“If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

This video has been making it’s rounds on the interwebs this week and I just thought it would be appropriate to remind everyone what a thoughtful, passionate and remarkable human being Carl Sagan was. I mean if autotune can get the kids to listen to anything these days it’s better this than Kanye. If you’re not familiar with his Cosmos series or his numerous books, let me share one of my favorite anecdotes about Dr. Sagan.

He chaired the NASA committee responsible for the content of the solid gold record (not sales, we’re talking Au) that accompanied the Voyager I & II probes into the depths of space containing a message from Earth. This record included greeting in 55 languages and music from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson among other representatives from non-western and indigenous cultures. Sagan wanted “Here Comes the Sun” from Abbey Road, but EMI said no. Also on this record is a brain scan of someone in love. For more on this, check out this episode of WNYC’s Radiolab. The probe is now well over 14 billion kilometers from the Sun. In 40,000 years it will be within 2 light years of a star in the next galaxy to us, Andromeda.

Sagan was also a great popularizer of the search for extraterrestrial life and of science in general. Sadly, he passed in 1996 and no one since has quite managed to replace his enthusiasm, love and selfless promotion of a higher understanding of life and its relationship with the universe.

The discussion, primarily focused on the concept of whether there is an intrinsic quality to human nature, or if it’s completely conditioned from external influences, was aired on Dutch television, and later transcribed and published as the Chomsky – Foucault debate.

This excerpt, dissects the notion of justice versus power. Each of the intellectual heavyweights stay true to their respective dogmas; Chomsky’s long standing position that absolute power corrupts, and Foucault’s disdain and criticism of psychiatry, but the results are terrifically interesting.

The book not only has a transcription of this debate, but additional original text from Chomsky, and a new introduction by Foucault scholar John Rajchman.

I was visiting a friend on Lake Winnipesaukee last Saturday when he started playing a guitar riff that sounded very familiar. I asked him the name of the song, and he said it was the theme from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, L’avventura (seen & heard in video above). I suggested that it sounded very similar to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae. He agreed. Now, composer Giovanni Fusco died in 1968 and The Modern Lovers formed in 1970, so they weren’t broing down in Boston, or even Italy for that matter. It is quite possible however, that a young Jonathan did see the film and fell victim to one of our implicit and ubiquitous human faults, cryptomnesia, or unintended plagiarism.

The term cryptomnesia, literally hidden memory, was coined by Experimental Psychologist, medium investigator and proponent of Hindu re-incarnation beliefs, Theodore Flournoy. Essentially, cryptomnesia is “a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else.” While the individual believes that they are creating something new, in reality the inspiration is drawn from implicit memory, our brains ability to remember information without us consciously knowing that we are remembering it. In a way, we experience the content of a memory not as memory, but perceive it as a fresh creative and uniquely personal experience. If this false belief is corrected or its creator is exposed to the original source of the memory, it can result in a feeling of mystical stochasticity, divine coincidence, déjà vu, defensiveness or plain old weirdness.

In the 8th grade I wrote an entire song that I thought was great until I realized that not only the guitar part, but the vocal melody as well, were from an Dinosaur Jr. song that I had heard only once the week before during a ride to school. To say the least, such an experience can be disappointing, but more often it’s just remarkable. A haunting mist of realization creeps over you, stirring thoughts neuro-duplicity and a hollow autonomy. It becomes very easy to call into question what you’ve ever really done that was yours. Are all our creative processes but micro-collages of cryptomnesia re-assembled as processed through our unique chemical interactions in time and space? And if so, is that a bad thing?

In some development models children learn how to behave by unconsciously copying others, and friends strengthen their relationships when they assimilate each other’s phrases, behaviors, and opinions. Not only that, but these bonds are shown to be more common in situations where trust or affinity are involved, thereby creating a reciprocal cycle of trust, sharing, mimicking and bonding. Now I would suggest here that a primal form of human social bonding would be art, storytelling and music, and it strikes me that these are the only areas of contention that plagiarism rears its head. So what about that Dinosaur Jr. song? Did I just inherently trust J. Mascis so much that I re-appropriated his song and believed it was mine? Perhaps I don’t even need to trust him. With music, it seems more natural to passively consume, but deeply, sometimes subconsciously remember. Like when you walk into the deli thinking sandwich and you walk out whistling a Rod Stewart song, only to try and figure out why you can’t stop hearing, Wake Up Maggie for twenty minutes before you get put it all together.

