Subject/Object

Most people, if they know any songs by the great Jazz musician Thelonious Monk, know or have heard the title of the slower song “‘Round Midnight”. While I admit that that song has its own greatness, I don’t think it exhibits the kind of quiet soul of some of his other slower works.

Thelonious Monk was an eccentric jazz musician of the bebop area. He often played with John Coltrane, although I read once that he and Miles Davis did not get along too well. Monk’s eccentricities are legendary. Often he wore a different strange hat for an extendid period—I think after a tour in Japan he wore a “coolie hat” on stage for a while. He rarely spoke, and when he did he often mumbled. During a concert he would regularly cease playing and dance in a tight circle on stage.

A documentary featuring largely contemporary footage about Monk, Straight, No Chaser (from a title of one of his pieces) was produced by Clint Eastwood argued that he suffered from some form of mental illness. Interview’s in that film with Monk’s son show that he was often distant and was hospitalized a number of times. What amazes me as well is that he just one day refused to play anymore—after spending all of his time on the thing, he just retreated into himself too far to touch it anymore. Like his time with it was finished.

“Crepuscule with Nellie” is one of those works that makes you feel a ripple deep in your soul. For me, I think my soul sits at the bottom of my stomach, because it flops and turns with every repeated playing of this track. If you get the 15 disc Riverside Recordings you get like half a dozen various versions of this song.

Crepuscule means twilight, and Nellie was his wife who was with him his entire life. Being so unique and having very special needs, Nellie was on every tour and travelled with him extensively, particularly has his condition got harder for him. For me I’d like to think that this song was him giving back to her. I often feel the power of this song and upset because I have the same feelings for my partner in life, but I won’t be able to write her something this good to express it. This version I found is not the best one in my opinion: there are four different takes of the song on Disc 4 of Riverside, and they are masterpieces.

This one does have a short interview with him at the beginning, the actual song starts at 1:57. I love this song because you can here his heavy handed handed style, where he seems to wait until the very last second to place each note, and then throws his hand down on the keys. He sometimes seems to be unsure just where each note is supposed to go, but you know he always picks the exact right one. When he has a full band for this song, it begins slow with just him and a wire brush on a drum, but slowly the rest of the pieces come in at the end to burn slowly.

I have been reading an excellent work by communication theorist and political economist Vincent Mosco. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace examines the myths we have been spinning around the rise of the Internet: that it will change politics and social interaction, and generally bring us into a new enlightened age.

The first part of the book details that myth, from Marshal McLuhan to Alvin Toffler to Nicholas Negroponte. What I am enjoying right now is the second half, which goes on to show that other technological developments where lauded in their time with the exact same language that we use to describe the Internet.

Any of these quotes sound familiar:

The Telegraph

• “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.”
• “Our whole human existence is being transformed.”

Electrification

• “It is no longer a matter of choice whether or not one shall become acquainted with the general facts and principles of electric science. Such an acquaintance has become a matter of necessity. So intimately does electricity enter into our everyday life that to know nothing of its peculiar properties or applications is, to say the least, to be severely handicapped in the struggle for existence.” (does this call for Electronic Literacy anyone?)

The Telephone

• the harbinger of “a new social order”
• “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen.”
• This would lead to an acceleration of democracy in politics and social life since we are all equals on the telephone.
• others welcomed the likely breakdown in class and family boundaries.

Radio

• “the greatest force yet developed by man in his march down the slopes of time.
• “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.”
• “it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded.”
• “Every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.”

Television

• “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (seriously!)
• will make “the attendance of classes in any one place…as obsolete as the buggy of twenty-five years ago”
• “television will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
• The new medium was predicted to be so potent that writers began to speak of a “pre-television” era and admonished those who were foolish enough to cling to the “habits of thinking” that characterized this time as “trapped in another anachronism.” (Library 2.0?)
• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept upon it for the welfare of civilization.”
• Additional examples give new hope for community television in low-income areas, for direct contact with candidates for electoral office, and for a transformation in the quantity and quality of citizen communication with government officials.
• “an “information highway.”

What Mosco is arguing is that, sooner or later, all of these new technologies become banal. He notes at one point that the average home now has 8 radios. Where the telephone was once seen by people as some kind of mythological device, now we do not think twice about it. In the 1930’s television was to be this great democratic and educational tool–now we see it as exactly the opposite.

So too with the Internet. This honeymoon many of us are still having with the Internet, and certain sub-technologies on the Internet (Blogs/Tagging/Social Software will save the world!) will quickly come to the end as new youngsters cease seeing the technology around them as something sacred, but as something purely profane.