe was one of many, but he was a leader and one of the strongest voices....It was not that they rejected all art made in what are called ‘art centres’ per se, but that they rejected the right of any person or group to prescribe what art should be....They sought out and found, in their own lives and localities, the stuff of their art." [1]

To my teenaged self, however, Greg Curnoe was just someone’s dad (Owen, Galen and Zoe’s), a middle-aged man who had a moustache and seemed like any other dad except for the fact that he spoke encouraging words about pretty weird music and actually seemed to enjoy listening to it. More curious still was his occupation: he was an artist. A successful one, I was told. And apparently there were more of them around. It hadn’t really occurred to me that there were actual artists in London, Ontario. I was pretty sure you had to go to Toronto for that. Or maybe Montreal. But here he was, painting everyday things like his bicycle, ink stamping entertaining anti-American rants, making magazines and – the clincher for me – playing kazoo in a band that dared to declare a pot full of marbles an instrument, and called themselves The Nihilist Spasm Band. It was a revelation that there were adults – 40- and 50-somethings – who did such things, and they did it all by themselves in boring old London, Ontario, population 250,000, sitting pretty at the forks of the Thames.

****

‘There’s no such thing as an underground anymore,’ sniffed a young friend when I told her I was pondering the quandary of underground music in the age of broadband internet access. I didn’t bother to mention that our paths had first crossed at an underground dance party in Sydney; hers is a popular 21st century refrain. Recorded music, new and old, marginal and mainstream, has never been more accessible, and we have digital and network technologies to thank. The Internet’s global reach and the ease of digital duplication has made once-marginal sounds not only more visible, that is easier to find, but more audible as well. But the joys of connectivity and the benefits of bypassing corporate gatekeepers and distribution channels seem to be giving way to a kind of underground fatigue: this increasing visibility and representation of the margins is also perceived as a threat to their health and wellbeing.

Collectors of analogue formats (vinyl records and the like) sometimes lament the loss of the hunt – musty garages, second-hand record shops and mysterious correspondences with other collectors. While I appreciate a good ‘thrill of the chase’ story, I don’t accept the idea that the ease of digital discovery is the real problem faced by underground music cultures; nor that its moderate success in distributing music by reproducing it has somehow undervalued the experience of listening to music, making it, dancing to it, or even collecting it. Recordings – be they on vinyl, tape or CD – have always made possible the movement of sound from place to place, and recordings have been at the heart of most contemporary music cultures: so the ability to move music with ease can’t by itself undermine the underground as a political ideal. Besides, as music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote in The Guardian, ‘Underground really ought to mean more than just ‘being into something not many people know about’.[2] If the underground as an ideal is to be of any use, in the 21st century it needs to be scalable: to be able to expand and contract; to offer the promise of self-determination, autonomy and community to anyone willing to help build and nurture it. It needs to be able to withstand its own representation.

* * * *

As I sit at my desk in Sydney, browsing through photocopied flyers of bands with names like Dormant Checker Effect, Bits of Food and Sheep Look Up, and scanned photos of teenagers dancing in their thrift-shop best, I can’t help but wonder about the qualities that made those fleeting moments at The Forest City Gallery so filled with creative and social possibility (if only until the last bus left downtown at midnight), and whether they might offer any lessons for this quandary of the underground in the age of the Internet. As a teenager, I couldn’t get out of Ontario fast enough, but I am beginning to wonder whether the regionalism that Greg Curnoe espoused might be more relevant and more powerful than ever. I can’t help but wonder whether in the process of building online communities-of-interest based around micro-genres instead of nurturing diverse local scenes, we may be simply replacing old centres of influence with new ones.

