Between The Numbers

Between the Numbers Kenny Lyon East and West. Los Angeles is 2631 miles from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. Almost far enough. But since that’s it without getting on an airplane or getting wet, here I am. The capitol of the Coast Of Last Resort. Los Angeles is a place you end up. As are Key West, Hawaii, French Polynesia, and scores of other welcoming ends of the earth where a person can find himself comfortably exiled, cradled by a forgiving economy, an accepting culture, an easygoing climate. There is a key difference, however, between those lovely havens and these decidedly drabber environs. Los Angeles is also a place where you go to make it. (Okay, a treasure hunter can make it in Key West, a surfer in Hawaii, a pedophile in Tahiti... but not with SAG benefits or stock options.) From the very beginning this nation has shuffled westward, driven by discontent and ambition. Trapped against the Pacific, these evolutionary arrows unique to the human quiver have refined and redefined themselves. Their essence hasn’t changed—the drive and greed are the same—but their principal manifestations would be unrecognizable to a Carnegie or a Ford. The premier industries of the most industrious of nations no longer involve iron and steel, heat and pressure, cutting and bending. The raw materials of today are dreams, visions, ideas. The manufacturing process is additive and more likely to be fueled by Mountain Dew than oil and gas. And the building blocks are numbers. Two of them, over and over, the irreducible elements of the “new” economy, art, and thought. On and Off. These two states define our existence. We are either awake or asleep; growing or shrinking. Alive or dead. There are gray areas, of course. Much of what we hold dear and sacred—emotion, faith, art—make these shady havens their home, But eventually even they are forced into the harsh light of logic, to stand before the withering beam of measurement: False or true. Good or evil. Ugly or beautiful. And even they are rapidly being disassembled into their smallest technologically and financially feasible component parts. To digitize may not be to know, or understand, but it certainly is to control. And that is the goal of many who would convert our thoughts, creations, ideas, and even feelings into numbers: control. Intellectual content as easily manageable commodity. The world is witnessing a disorganized global campaign to organize, a plot without plotting, a conspiracy whose conspirators seldom conspire. The business of business—its Darwinian dictate, if you will—is to survive and grow. The hydra-headed monster known as the World Economy is nothing more than a food chain, one easily as cutthroat as its biological counterpart. Are corporations fighting over an ailing competitor essentially different from polar bears battling over a wounded penguin? If meat is murder, money is meat. And look at that money. Closely. Follow it through its journeys. At its most rarefied, the science of money has always been about numbers. Today on the leading edge, the high-profit fringe, the speculative frontier, those numbers are less and less likely to quantify anything not made up of (or stored as) numbers.

Today the business of numbers is numbers. North and South. Vineyard Haven is 5271 miles from Buenos Aires. It was a fluke, a whim that directed the finger that pushed the buttons in Argentina and sent the machine in the forest cottage half a world away into confessional mode. A year on the road and this was the first try. Foreign payphones are notoriously unable to send the proper tones; why bother? But this one—which stood like a beacon of painful revelation in a downtown Buenos Aires pedestrian mall—worked intercontinental mechanical magic. Numbers in; beeps back. A whirring of rewinding tape. Voices. Male voices. On that lovely, midsummer/winter (northern/southern) evening, thoughts intended for other ears bridged continents, hemispheres, and seasons. Innocent impulses broken into anonymous numbers skipped from server to server, racing down copper wires and flashing along fiber-optic highways. In a twinkling of Einstein’s eye they negotiated switches and tore free of earthbound restraints, only to bounce off satellites and be sucked back into the morass of cables and relays on the far side of the equator. And when the numbers had reconstituted as sound and emerged into the cool, antipodean air, their very nature had changed: no longer were they simply spoken symbols, however seductive, cloying or traitorous. They were daggers, claws, vipers, the most virulent of viruses. They were instruments of torture, agents of destruction. In an instant a being was shattered. A life was rearranged, a home lost. A future consigned to the past. Everywhere and Nowhere. Back to Los Angeles. To Koreatown. To the Gaylord Apartments, where I sit suspended between the welcoming dark atmosphere of the Bounty Bar and the merciless blue Southern California sky. This improbable city in an impossible location is the vortex of a whirling sinkhole that sucks in culture and spits out numbers. It wasn’t always so—the industry is nearly a century old, the numbers fairly new. And now that the internet has rendered the concepts of regionalism and even geography quaint, the situation will no doubt change: because Hollywood is everywhere, it is nowhere. But for now, infrastructure is infrastructure and inertia is a powerful force. When the leftover centrifugal force of manifest destiny, cheap real estate, and lots of good shooting weather landed the nascent film business in Southern California, it was an oddity— nothing more. We know where that wound up. Today the planet earth has a media addiction beside which all others—sugar, alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, gambling, consumerism, what have you—pale. Television is the dope of the century. Whole families spend entire days in unmoving, unthinking TV nods. Lives are lived on couches. The modern town square is a virtual space sandwiched between commercials and clicks on a remote. And that space is largely conceived and implemented right here in Los Angeles: the artificial there that isn’t there is made right here. And this is big business. Throughout history it’s the compulsions that have really brought in the cash. Music can be a strong one. It has been my livelihood, my pastime, my pathology. I’ve passed Zelig-like through an interesting career; some of you have no doubt heard me—somewhere, on a CD, at a show, on TV—but not of me. Well, maybe. But not likely. A friend once described me

