Michael, you're onto something here — an observation about the digital environment; which has implications for all media environments. For a guide, we can go right to the work of McLuhan, who was the first person I know of to define the idea of a media environment and to explain that as a conducting vector, it has more power than the content that it facilitates.
This is what is meant by "the medium is the message." It is the vector — the medium — that transforms people and society, rather than the content. But people tend to obsess over the content and forget that the environment exists. You are talking about what the digital environment is doing to the content that it conveys — which is basically everything.
Let's consider another environment you didn't mention — food. I'm so old that when I was a boy, there was such a thing as "going out to eat." It was contrasted with "the family eating dinner at home." Going out to eat was a little quaint, and it has a slightly formal quality and you put the napkin in your lap. Back in the day, there was such a thing as a "meal."
Today, I would estimate that most people with jobs eat most of their food prepared out — but it's no longer "going out to eat." Some people eat in; and there is a heck of a lot of take-out as well as the digitization of food, all those delivery services where so many people take a cut that the restaurant makes little profit and the person who used to be called a chef has little influence over something crucial, which is the presentation of the dish. We still have that if you eat in (which used to mean eat at home, and now means eat in the restaurant).
Then there is eating out that is itself digitized, by third-party reservation services and contactless checkout in the restaurant — you pay your tab like you're at one of Walmart's self-checkout lanes.
When I was little, there was a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn called Jay Wong's. Mr Wong himself worked there every night. The metal dish of pork fried rice would come out covered, and when the cover was lifted, the rice was shaped perfectly and there was the (intended) effect of a burst of aroma.
That has nothing to do with the slop thrown into a cardboard bucket in most Chinese takeout places today, which sometimes have a creaky, greasy table over in the corner. No such meal is memorable, unless it's connected to some other significant life event, like running out of gas right near the place. It has no value of its own. And any teenager with kitchen skill can be taught in about 10 minutes to make fried rice that may not be Jay Wong's but would be many times better than takeout slop.
Then there are the phantom restaurants that take no customers — they only do delivery. They could be in the back of a warehouse or in someone's garage. That's actually a pretty good idea, since the whole table service thing has very little to do with the food preparation thing, or the delivery thing.
Digital conditions have expedited this whole process. They have expedited all processes. There used to be a thing called journalism, which gave way to the blogosphere, which has given way to the ongoing mass shooting known as Substack. The problem with the blogosphere and Substack is not that the copy is not edited; it's that hardly anyone has heard of, much less met or worked with, a copy editor.
The result is an ongoing horror; yours is one of the few Substacks I did not unsubscribe from this summer (notably, I only unsubbed from one of the Stacks I pay for, kept the rest of the ones I paid for, and ditched about 50 that were not worth paying for because they gave me agita and because the authors would do things like photograph their computer screen and push the photo into the article and think that was an "illustration." As a photographer who would take a photo, then develop and print the image, then reproduce the image in what was called a stat darkroom and then place it in the article, the torture was worse than finding typos in a book of poetry.)
As for Eddie van Halen, he's a clown, even if someone thinks he's the 4th greatest guitarist of the Anthropocene. I can't name one of his songs, and I am not ignorant of the music of his era. He can complain about noodling all he wants, though he seems to miss the point of improvisation — which is not a product of the digital age but (as we know it) a product of the jazz age (the early radio era). Nearly all jazz has an improvisational element, which comes across as freshness. Of course, all music back to the Paleolithic is based on improvisation. There was a time before songs, and nearly all songs are based on some form of an experiment.
When my teacher Joe Trusso arrived at conservatory in the 1960s, there was a sign on the wall of all the practice rooms that said NO IMPROVISING. So the first thing the students did was...improvise. Aah, the Sixties. Usually, good improvisers have some real training and then they let it go and learn how to be with the music and do something that is based in how they feel and what their surroundings are feeding them in that moment. As one great guitarist said to me, "Fuck the modes."
I can point you to many great Jerry Garcia solos (which were different in every rendering of every song). Brian Eno composed Music for Airports using tape loops strung around the legs of furniture in his apartment. Then the virtuosos known as Bang on a Can transcribed it and did a new version that is amazing but probably too complicated and dynamic to be called ambient music; it is more properly classical music.
This essay is improvised. It's a "comment" in a "Substack" about 1000 words long, which in the past an editor would have been happy to pay me for, since it's a focused piece of commentary. But tonight, it's just a comment to one of the last Substacks I care to read.
PS, once upon a time there was a thing called a book, and it could change people's minds about topics and issues they had not considered before.