Writing about why he and other artists established Region Gallery (an earlier artist-run space launched in 1962), Curnoe wrote

"London [Ontario]’s official art circles, such as they are, are completely smothered by out-of-date sophistication. No person or group seems to realise that this city is not a cultural centre – it is a backwater. I and several others involved with Region believe that this is a good thing. Due to the mass media most people’s eyes and ears are on radio, TV and newspapers, and never or rarely on where they are. Because of this we can work without being bothered. Our way of working can not be called a movement because each of us has many and severe reservations about the others’ works, and because we are not using regionalism as a gimmick but as a collective noun to cover what so many painters, writers, and photographers have used – their own environment..." [3]

Today, when seemingly everything is documented and accessible, when we are looking and listening everywhere all at once, and as advertisers and marketers rush to the margins to get in on our distributed gaze, it strikes me that the need for some kind of underground has never been more necessary. Networking artifacts from underground cultures past – recordings, videos, scanned flyers and photos – should serve as a reminder that art and inspiration can come from anywhere, but as I scour the many user-generated archives that populate the web, I keep returning to the fact that anywhere is still somewhere; whereas on the Internet, to appropriate the words of Gertrude Stein, ‘There is no there there.’ If we think that the Internet has made the underground disappear because it has made certain styles and genres of music more audible by first making them more visible, then what specific qualities were lost in the process of networking music? Could it be that the social and political value of an underground remains entangled with the physical power and contingency of place?

Despite the promise of network equality, digital centres of influence on the web cast long cultural shadows, but perhaps we can find in that darkness room where we can hide in plain sight. Regionalism as a creative strategy is not so much a case of turning off as it is of acknowledging that the more pervasive our networked media environment becomes, the more situated experience and the particularities of place matter. We need to resist the notion that we are now engaged in a global culture based solely on proliferating micro-genres, and consider the possibilities that are only available to us in the here and now. In Sydney, I can’t go out to listen to the surviving members of The Nihilist Spasm Band play (as they have done every Monday night in London for the past 44 years) but I can still hear their message loud and clear. If you want to keep an underground alive, Do It Yourself, in the place that you’re at.

References-

1- T. Heath, 2001, ‘The Trojan Bicycle: Greg Curnoe’s Life & Stuff’ in BorderCrossings, Vol 20#2, Winnipeg .

2- Reynolds, S, ‘Notes on the noughties: The changing sound of the underground’ The Guardian Dec 21, 2009, .

3- D. Reid and M. Teitelbaum (eds) 2001 Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, p148.



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Media International: Book Notes: >Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches

Media International Australia
Television Comedy and Light Entertainment
No 134, February 2010
Theme Editors: Felicity Collins, Sue Turnbull and Susan Bye

Churchill, Suzanne W. and McKible, Adam (eds), Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007, ISBN 9 7807 5466 0149, 292 pp., £55.00.


Scholars of modernism have long considered the thousands of little magazines that came to be published in the first half of the twentieth century as important vehicles for the Anglo-American artistic and literary movement. After all, it was in the pages of such avant garde publications as The Egoist, The Little Review and The Dial that canonical writers such as James Joyce, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot found their first readers, and in tiny-circulation periodicals such as The Blindman and Others that modernist manifestos and highbrow pranks were let loose on the world.

This collection of essays edited by Suzanne W. Churchill, an Associate Professor of English at Davidson College, and Adam McKible, an Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, brings together periodical studies scholars who are forging new approaches to understanding these publications and the culture that produced them, treating the little magazines as primary texts worthy of study rather than as mere distribution vehicles for elite genius.

Forget the ‘Great War’ theory of modernism, the editors argue, little magazines require a ‘Great Party’ model, ‘one that duly recognizes the era’s sense of urgency, mechanization, and conflict but also address’s modernism’s spirit of creativity, conviviality, and playfulness’ (p. 13). The focus for the researchers in this collection is the collaborative and dialogic nature of the print culture of which little magazines were a part, an approach that explores the way artists and intellectuals of the era used media as a space for exchange and engagement and a wedge against (and sometimes in tandem with) mass- market publications.

Among the 11 essays are Alan Golding’s consideration of the rivalry between The Dial and The Little Review, Jayne Marek’s exploration of the role women editors played in the Harlem Renaissance, Suzanne W. Churchill’s meditation on modernist mischief-making and ‘the Great Spectra Hoax’ in Others, and Tom Lutz’s thoughtful examination of the often-overlooked role of regional magazines and regionalists in the development of modernism. In addition to students of modernism and periodical studies, this volume enriches current debates about collaboration and reminds us of the power that the media representation of marginal and unconventional voices can have on the culture at large.