Now, of course it isn’t just music that is the exclusive domain of cryptomnesia, but music is rife with examples and I will explain why I think that is in a moment, but first another example. Take The Banana Splits’ Tra La La
Tra La La

versus Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier

Buffalo Soldier

This is just one example of many that Thomas Irvin has compiled on his website. Now, who knows what kind of interaction Bob Marley ever had with the music of The Banana Splits, but the comparison is undeniable. If you’ve ever had it happen, (it happens to me all the time) you wonder why musically such blatant plagiarisms repeatedly come to be?

I would posit that perhaps this is because there is a relatively limited lexicon (12 notes in a chromatic scale, duplicated at octaves) in music and an even more binding syntax of contemporary music (particularly popular music) than compared to the phonemes of language and the complete lexicon of our collected global linguistic systems. In its essence, perhaps music is so simple and so direct an emotive and communicative device that we just can’t help ourselves. Perhaps musical memory and experience runs so deep that it can more easily operate undetected from our higher cognitive faculties, resting in a murky sonic pool deep in the nether-reaches of our brains. This ease and simplicity of form would make it more liable to re-appropriation, overlap, plagiarism and our ever-increasing claims of Fair Use. That is to say, it’s easier to lift (accidentally or otherwise) a four note chord progression than an exact paragraph of Faulkner’s.

Nevertheless, it happens in writing too. More and more. Now the question with the integrity of the written word I believe is slightly different. As our access to all of this information, often plagued with dubious citation, glib proclamation, patent  fabrication and deviously mercurous origins, what kind of truths are we writing or more accurately, re-writing? And what will the cultural implications of a rampantly cannibalistic media-based society be? Artwork is another matter, but the battles have begun. But for music, it is less about origin and truth than fair use and over-exposure. There are only so many hooks out there, I hate to say it. With twelve notes and a reasonable limit of 5 – 20 notes in any given hook, keeping in mind that 99% of bands are playing some combination of the same five instruments, Christ. It’s a goddamn litigious nightmare we’re clicking and file-sharing our way into–or wet dream depending on your area of legal expertise.

As with the development of any professional craft, the only solution to this digital age dilemma are due diligence, rigorous editing, and review, but really who cares? That’s the question and I don’t know if enough people do. This is not to justify purposeful, malicious slothful plagiarism which is, in my view, inexcusable. But perhaps on a subconscious level we’re all plagiarists, some of us just take from more places and some just mask it better.

Copy. Paste. Check please.

Lazy? Certainly. I’m pulling “not saying shit” on these clips for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this film is absolutely impossible to find. Between this and the Fleetwood Mac Tusk doc., I’m signed on with every dangerous/crawling-with-hackers-stealing-your-worthless-identity auction network throughout Eastern Europe, Korea, China, and all nations currently comprising South and Southeast Asia. A Swedish Love Story is a brilliant piece of work.

The painfully short, incomplete, clips on YouTube have, whether they intended to or not, created a community of people who care deeply about this film they’ve never seen. I haven’t seen all of it. If anyone reading this can remedy that, let’s talk.

A Swedish Love Story (Swedish: En kärlekshistoria) is a 1970 Swedish romantic drama directed by Roy Andersson, starring Ann-Sofie Kylin and Rolf Sohlman as two teenagers falling in love. Inspired by the Czechoslovak New Wave, the film was Andersson’s feature film debut and became a big success in Sweden and abroad. It is today considered a classic about teenage love.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 below.

Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So what did he do? With the advent of reCAPTCHA, every time you solve one of those annoying verification puzzles you are helping to decipher and digitize some of the 150+ years of non-digital, non-computer recognizable NY Times archives that exist as scans or microfilm. Keep in mind, this started last year and Ahn expects to be done by the end of 2009.

Some other interesting notes:

The Empire State Building took 7 million human-hours to build.

The Panama Canal took 20 million human-hours to build.

9 Billion Human-Hours of solitaire were played in 2003.

Granted, the energy output of a game of solitaire is not equal to one of manual labor, but think about the scale of this. Thanks to Nova Science Now for bringing this up.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. -MM

coming soon…

Read: The Dystopians (The New Yorker, 1/26/09)
Related: a few lines from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives:

Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
A rich man speaking in praise of wealth
A rich man speaking in praise of poverty
A poor man speaking in praise of wealth
A poor man speaking in praise of poverty

Comic primness, or “prim irony,” is an an attitude characterizing a member of a privileged class who somewhat questions the state of affairs whereby he enjoys his privileges; but after all, he does not enjoy them, and so in the last analysis he resigns himself to the dubious conditions, in a state of ironic complexity that is apologetic, but not abnegatory.