The magic of this spontaneous wordjam you made reminds me of our first video chat YouTube experiment talking about McLuhan and the net—and here we are in a relatively new digital environment and no one can see it, because we're all like fish inside water.
The vectors are like highways and wires, and whatever travels upon them are nothing effects-wise compared to the vectors themselves. But the food environment you mention is absolutely fascinating. It's so funny you mention this, because this exact thing has been strong on my mind lately and now you've brought it out.
My dad was a chef. Well, that was the “official” career. There were others. But I grew up around it and have hundreds of good classic cookbooks. And I was thinking about them just like a week ago, and realized at once with a cold, sharp realization that I don't really even use them anymore, most of them, and it's because this whole environment's changed.
Today food is completely different from how it was in the old days of cookbooks, when every well-appointed kitchen had a copy of Larousse Gastronomique (a bias I still sort of agree with). Food interests, and habits, have quickly shifted away---I'm pulling together ayurvedic angles and other quirks and exoticisms and aside from a few staple cuisines am just no longer interested in the old-fashioned “dishes” of yore, and the way they were done. And for various reasons I don't think really anyone is anymore.
Eons ago I used to chase after what great old restaurants were left—from the roadside glass-walled places up against long tongues of highway to the “fine” palatial fortresses like Lowrey's in Chicago, and it was great to see them all even as I knew it was from a gone world, they were all dying out, and out of place in the world, the whole thing was more like an exploration in urban archaeology than anything else—I’m glad I saw what I saw, views into a world before my time, but by now just about all those neat historic places are gone, and the menus and food contents and habits have gone with them.
Restaurants, as you describe them—same with cocktail lounges, another longtime favorite to find—and diners, definitely diners, they're all gone away. Even the ones that are left, they're gone, they just don't realize it yet.
A few diners still appear scattered occasionally on the landscape in places, if you know where to look—Marshland on the Cape, a few great ones in Florida, and the shell of the old Paradise Diner in Lowell, almost like a tiny burnt-out shoebox along the traintracks, and is (in my longheld theory) the place (along with a memory of Scott Fitzgerald's first book) where Kerouac came up with the name of his hero in On the Road. I've got to dig that one out. But anyway shooting the neons and the formica counters and bringing home a mug like some kind of trophy—I saw lots of them, they were indeed interesting, but diners really were a technology of another time. And that time is way gone. I loved Syracuse china and Homer Laughlin plates and all that, but the future is going to be something so different: with fast food, where everything you use is disposable and the food contents are centralized machine food measured out, the actual dining experience, even the “restaurant” itself, have all been rubbed out of the picture as much as possible.
Dining is a completely different thing altogether now. For one thing it's joyless, and I almost entirely refuse to ever do it. I love your coinage “the digitization of food,” because that's exactly what it is on both a technical and clinical level. The value today is in the convenience, and in the quantification of every aspect of it down to the list of specialized or dietary-requirement items—but the meal, and the place, and the act itself, the experience of it all, these things have no place now. The whole dining experience is replaced by convenience, measurement, and gunk atmosphere matching the wardrobe. But atmosphere is one of the most important things.
If radio age is improv, the digital age is reproduction, and we're getting that stamped into everything. One of the most interesting big solid trends in music today is mallsoft and related explorations in vaporwave, which is an effective (and successful) creation of moods, pure atmospheres, from near-past time periods and the built environments of this recent past.
When I was growing up and in the scene I knew (grungies and so forth) it was supremely uncool to have anything to do with the Dead. But I didn't care, I liked 'em. There was something to the jazzic tapestry of the music, the long lone road of it from beginning to end, that in a way still hasn't been entirely figured out. (RIP Phil Lesh, btw.) They play a lot of the same songs, but they never play the same song twice—and Gregory Corso might interject at this point, they've never played the same song once! I don't care if it's not “punk” enough, punk is dad, after all, and I'm not, and there's interesting energy to the sound that they splatter.
Something I said with all firmity decades ago now was that web sites are more important than books. Not, of course, that books were bad—they're all still there on the shelf, and I can read a thousand words of Belloc or Balzac any time I feel the urge for their company—but also here, on this screen, is a new thing, a new kind of thousand words, new forms of writing much more immediate and freshly composed and on a new kind of road, which is, I believe, one of the great promises of Substack.
We got in a nice stack of first press Brian Eno stuff yesterday. I might have to put Music For Films on rotation now because aside from writing what once was a book we are, it seems, also watching a movie.