— Margie Borschke, Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales



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"analogous resemblances” or “mimetic analogies

Remarkable Creatures
Imitators That Hide in Plain Sight, and Stay Alive
By SEAN B. CARROLL
Published: February 16, 2010
The New York Times
Henry Walter Bates returned to England in 1859 with 14,000 species from the Amazon, just in time for Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”

Bates explained to Darwin that he had found many instances in which a completely harmless and potentially edible animal resembled a distasteful, inedible, noxious or poisonous species. He observed flies that looked like bees, beetles that looked like wasps, even caterpillars that looked like pit vipers. He referred to these as “analogous resemblances” or “mimetic analogies.”

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Smash it up until there is nothing left: New found interest in antiques in China

Reactionaries? Make That ‘Collectors’
By DAN LEVIN
Published: February 3, 2010
The New York Times

CONTESTANT No. 3, a portly man in suspenders named Cui Xiaosong, clutched a golden mallet and gulped like an executioner having second thoughts. As a guest on China’s wildly popular antiques reality show “Collection World,” Mr. Cui knew he might have to get violent before the next commercial break. The victim? A delicately painted vase he had brought to the show, which he believed to be from the Qing dynasty and worth about $30,000.

“If it’s a fake, will you smash it?” asked the program’s white-gloved host, Wang Gang, as Mr. Cui faced the studio audience and three guest judges.

Mr. Cui nodded. The audience quieted down and Mr. Wang used the final minute to impart a bit of wisdom about collecting antiques in modern-day China: “Just as China opened up, so too is collecting about opening the mind to understand the outside world.”

It was hard to tell whether Mr. Cui was listening, but he certainly heard the host announce the judges’ verdict: “It’s a modern reproduction!”

Mr. Cui winced as he swung the mallet, shattering the vase — and with it his dreams of the wealth it might have brought at auction. Cue the instant replay.

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Edward Said on Inventio as reassembling

Therefore, one invents--in the literal use of the Latin word inventio, employed by rhetoricians to stress finding again or reassembling from past performances, as opposed to the romantic use of invention as something you create from scratch--goals abductively, that is, hypothesizes a better situation from the known historical and social facts.

Said, Edward, "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals", The Nation, September 17, 2001 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010917/essay/4


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Only One of its kind: Dickens doubled

Only One of Its Kind...

The New York Times has published a digital copy of Charles Dickens Manuscript for A Christmas Carol. The original is in the collection of The Morgan Library in New York City.

via http://wardsix.blogspot.com/


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Double Exposure - Ten Per Cent

Double Exposure - Ten Per Cent
Originally uploaded by ElectriqueKingdom

Uncommon Press

Uncommon Press account on Spike
http://meanjin.com.au/spike-the-meanjin-blog/post/uncommon-press/


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cryptomnesia and plagarism

You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did
Is cryptomnesia—copying the work of others without being aware of it—to blame for journalism's ultimate sin? Um, maybe not.

By Russ Juskalian | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jul 7, 2009

Henry Roediger, a memory expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said that cryptomnesia is partially caused by the lopsidedness of our memories: it's easier to remember information than it is to remember its source. Under the right conditions, this quirk can even evoke false memories. In one study, the more times Roediger instructed participants to imagine performing a basic action (like, "sharpen the pencil") the more likely the participants were to recall—incorrectly—having actually performed the action when asked about it later.

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Nunberg on Google Book's Meta-data Disaster

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
By Geoffrey Nunberg
The Chronicle of Higher Education-August 31, 2009

Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

It's clear that Google designed the system without giving much thought to the need for reliable metadata. In fact, Google's great achievement as a Web search engine was to demonstrate how easy it could be to locate useful information without attending to metadata or resorting to Yahoo-like schemes of classification. But books aren't simply vehicles for communicating information, and managing a vast library collection requires different skills, approaches, and data than those that enabled Google to dominate Web searching.

Nunberg,Geoffrey, "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars", The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2009.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, is an adjunct full professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

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McCartney on Imitation and Originality

McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.” That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.”

From
Magazine
While My Guitar Gently Beeps
By DANIEL RADOSH
Published: August 16, 2009
A Beatles video game arrives at a time when participation and simulation are changing the way we listen to music.