as rock star adjacent. I tell it this way: I crash a wedding. The groom’s family thinks I’m with the bride, the bride’s family thinks I’m with the groom. Soon everyone is drunk and having a good time and we’re all friends. Or it doesn’t matter. And that’s the thing about touring—a lot doesn’t matter. Touring is the crude, analog path to ubiquity. Like Hollywood, the road is everywhere and nowhere; hard to pin down and impossible to avoid. Recording is beautiful, but playing live is straight into the vein. The price of that rush is high. It was near the end of a year of shows that I pulled fifteen minutes of messages across 5271 miles of ocean. A kite needs a string needs a hand to hold it. Mine was gone. Less than a month later I left the stage at Reading Festival, finished with the toughest month of the year and my life. With the sound of 40,000 throats ringing in my ears I sat in my hotel room alone, homeless, loveless, worthless, surrounded by the pieces of my shattered self—picture the poignant desperation of a man in a foxhole holding his freshly severed arm. The trauma spread like blood from a torn jugular, staining everything around me not lustrous crimson, but dull, dirty gray. I was no good to anyone, a walking depression, a breathing corpse. I went away alone. And wandered until a recording project brought me to Los Angeles. I needed a change and a door opened: a producer friend had a screenplay to rewrite. A media leap. I rented an apartment across the street from the abandoned Ambassador Hotel, where Clark Gable bathed, Sammy Davis sang, and Bobby Kennedy met Sirhan Sirhan. I began working. Art into Numbers. The exact, physical nature of that work? I spend my days creating, editing, and storing words describing future potential images as numbers describing words. And while I do so the very fiber of the intended final product—film—is being forever altered. The end result of all these numerical processes will soon be numbers. The process is inexorable, unavoidable, and not unexpected—I watched music undergo the same transformation. For some the process was painful; metamorphosis and birth are generally traumatic. For others, fortunes were made. Those involved in creating the new technology prospered, of course, but the real winners were record companies able to sell their back catalog all over again in a cheaper format for more money. What was lost? Well, something always slips between the numbers. But that apple has already been bitten. As soon as the world’s ears accepted paper vibrated by electrons as substitute for wood, brass, and flesh set in motion by human hands and lungs, Eden was lost. After that leap into the artificial the matter is simply one of degree, detail, and choice. (And while God may indeed live in those details, the devil is kingpin in the kingdom of choices.) Comparing formats is a waste of breath. The numbers have won and there it is. And now that advances in processor speed and storage technology allow recorded sound to be reproduced, duplicated, and manipulated with the ease of any other computer file, the ravenous shark of technology has film in its jaws. Digital editing is here. Digital video is being groomed for takeover from lovely, anachronistic, idiosyncratic, expensive film. Digital projection is knocking at the gates. Special effects and animation hold a position somewhat like that held by MIDI in music until recently—a shorthand language, soon to be made redundant by the ability to move real data around with similar ease. It