Michael, you're onto something here — an observation about the digital environment; which has implications for all media environments. For a guide, we can go right to the work of McLuhan, who was the first person I know of to define the idea of a media environment and to explain that as a conducting vector, it has more power than the content that it facilitates.
This is what is meant by "the medium is the message." It is the vector — the medium — that transforms people and society, rather than the content. But people tend to obsess over the content and forget that the environment exists. You are talking about what the digital environment is doing to the content that it conveys — which is basically everything.
Let's consider another environment you didn't mention — food. I'm so old that when I was a boy, there was such a thing as "going out to eat." It was contrasted with "the family eating dinner at home." Going out to eat was a little quaint, and it has a slightly formal quality and you put the napkin in your lap. Back in the day, there was such a thing as a "meal."
Today, I would estimate that most people with jobs eat most of their food prepared out — but it's no longer "going out to eat." Some people eat in; and there is a heck of a lot of take-out as well as the digitization of food, all those delivery services where so many people take a cut that the restaurant makes little profit and the person who used to be called a chef has little influence over something crucial, which is the presentation of the dish. We still have that if you eat in (which used to mean eat at home, and now means eat in the restaurant).
Then there is eating out that is itself digitized, by third-party reservation services and contactless checkout in the restaurant — you pay your tab like you're at one of Walmart's self-checkout lanes.
When I was little, there was a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn called Jay Wong's. Mr Wong himself worked there every night. The metal dish of pork fried rice would come out covered, and when the cover was lifted, the rice was shaped perfectly and there was the (intended) effect of a burst of aroma.
That has nothing to do with the slop thrown into a cardboard bucket in most Chinese takeout places today, which sometimes have a creaky, greasy table over in the corner. No such meal is memorable, unless it's connected to some other significant life event, like running out of gas right near the place. It has no value of its own. And any teenager with kitchen skill can be taught in about 10 minutes to make fried rice that may not be Jay Wong's but would be many times better than takeout slop.
Then there are the phantom restaurants that take no customers — they only do delivery. They could be in the back of a warehouse or in someone's garage. That's actually a pretty good idea, since the whole table service thing has very little to do with the food preparation thing, or the delivery thing.
Digital conditions have expedited this whole process. They have expedited all processes. There used to be a thing called journalism, which gave way to the blogosphere, which has given way to the ongoing mass shooting known as Substack. The problem with the blogosphere and Substack is not that the copy is not edited; it's that hardly anyone has heard of, much less met or worked with, a copy editor.
The result is an ongoing horror; yours is one of the few Substacks I did not unsubscribe from this summer (notably, I only unsubbed from one of the Stacks I pay for, kept the rest of the ones I paid for, and ditched about 50 that were not worth paying for because they gave me agita and because the authors would do things like photograph their computer screen and push the photo into the article and think that was an "illustration." As a photographer who would take a photo, then develop and print the image, then reproduce the image in what was called a stat darkroom and then place it in the article, the torture was worse than finding typos in a book of poetry.)
As for Eddie van Halen, he's a clown, even if someone thinks he's the 4th greatest guitarist of the Anthropocene. I can't name one of his songs, and I am not ignorant of the music of his era. He can complain about noodling all he wants, though he seems to miss the point of improvisation — which is not a product of the digital age but (as we know it) a product of the jazz age (the early radio era). Nearly all jazz has an improvisational element, which comes across as freshness. Of course, all music back to the Paleolithic is based on improvisation. There was a time before songs, and nearly all songs are based on some form of an experiment.
When my teacher Joe Trusso arrived at conservatory in the 1960s, there was a sign on the wall of all the practice rooms that said NO IMPROVISING. So the first thing the students did was...improvise. Aah, the Sixties. Usually, good improvisers have some real training and then they let it go and learn how to be with the music and do something that is based in how they feel and what their surroundings are feeding them in that moment. As one great guitarist said to me, "Fuck the modes."
I can point you to many great Jerry Garcia solos (which were different in every rendering of every song). Brian Eno composed Music for Airports using tape loops strung around the legs of furniture in his apartment. Then the virtuosos known as Bang on a Can transcribed it and did a new version that is amazing but probably too complicated and dynamic to be called ambient music; it is more properly classical music.
This essay is improvised. It's a "comment" in a "Substack" about 1000 words long, which in the past an editor would have been happy to pay me for, since it's a focused piece of commentary. But tonight, it's just a comment to one of the last Substacks I care to read.
PS, once upon a time there was a thing called a book, and it could change people's minds about topics and issues they had not considered before.