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Distributing the risk (pre-pirate bay)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25739026-2703,00.html

The project began 44 years ago with Michael Samuels, then Professor of English Language at the University of Glasgow. Several of the project's founders have since died.
His team began transcribing information from the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on to slips of paper.

They plugged away for more than a decade, and disaster almost struck in 1978 when the building housing the only copy of their work caught fire.

The entire building was gutted, but the slips remained intact because they were stored in metal filing cabinets.

After that the slips were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations.

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Distributing the out-of-the way town

David Farley on the perils of travel writing

“Is that a good article?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t seen this in my local paper,” the woman from Houston said. It turned out, the article went out on the Times’ wire service and was picked up by a dozen or so other newspapers. There was even an article about my article in La Stampa, the daily newspaper of Turin. In the coming weeks, I’d see versions of my article in numerous newspapers, including the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Star. Interestingly, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Dallas Morning News cut the two paragraphs about the town’s famous relic, the Holy Foreskin; the newspapers in Poland and Mexico, however, did not.

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Holden Caufield meet Dorian Grey

"A lawyer for Mr. Salinger, Marcia B. Paul, told Judge Batts that the author had a right to keep Holden Caulfield “frozen in time” for the life of his copyright." (via Clyde Haberman's "‘Rye’ Dispute Is Gateway to City’s Past"

Judge Rules for J.D. Salinger in ‘Catcher’ Copyright Suit
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: July 2, 2009
A federal judge banned publication in the United States of a book containing a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield.

Cheap Trick release new album on 8-track

Cheap Trick adventures with 8-track in 2009!

Globe & Mail's Report

Fair Syndication and copied content

It's unfortunate that the authors equated 'copied' with 'stolen' but Attributor's idea seems fair at first glance if it allows for the following:

1. It facilitates social distribution, that is, the reposting of entire articles without having to seek permission
2. It allows blogger to profit from their aggregating or curating activities while creating a simple solution for any ad revenues generated to be shared. This is fine if the publication owns the copyright. What happens to the freelance writer who granted a paper one-time rights?
3. It allows for non-commercial use. That is blogs like this one that don't collect ad revenue.
I run this blog entirely for my own convenience and benefit--it's just so I can find articles again--which is why I mostly point and copy rather than point and comment. But if I help a reader finds content from another site, I hope this would be seen as a benefit to the publication (eg helping to generate buzz) rather than 'stealing'.

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.
18 Comments
by Erick Schonfeld on April 21, 2009

As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

'Archival Auteurs' at the UNSW Creative Media Conference

Research Showcases

Creative Media Showcase & Energy Showcase


The Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Les Field, has announced the winners of the Presentation and Poster Prizes for the Creative Media Research Showcase and the Energy Research Showcase.

The quality of the all presentations was exceptionally high and he thanked all those who had contributed to the success of the showcases. Both days had been entertaining, educative and exciting and had raised awareness across disciplines of the research being undertaken in the field.

The prizes of $1000.00 each are to be used to foster collaborative research, particularly by more junior researchers.

Creative Media Showcase Winners

creative media showcase
Photo: Getty
Presentations
Session 1: Professor Rob Brooks, Science, BEES
Session 2: Professor Jeffrey Shaw, COFA, FASS, Engineering, iCinema
Session 3: Mr Ian McArthur, COFA, Design Studies
Session 4: Ms Margaret Borschke, FASS, Journalism and Media Research Centre

Poster
Dr Daniel Woo, Engineering, CSE

Hulu, huh?

AP Reporter Jake Coyle named Hulu.com, a video streaming site backed by NBC and News Corp, best web site of the year.

I can't comment on the reporter's pick as I've never seen the site--it is only available for streaming in the USA.

Given this failure to work with the *world wide* nature of the web, holding Hulu up as a model of "how professional content can thrive on the Web" is problematic. I'm beginning to wonder if the entertainment industry's licensing habit will turn out like the financial market's addiction to deriviatives.

So for those of us on the outside, I'd have to say it's still Pirate Bay that takes the cake.

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks

Michiko Kakutani, writin in The New York Times on Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' early collaboration:

The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.

Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.

I'm curious to look at the book to consider the role that imitation plays in the development of personal style. The beats use of found material has always been notable. It will be enlightening to see their clumsier attempts (even if it would make the writers themselves wince.)