Nomads

I suppose it was inevitable. After less than two years of living in Tucson, I have started reading historical and cultural books about the Southwest. My mother tried to interest me in westerns when she moved to Phoenix in the late 1970s, but they seemed irrelevant when I lived in Ohio. Perhaps it's the wide open spaces that we see as soon as we drive out of town. Perhaps it's the amazing but true fact that Tucson closes the public schools for the annual rodeo parade. No doubt there's a big chunk of mythology planted in me by years of watching Hollywood westerns. But it's one of the behavioral trends that I see in myself and have to stand back, scratch my head, and wonder why.

Two recent books from the vacation reading have prompted these reflections. In one of them, Cities of Gold by Douglas Preston, two greenhorn cowboys recreate Coronado's initial exploration into the southwest, riding over a thousand miles on horseback from the Mexican border south of Tucson to the Pecos Pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The book is equal parts riding story and history lesson, covering not only Coronado's initial contacts but whatever we know about pre-Coronado native civilizations and their subsequent demise in the wake of the American conquest in the nineteenth century.

The second book is by Richard Grant, a British ex-pat who was living in Tucson when he wrote American Nomads. This book has more general interest than Preston's, not being limited to residents of the southwest (although cowboys, historical and contemporary, participate in his tale). Nomads, people of no fixed abode, live way off the grid, and include an amazingly wide spectrum of contemporary American society, albeit mostly unknown and undocumented. In addition to rodeo cowboys, Grant also visits the annual Rainbow Family gatherings, the annual gathering of retirees in RVs at Quartzsite, Arizona, the tribal headquarters of the largest group of nomadic Indians (the Comanches), and even the Freight Train Riders of America, formerly known as hoboes. It's a fascinating array of tales of wanderers past and present, with occasional references to nomadic philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, whose seminal work A Thousand Plateaux spun the image of a eternally outside nomad war machine across a dozen different knowledge domains.

The most well-known musical nomad was Harry Partch, who spent formative years riding the rails as a hobo, participating in the loose and unstructured society that flourished for a brief period during more sympathetic, less dangerous times. Partch's unique musical system based on a 43-note scale (rather than the usual twelve) lies fairly far outside any mainstream, although his maverick status finds him at the headwaters of some kind of tributary that continues to contemporary microtonal composers like Kyle Gann and Ben Johnston.

Drone composers have a nomad representative in Michael Northam, whose resume reads like a fifteen-year travelogue. His very occasional blog posts are separated by several weeks and thousands of miles. While it's easier to make a case for an audible nomadism in Partch's music than it is for Northam's, I hear a powerful yearning for stability in the way Northam combines dozens of layers of source material, a constant that permeates the delicate and timeless texture that he constructs. But this is an aspect that I bring as a listener — Northam's concerns as expressed in interviews and his own writings tend more to complex systems, meterological phenomena, and the complex layering in tiny molecules. But for all the imaginative stimuli that come from a contemplation of nomadism, I would be hard pressed to identify a nomadic aspect in Northam's work that wasn't present in other drone artists. But southwestern landscapes, rootless nomadic wandering and slowly moving journeys like Preston's are growing in my personal symbolisms, which inevitably colors the way I listen to and perform music.

Miscellaneous playlists

Back from vacation! Now that southern Arizona has gotten to triple-digit heat, a picture like this one is an reminder of cooler climes.


For most of our recent driving trip, we mostly listened to playlists on our iPod. I like the playlist concept; it's like a radio station with no commercials. I download new songs to our driving music playlist, including new music that my wife has chosen, so I get to hear music I've never heard before. In case you're interested, our driving music playlist has 1661 songs, 206 of which have a play count of zero. Not all of the songs are completely new because I have a tendency to transfer new pop music CDs directly to the playlist, but I did have new albums from Wilco and Bjork to accompany us.

I've gotten used to the playlists in shuffle mode, to the point where I find that many albums are fairly boring to take in a single sitting*. I grabbed a small stack of CDs for the trip, and at one point we put on Bill Frisell's album The Willies. I like Frisell's music, but found this album as a whole to be underwhelming. It's a collection of sixteen very subdued, mostly acoustic instrumentals, and it simply didn't hang together for me as an album. We have other Frisell albums in our rotation (Good Dog, Happy Man in particular), but we probably won't include this one.

Playlists (and iTunes in general) provide considerably more flexibility than the CD format. Smart playlists can even use metadata associated with the songs to update themselves dynamically. We like to play music late at night, so we have a smart playlist that looks for two hours of slow ambient and classical music based on the least recently heard field in the iTunes database. Our iPod has a handful of Takemitsu and Feldman pieces, a small subset based on the same criterion. The ability of iTunes and the iPod to use a larger set of metadata, and to let me as the user define my own tags, is one of the great strengths of the program.

The different ways people use metadata is the subject of a recent essay, Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger, an information society guru with credits for NPR, Wired, Harvard Business Review, etc. He describes a third-order organization, another level out from the organization of things (first order) and a physical catalog of things (second order), as the metadata tags that can be applied to digital things, thus making them available for any conceivable sort or search order. In the first-order time, the keepers of the organization were the specialized caste who were the only ones who could retrieve the knowledge (think of medieval libraries in monasteries). When catalogs came into being, the ones who defined the categories used in the catalogs were the definers of our knowledge. The catalogs were still limited by physical constraints, so the knowledge pattern that created them was the way humans tended to categorize reality. By the end of the essay he has extrapolated digital organization to our understanding of knowledge.

The third order organization is the beginning of the recognition that reality is more complex than the knowledge systems that we have tried to impose on it, that reality contains a great deal more of the miscellaneous. It's up to us as individuals to filter the vast quantities of 'knowledge' out in the world, and to recognize the patterns that make the most sense to us. Weinberger takes his examples from many different fields, and is entertaining and educational on the development of libraries and other classification schemes. He uses tagging (and cites the success stories of huge web sites of user-generated content all held together by tagging, such as the photo sharing site flickr.com, the social bookmark site del.icio.us and other social networking sites, YouTube, and even Wikipedia (Weinberger's take on Wikipedia is considerably more bullish than Kyle Gann's). His unbridled optimism overlooks some casualties (he states that record labels benefit from meta-businesses like iTunes and implies that brick-and-mortar stores are "middlemen who provide no value"), but I found his overall conclusions to be generally spot on.

Perhaps musicians and other artists have already discovered that knowledge doesn't really keep itself to the categories that we've inherited from previous lawgivers. Although the essay was entertaining enough, and the examples were new for me, it seemed like Weinberger was articulating something already in our zeitgeist. Scandals and calculated irrelevance in the news media have undermined our trust in the keepers of the story of our times. The public's confidence in the government and our elected officials is at a historical low. Although Weinberger's interests are oriented more towards business than art, the grey area of knowledge definition is at the heart of the artistic endeavor.

*For some reason, the exceptions that come to mind are all prog rock. We had a great time listening to classic albums like In the Court of the Crimson King, Lark's Tongues in Aspic, and Wish You Were Here.