I’m a lover,
and I’m a Twitter.
(From Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker’s, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, 1968)
I’m a Spitter, I’m a Knitter
Category: McLuhan @100
“Fear of Everything”
So of course I always thought Talking Heads were about the individual human units (ha!—and fuck you, Fripp) response to cybernation, depersonalization, the effect of corporate consciousness on individual identity, all those great contemporary questions nobody can seem to come up with any real or workable answers for. Richard Hell was about the same thing on a darker, more hermetically selfenclosed/obsessed/possessed level, in fact the Ramones, Clash, just about all these New Wave bands that really count seem to be trying to deal with these questions which is why no matter what happens to it commercially New Wave for me will always be a lot more crucial than the R’n’R bands explosion of the Sixties, when it was all too easy to croon how there’s somethin’ happenin’ in here and what it is ain’t exactly clear. The point is, now we’re all “in here,” and apart from each other, and how are we gonna get out?
– Lester Bangs, unedited review of Talking Heads’s Fear of Music (3,000 or so words, nary a sneeze about “music” per se, and it’s a remarkable piece of writing).
McLuhan Mc-Went that a Mc-Way
I’m not done yammering on about McLuhan yet — more specifically about MM’s relationship to rock and to rock criticism (and to “cultural criticism,” more generally speaking) (I haven’t even started with the Meltzer) — but I’ve decided to take my copying and pasting and scrapbooking and probing and etc.-etc. over to a new location so as not to bore y’all to tears and/or derisive laughter. So check out my jibber-jabber here, at the McLuhan Sandbox instead.
McLuhan on 45
Jon Savage in an April 2009 record roundup from his blog:
Published the same month (March 1967) that The Velvet Underground and Nico was released, Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is The Message [sic] became an instant bestseller and has become a key text. Columbia Records quickly rushed out an LP of McLuhan and his colleagues Fiore and Jerome Agel reading selections from the book, which is a very high sixties product with people talking at and over each other, added found noises and distortion — which should be reissued (for more, see Johnny Trunk’s eloquent article in Mojo May 2009). The whole point was simultaneity. There was also a promo 45, which culled selected five and ten second spots for DJ’s with locked grooves (just like the Velvet Underground flexi in Aspen’s POP issue, “Loop”) with visionary/critical slogans: “everything we do is music.”
You can listen to The Medium is the Massage album in its entirety on YouTube. It was produced by John (not the critic) Simon, a producer best (and most deservedly) known for his work with the Band. (Apparently, McLuhan himself was said to dislike the recording, though I’ve never seen documentation of such. He comes across pretty stiff and professorial-like, truth be told, though the surrounding collage is kind of fascinating. Sonically, it brings to mind a few other artifacts from the period, i.e., We’re Only In It For the Money, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, et al.)
. 104 & 105 from McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage
cf. p. 106
McLuhan & Xgau
Search results for “mcluhan” at robertchristgau.com:
“What makes it even more discomforting is that our former National Pastime has become square. McLuhan and his minions in the big media have almost delegitimized it, and with reason. Baseball is an old-fashioned game. Its pace is so slow that it is now chic to claim to enjoy the gossip of the game more than the contest itself.”
– review of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, 1971
MM in Understanding Media:
“The characteristic mode of the baseball game is that it features one-thing-at-a-time. It is a lineal, expansive game which, like golf, is perfectly adapted to the outlook of an individualist and inner-directed society. Timing and waiting are of the essence, with the entire field in suspense waiting upon the performance of a single player. By contrast, football, basketball, and ice hockey are games in which many events occur simultaneously, with the entire team involved at the same time.”
(This site has an interesting graph, based on Gallup polls, showing the relative relational popularity of football and baseball.)
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2) “It is by creating a mood that asks ‘Why should this mean anything?’ that the so-called rock poets can really write poetry — poetry that not only says something, but says it as only rock music can. For once Marshall McLuhan’s terminology tells us something: rock lyrics are a cool medium. Go ahead and mumble. Drown the voices in guitars. If somebody really wants to know what you’re saying, he’ll take the trouble, and in that trouble lies your art. On a crude level this permits the kind of one-to-one symbolism of pot songs like ‘Along Comes Mary’ and ‘That Acapulco Gold.'”