Eric,
As Zeus said to Sisyphus, "Hold my beer..."
The magic of this spontaneous wordjam you made reminds me of our first video chat YouTube experiment talking about McLuhan and the net—and here we are in a relatively new digital environment and no one can see it, because we're all like fish inside water.
The vectors are like highways and wires, and whatever travels upon them are nothing effects-wise compared to the vectors themselves. But the food environment you mention is absolutely fascinating. It's so funny you mention this, because this exact thing has been strong on my mind lately and now you've brought it out.
My dad was a chef. Well, that was the “official” career. There were others. But I grew up around it and have hundreds of good classic cookbooks. And I was thinking about them just like a week ago, and realized at once with a cold, sharp realization that I don't really even use them anymore, most of them, and it's because this whole environment's changed.
Today food is completely different from how it was in the old days of cookbooks, when every well-appointed kitchen had a copy of Larousse Gastronomique (a bias I still sort of agree with). Food interests, and habits, have quickly shifted away---I'm pulling together ayurvedic angles and other quirks and exoticisms and aside from a few staple cuisines am just no longer interested in the old-fashioned “dishes” of yore, and the way they were done. And for various reasons I don't think really anyone is anymore.
Eons ago I used to chase after what great old restaurants were left—from the roadside glass-walled places up against long tongues of highway to the “fine” palatial fortresses like Lowrey's in Chicago, and it was great to see them all even as I knew it was from a gone world, they were all dying out, and out of place in the world, the whole thing was more like an exploration in urban archaeology than anything else—I’m glad I saw what I saw, views into a world before my time, but by now just about all those neat historic places are gone, and the menus and food contents and habits have gone with them.
Restaurants, as you describe them—same with cocktail lounges, another longtime favorite to find—and diners, definitely diners, they're all gone away. Even the ones that are left, they're gone, they just don't realize it yet.
A few diners still appear scattered occasionally on the landscape in places, if you know where to look—Marshland on the Cape, a few great ones in Florida, and the shell of the old Paradise Diner in Lowell, almost like a tiny burnt-out shoebox along the traintracks, and is (in my longheld theory) the place (along with a memory of Scott Fitzgerald's first book) where Kerouac came up with the name of his hero in On the Road. I've got to dig that one out. But anyway shooting the neons and the formica counters and bringing home a mug like some kind of trophy—I saw lots of them, they were indeed interesting, but diners really were a technology of another time. And that time is way gone. I loved Syracuse china and Homer Laughlin plates and all that, but the future is going to be something so different: with fast food, where everything you use is disposable and the food contents are centralized machine food measured out, the actual dining experience, even the “restaurant” itself, have all been rubbed out of the picture as much as possible.
Dining is a completely different thing altogether now. For one thing it's joyless, and I almost entirely refuse to ever do it. I love your coinage “the digitization of food,” because that's exactly what it is on both a technical and clinical level. The value today is in the convenience, and in the quantification of every aspect of it down to the list of specialized or dietary-requirement items—but the meal, and the place, and the act itself, the experience of it all, these things have no place now. The whole dining experience is replaced by convenience, measurement, and gunk atmosphere matching the wardrobe. But atmosphere is one of the most important things.
If radio age is improv, the digital age is reproduction, and we're getting that stamped into everything. One of the most interesting big solid trends in music today is mallsoft and related explorations in vaporwave, which is an effective (and successful) creation of moods, pure atmospheres, from near-past time periods and the built environments of this recent past.
When I was growing up and in the scene I knew (grungies and so forth) it was supremely uncool to have anything to do with the Dead. But I didn't care, I liked 'em. There was something to the jazzic tapestry of the music, the long lone road of it from beginning to end, that in a way still hasn't been entirely figured out. (RIP Phil Lesh, btw.) They play a lot of the same songs, but they never play the same song twice—and Gregory Corso might interject at this point, they've never played the same song once! I don't care if it's not “punk” enough, punk is dad, after all, and I'm not, and there's interesting energy to the sound that they splatter.
Something I said with all firmity decades ago now was that web sites are more important than books. Not, of course, that books were bad—they're all still there on the shelf, and I can read a thousand words of Belloc or Balzac any time I feel the urge for their company—but also here, on this screen, is a new thing, a new kind of thousand words, new forms of writing much more immediate and freshly composed and on a new kind of road, which is, I believe, one of the great promises of Substack.
We got in a nice stack of first press Brian Eno stuff yesterday. I might have to put Music For Films on rotation now because aside from writing what once was a book we are, it seems, also watching a movie.