won’t be long before we see new Humphrey Bogart films. Marilyn Monroe once again on the big screen (sans-cellulite). James Dean. The Duke. Scary, huh? In an industry with an inexhaustible appetite for sequels, remakes, and profitable nostalgia, this bodes ill for fresh faces and new ideas. But that’s a side effect of enabling technology: inspiration is like peanut butter. There’s only so much in the jar. Spread it further, it gets thinner. Look at music—we have 24 bit 96hz recording now, but what’s being recorded? What new music is going to find sparkling, eternal life in this lovely high resolution? Fat Boy Slim is not exactly Stravinsky. (Don’t get me wrong, both are just fine with me—a deconstructionist cannot be a snob. But though an orchestra is a symphony of materials caused to vibrate by highly skilled artists, the sound of a CD is, once again, vibrating paper. And while Rockefeller Skank is a fine little piece, is anyone rioting in Paris?) Numbers into Art. Perhaps the wave has crested and the real triumphs of our age have been in technology and marketing and market-driven technology. In the arts a technology driven by marketing is one largely concerned with duplication and dispersal. From records and films to television and video to compact discs and finally digital video and projection, the campaign has been to make content portable—and salable. And to create a world addicted to the dreams and imaginations of others; a world buying, watching, and listening to a highly commodified version of an inner life, one that soon will exist as nothing more than a colossal collection of ones and zeros. The advent of the computer marked the beginning of this transubstantiation of the world’s intellectual content into numbers. The commercial acceptance of the compact disc signaled it’s coming of age. The next step is under way and it won’t be long before our every view of the world will be crudely emulating our own particulate construction. Songs and movies and animation and graphics are now the friendly front-ends to fiendishly complex, Byzantine software programs. Their methods of creation form—in essence—high level programming languages. So which is more artful, the art, or the programs used to create it? Does a piece of techno music represent anywhere near the artistic achievement of the sequencer program used to realize it? It’s possible that a true understanding of the aesthetics of our time is denied to all but those who can appreciate the abstract beauty of machine code. Crisis and Calm. Like generations before me, I came west to start over. Again. As I drove those 2631 hypothetical-flying-crow miles between Vineyard Haven and Los Angeles, I wasn’t thinking about the digitization of our cultural heritage. I wasn’t worried about cymbals sounding harsh in a frequency range only the dog I had to leave behind could hear, or whether Ted Turner would succeed in hyping the colors of a bunch of classic films largely concerned with a romantic world-view recently cauterized from my soul. I didn’t care about digital ID’s and high definition TV; wasn’t troubled by internet commerce or college students sharing MP3’s. I was caught in a world of love and loss, life and death; trapped in an internal landscape as bleakly binary as any computer game scenario yet freighted with the inescapable bite of reality. Art is created to express that which is human and inexpressible by any other means. Since all functions of the brain are likely to be binary on some level, in some way, all that is able to be felt but not easily expressed is also likely to be binary—on some level, in some way.

Pity we can’t cut out the middlemen; I would have loved the ability to quantify my feelings into impartial formulas, digitize them into algebraic ambiguity and ambivalence. Instead, I was left to deal with the painstaking assembly of pieces much like the ones I was broken into myself. And though times of emotional crisis might seem perfect for facing the intricacies of angst and bending them to the shape of drama, the unformed mess of the real thing doesn’t fit neatly into 120 pages, translate nicely into arcs and plot points, or tie up like a bow on a birthday gift. Nor will even the most ingenious of conceived solutions assist their creator one bit with the daily wrestling match that is life—whatever spells one might cast with words or notes or images, the best that can be hoped for in return is a comfortable holding action, a workable triage. But I feel blessed by every little death that allows yet another rebirth. The latest (last?) has dropped me into a Los Angeles whose neutral charm has calmed many a troubled soul, upon whose shores the world’s lives wash up, are digitized, sent out as fun-house mirror reflections, and sold back to their original owners at usurious prices in a scheme the wickedest pawnbroker would envy. What better place to do my part, dutifully shuffling the numbers while plotting to slip between.