– from “Rock Lyrics are Poetry (Maybe),” 1967
A nicely drawn example of the participatory (“if someone wants to know…”), un-filled-in nature of MM’s definition of “cool.”
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3) “This way of explaining the children-of-affluence idea is the one instance in which Reich’s popularization elevates itself to synthesis, which is really what popularization should do. It is a concise and sane interpretation of ideas implicit in thinkers like McLuhan and Fuller. That it has received scant attention even from Reich’s fans indicates how deeply ingrained the Consumer Society cliché, which it contravenes, has become among American nay-sayers.”
– review of Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, 1970
I’m unfamiliar with Reich’s book or thesis, but Christgau is voicing what seems to me a fairly typical and unsurprising (though nonetheless interesting — at least if you’re a fan of McLuhan) pattern: that is, that MM’s ideas — assuming Reich is indeed re-playing them in a more “concise and sane” way — have always had a much better chance of reaching a broader audience when translated into plain/sane English. (Better still, don’t acknowledge the source at all, for the very word “McLuhan” can still induce a screeching, nails-on-a-chalkboard effect, depending on the audience.)
McLuhan Untwists “The Twist”
(Via McLuhan on Maui 2011)
MM: “As a matter of fact, we’re not very far from [twisting] right now. We’re in a state of agitated conversation, in which we’re getting pretty close to twist. All we have to do is stop talking and use our hands a little more…”
I’m assuming this is from ’60 or ’61?
P. 106 from McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage
MM, Auden, Rock
(from Philip Marchand’s The Medium and the Messenger)
McLuhan @100: An “intellectual thug”
“Reading John Dewey for a seminar (it’s a McLuhan/Dewey seminar, and I’m already enjoying McLuhan more by focusing on his ideas as aphorisms and reading more interviews and lectures. He intended most of his writings to be cryptic, full of wordplay, and his basic concepts were fairly simple; the iterations of them were often convoluted and usually aphoristic — he claims that he wrote this way to teach, not to tell — the teaching process was in unraveling smaller bites of info).”
– David Cooper Moore, “Can Rock Criticism Be an Educative Process?,” Skyecaptain Livejournal entry, 2009
McLuhan’s “basic concepts were fairly simple”: perhaps, but only if you think of them as “concepts” rather than as probes or percepts or activities (MM himself was fairly dismissive of terms like “concepts” and “theories”). But otherwise, yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me. One of the least rewarding approaches to understanding McLuhan — it’s certainly the case from my experience — is to limit your intake to his books. Even if you include those “books” of his which can scarcely be called books — i.e., those bound objects on printed paper which come across as deliberate attempts to satirize or explode the book form altogether, like in Cliché to Archetype, the way the introduction to the book shows up halfway through. I’ve probably learned thrice as much about MM reading and listening to interviews with him than I have from reading his texts (though the texts always make a lot more sense when I revisit them). You do McLuhan a great disservice, I think, to label him a “writer” — or anyway, to limit your classification of him as merely a writer. It was but one weapon in his arsenal of social activities. (Back in the fifties, I think, he described himself as an “intellectual thug.”)
(I interviewed David Cooper Moore here a couple years ago, though we were discussing Ashlee rather than Marshall. The podcast version is here; transcript here).)
McLuhan @100: Bless the Beatles
– Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Counterblast
(2011 marks the centenary of my all-time favourite Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. I’m going to mark the occasion here over the next few weeks by posting various McLuhan-related items, including though not necessarily limited to some of the intersections between McLuhan and pop music. I once half-jokingly suggested somewhere that McLuhan was “the world’s first rock critic.” This is indeed funny until you wake up one day and realize that it might just be true. As no less an authority than Tom Wolfe once asked, “What if he is the world’s first rock critic?”)
RockCritics.com 