Big Wave Surfing

Why is big wave surfing so engaging?

There's something about huge waves that inspires fear. From the shore it's possible to write them off as passively destructive. But from the water, they can look positively evil. The wave itself can't even be identified — it's no specific body of water, but a general force. A collective action of the entire ocean. An unseen force manifest in a mountain of water.

The big wave surfer confronts this: an unidentifiable, shape-shifting, destructive force backed by the entire ocean. They collaborate, redirecting all of that destructive energy into a single creative action. They name the unnameable.

From the shore, the ocean has no scale. There is nothing to be compared. But when you see a surfer on a wave, you know exactly big it is. Big wave surfing is the humanization of infinity.

Magical Situations

When you see a tightrope walker, no one needs to explain what is happening. You immediately understand the risk and skill involved, and you are transfixed by it. I'd say this is a "magical" situation: understood intuitively, without explanation, with minimal cultural context. Nature creates a lot of magical things, but I have trouble thinking of many magical human creations. Fireworks? Percussion? What else?

The Best Hack

Fold a single piece of paper down the center, length wise. Open it up, and fold two corners from one short side to the center, so that the short side is parallel to the center line. Fold the two corners this creates to the center in the same manner. Repeat this once more, but folding in the opposite direction. A section of the structure should create a T shape. Throw the piece of paper with the smallest end facing forward, and it will glide.

This is the most elegant repurposing of an everyday object I know: the paper airplane.

Harry Houdini

Things I learned from the Wikipedia article on Harry Houdini:

1. Sometimes things work, but they don't always
2. When they don't work, the solution may be hidden in a kiss; or not working may have been part of the plan in the first place
3. Sometimes it's important for people to see the process, and other times it's more alluring for it to be hidden
4. The possibility of death is intriguing

Cage and Affect

John Cage appreciated natural sounds. Striving to produce similar sounds, he attempted to remove any of his intentionality from his music making: imitating nature, he used chance events.

But maybe when we follow chance events, we don't make nature-like sounds. They're nature-like in that they have the same underlying order, but not in the experience. The average person might sometimes listen to rain, but not to Cage.

Perhaps in order to imitate nature we must act very unlike nature? Perhaps our best approximation of nature cannot come about by imitating its processes, but by analyzing its results?

Awareness and Art

In the last century a tradition has developed that places awareness at the center of art. One of my favorite realizations of this idea comes from John Cage's famous "silent piece"/4'33": the music consists of any sound the audience is aware of. Surely this can be expanded into other forms:

Music is awareness of sound

Sculpture is awareness of physical form

Dance is awareness of movement

Poetry is awareness of language

Architecture is awareness of space (from Caitlin)

And by "is", I should say "requires", as it is possible to have awareness without art, but not art without awareness. And, perhaps, the only distinction between these two cases is the label applied to that which one is aware of (whether it is classified as/connected to other things called "art"). I can imagine "beauty" working the same way: requiring awareness (and perhaps, the label "art"), but then being nothing more than an additional label.

Merzbow's Noise

We are slaves to analogy. Every sound we hear evokes a reaction and association. Every image reminds us of a time and place; and if it doesn't, we imagine one. Breaking stimuli into its constituents doesn't do us any good: pure colors remind us of representative objects (the blue sky, the green grass), pure tones are reminiscent of various electronic devices, and pure rhythms occur naturally in the machinery that surrounds us. In an attempt to expand our sonic palette, Russolo introduces us to a variety of ignored noises. Yet his list of "roars", "whistles" and "screeches" still suffers from analogical bondage: all these noises are implicitly categorized by their origin. Even when we're confronted by an unfamiliar noise, if we listen closely we recreate it into something familiar (people often hear voices where there are none). Merzbow makes these kind of sounds, these cracklings, mumblings and loud whispers. But if "noise is the unconsciousness of music" in the same way "pornography is the unconsciousness of sex", he has yet to accomplish his goal. Listening to "Minus Zero" from "Red Magnesia Pink", I can still hear structure and reminders of life: broken radios, irregular rhythms, guttural screams, armor penetrating bullets, lasers, explosions, fans, engines, hairdryers and children's conversations. I have yet to experience "being-for-itself" as Sartre would have it. Unfortunately, Merzbow seems unaware of this issue. He initially "tried to quit using any instruments which were related to, or were played by, the human body", in an attempt to sever any connections the noises might incite. But at the same time he's rooted in the subjective interpretations of Dadaism and even gives his own analogies: "The sound of Merzbow is like Orgone energy — the color of shiny silver." Perhaps, in an effort to escape familiarity, after twenty years of experimentation he has created one more familiar sound? If the goal of noise is the "obliteration" of identity, as Simon Reynolds puts it, then the climax of Merzbow's noise is not found in its duration, but afterwards — in the silence. It's only in this silence, the un-created non-sound, that we are emancipated from analogy and forced to come to terms with our unconnected self.

The Lesson of the Moth

Don Marquis, 1878-1937, wrote a series of poems based on a cockroach "Archy" in which the soul of a poet was trapped. Archy would "climb painfully upon the framework of the [typewriter] and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another." Of course, Archy couldn't operate the shift key, so his poetry was in lowercase:

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy